Save Point 19: Baby's First Collective Action
Xenoblade, Localization, and a strange amount of Jerry Rice
There are few things that remind me how few video games I really know about like looking through the Nintendo Wii’s 2011 release lineup.
While hit titles like Rayman Origins and Kirby’s Return to Dreamland tried their best to drag it out of hell, they could only pull it a few layers up. A list burdened with such titles as Jerry Rice & Nitus’ Dog Football and Jimmie Johnson’s Anything With an Engine and 101-in-1 Sports Party Megamix cannot escape the demon world, and we are all better off for it.
The Wii’s viral fame had died down by now, and Nintendo was preparing for the release of the Wii U, which had a totally normal and fine life. Nintendo was fully focused on the new console’s launch, which went fine, why are you asking so many questions?
In the hardcore gamer world (a different kind of hell), the Wii was for babies. It wasn’t as strong or serious as the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, which had the best versions of every Call of Duty game. Mario and Zelda weren’t cool; if you weren’t blowing terrorist heads off and yelling slurs over voice-chat while getting recruited by the U.S. Army, you weren’t cool.
I had no interest in shooters, in part because the Wii and DS didn’t have any good ones, in part because I didn’t actively seek to disappoint my parents. My copies of Pokemon Platinum and HeartGold had enough content to get me through an anemic Wii lineup.
At some point in the summer of 2011, my endless Reddit scrolling informed me that a few people were trying to make that lineup a little less sad. “Operation Rainfall,” it called itself.
Operation Rainfall began on IGN message boards in 2011 after the soon-to-be-ex marketing manager of Nintendo France revealed that Nintendo of Europe wanted to show a game called Xenoblade: Chronicles at E3, but Nintendo of America nixed the idea. NoA did not want to show products they “weren’t going to sell,” according to a Nintendo World Report article from June 2011.
I didn’t know what a Xenoblade was. I didn’t know that it had taken its prefix from a long-dormant series of RPGs for the PlayStation. What I knew was that I was bored with the Wii, and at least these games looked interesting.
Let’s call a spade a spade: online petitions are useless. They do not affect change. No government official cares about a change dot org petition. No business is going to change their practices because a bunch of people tweeted something. Responses go to some social media or PR head, they might relay information about it, and it’s forgotten in the name of Doing What Makes Money.
Fortunately, Operation Rainfall had real ideas to get what they — what we — wanted. They started a letter writing campaign. Physical letters. They pushed supporters of the movement and fans to preorder Xenoblade on Amazon, even though it hadn’t been announced. By late June, Monado: Beginning of the World (Xenoblade’s original title) reached #1 on Amazon’s preorder sales list — eclipsing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, a game Nintendo was actually releasing in the States.. No better way to get a company’s attention than to say, “hey, if you give us this product, we have already committed to buying it.”
I’ve focused on Xenoblade because that was the crown jewel of the Operation. It was the only part of the project that wasn’t a new IP and represented the best chance at being localized. Still, it was only one part.
Two other acclaimed, Japan-only games joined Xenoblade in the campaign: The Last Story, created by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi; and Pandora’s Tower, a mature take on the RPG genre that Nintendo consoles hadn’t really seen in the west before.
Okay. I know a lot of my readers are unfamiliar with video games. Every Save Point is somebody’s first — a phrase I made up all by myself. So, let’s step back and ask: why was Nintendo so opposed to localizing these games?
The answer: localizing a video game is expensive, time-consuming and hard.
Some games are relatively simple. Think about the original Super Mario Bros. Localizing a 2D Mario game might involve renaming levels, rewriting instruction manuals and tutorials, and updating menus. That’s not necessarily easy, but it’s easier than translating a game that has 80+ hours of content, cutscenes, and full voice acting.
Localization so much more than putting pages of text through Google Translate, because otherwise you end up with this. You have to transliterate the ideas and emotions being communicated as much as you have to translate the words themselves — many of which don’t have a 1-to-1 English match.
