Since I normally play one game at a time on my Wii U, I’m used to deleting games. Investing in an external HD for my every-so-often console seems goofy. But I almost reconsidered this decision when downloading Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, which takes up a whopping 15GB, and it’s an eShop only game.
Nintendo sells the Wii U with two hard drive sizes: 8GB and 32GB. If you happen to own the former, you won’t even be able to download and play the new Fatal Frame, unless you invest in a hard drive.
Fatal Frame is not alone in being a gigantic download, of course. Xenoblade Chronicles X takes up 22.7GB and Super Smash Bros. required 15.6GB. With Fatal Frame, though, players are required to buy digitally. There’s no physical release.
This has ruffled some players’ feathers, though a Change.org petition asking for a disc version of the game has only managed slightly over 2,000 signatures.
Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water for Wii U is currently set to be a digital release only in the US. With the game being 16GB in size, most Wii U owners don’t have the HDD storage for the game. People have been asking for this game for years, many of which are also collectors and value physical content over digital for its tangibility. With Nintendo not releasing the game in a physical format, many will not be able to purchase the game.
Even if you’re rocking one of the 32GB machines, you may still have to do some cleanup. Wii U games can temporarily require more space to download a game.
Here, the 8059MB second download actually needs 9965MB before it installs.
No doubt, Nintendo skimped on the hard drive space with the Wii U. Both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One shipped with 500GB of space to accommodate the shift to digital releases happening this generation. One hopes Nintendo is smart enough to bump the internal space with the NX.
With Nintendo, though, who knows?
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.