The cost-benefit analysis has long been against localizing Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs). The Western market traditionally has less interest in story- and turn-based video games than the Japanese market. We were too busy gorging ourselves on Pac-Man and Mario and Goldeneye 007 and Halo and Call of Duty to actually read or feel something. Yuck.
Editor’s note: NBA 2k13, your day is coming.
Put yourself in the shoes of a video game executive. Would you rather spend money on developing a new game more suited to the gargantuan American market, or spend that money on localizing a game that might reach cult-classic status in 20 years? Cult classics make memories, but they sure as hell don’t make money. If they did, they’d be classics.
This was commonplace back in the 1990s — classic JRPGs like Shin Megami Tensei and Mother 3 still haven’t seen an official, playable Western release — but it was exacerbated with the rise of the “casual” gaming market the Wii and DS unearthed.
It was cheaper to put minimal work and time into name-brand shovelware and hope to get some unaware parent to buy their kid a game because, well, it has Jerry Rice and dogs. It must be good.
If publishers could get away with putting out profitable games that required no work at all — even if they were panned by the gaming public — why would they stop?
That’s why Xenoblade rocketing to the top of the Amazon charts was so important. It was, in part, a show of support for the hard work that goes into localizing a game of its size: character names, locales, background lore, cultural differences, full voice acting in cutscenes and in battle, hundreds of side-quests and thousands of collectible names and descriptions. Probably more stuff I’m not thinking about.
Rumors spread that Xenoblade had already been localized in July 2011, but Nintendo of America was still tight-lipped. The campaign continued for months, momentum grew, and… nothing. It seemed like Rainfall was doomed to the same fate as every online petition.
Then December came. A quiet holiday season is bad for any business. Nintendo needed to make a splash. So they did.
Xenoblade: Chronicles would be published by Nintendo in spring 2012 as a GameStop exclusive. While this wasn’t an issue to me, a child who spent many an anxious hour in the local GameStop, it showed Nintendo still lacked confidence in Xenoblade’s prospects. Ironically, the fact that it was a store exclusive kept it from appearing The NPD Group’s sales data for 2012, but an interview years later between the late Satoru Iwata and Monolith Soft Director Tetsuya Takahashi revealed that sales in the west were higher than in Japan.
Nintendo wouldn’t publish the other two games that Rainfall targeted, but third-party publisher Xseed Games saw an opportunity. They published both Pandora’s Tower and The Last Story, the latter of which would become one of Xseed’s “most-successful” titles, though they don’t specify how they determined success.
I picked up Xenoblade either at or close to its launch. It felt like a personal victory. I signed the petition. I talked about it in gaming threads. I wrote an email. Maybe. I think. It was twelve years ago, man.
Regardless of what twelve-year-old Joe did, Operation Rainfall was an undeniable success. Their website is still active today and focuses on niche Japanese titles.
Let’s not forget that it was an unmitigated success for Nintendo, too. Xenoblade has received three sequels, the main character of the first game is a mainstay in Nintendo’s biggest crossover (Super Smash Bros.) and the original got an HD release on the Switch that sold 1.88 million copies. I’ve yet to pick it up despite its many quality-of-life improvements since I’ve still got my Wii copy.
I won’t lie to you and say that Operation Rainfall made me believe in online activism, or that it could be repeated in today’s climate. It fortunately didn’t, and it probably can’t as the gaming industry continues to flounder.
As a lonely seventh grader surrounded by Gears of War and Battlefield, though, it felt good to be a part of a group that demanded to be taken seriously despite unconventional tastes.
It felt good to be part of a group that understood that a game didn’t need excessive gore to be “mature,” and that long games and complex stories had appeal in the west as well. Fast-forward to today, and Persona 5, part of Atlus’s famed JRPG series, has sold over 10 million units in large part due to the Western market.
At the end of the day, maybe it just felt good to be in a group. Even if that was the case, nobody can take away how that group altered the course of video games forever.
Let it rain.