Nintendo of America got to look like a big hero last year when it caved and announced that Xenoblade Chronicles would come Stateside. The consumer pressure group Operation Rainfall, however, is not satisfied, and intends to focus its efforts on The Last Story.
"Between the dates of January 27th (the 1 year anniversary of The Last Story releasing in Japan) and February 24th (the European release date for The Last Story) we will be focusing our content on The Last Story as well as the people behind the game, Hironobu Sakaguchi (the creator of Final Fantasy) and Nobuo Uematsu (famed Japanese composer, best known as well for his work on Final Fantasy)," said Rainfall member Tyson Gifford.
"On the 27th we will be contacting Nintendo in mass again, after that we will be doing everythign we can to raise public awareness of the title and it's link to Sakaguchi and the Final Fantasy franchise. We find it absurd that the title is so little known considering it's pedigree, and we hope to correct that this month."
The group will be coordinating efforts on Facebook and Twitter, and will be presenting videos on Youtube. As someone who wanted this game the moment it was announced, I totally wish them the best!
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
11:45 AM on 01.24.2012 | 
Do people seriously see it as if they caved? Sure it was a weird move at best to suddenly say "okay, lets do that" (and its not exactly proving to be the most lucrative move now, is it?) but I don't believe for a second they "caved".
Caved to what? We hadn't heard jack from this movement since their little "lets all buy FF on the Wii shop and tell them we want this completely unrelated game!!" back in what? September? Maybe there was a weird moment that lasted all of a day that ended up looking like they stormed Nintendo (or Reggie's) twitter castle, and making themselves look kind of foolish?.. They aren't exactly making themselves out to be the most noteworthy cause on the planet.
Making it seem like "oh, we won something, lets push to a new goal" isn't exactly accurate, and their "refocusing" is silly when this game was part of their initial mission intent.
And what of Pandora's Tower? They ditching that till they claim another victory they probably had nothing to do with, so they can keep claiming they aren't satisfied? Or are they going to quit and make themselves out to be selfish for a decidedly low number of titles, when many other games deserve to see a world-wide release?
Also, a side point, I don't think any one see's Nintendo as a hero of any size for doing what they should have done in the first place -specially when they limited the availability of the game to just gamestop, which -if I remember- gamestop saddling some of the cost. Maybe Gamestop could be the hero here, because maybe they came forward (and not like we'd ever know this) and asked to have the game published.
I get their cause, and I believe in the idea of more great games being released worldwide, but I've said it before (but who'd remember? Its not like we've talked about them in many months) I just don't think Op Rainfall is the best case scenario when people think of consumer pressure groups. Someone could really do better then this if they were motivated enough.
Because they're published by Nintendo...
I don't know about The Last Story, but Xenoblade don't have any motion control. It can be played with the "Classic Controller", and is one of the best JRPGs I have ever played. You have no reason to not at least try it.
So yeah Nintendo, stop fucking around. Please.
I already pre-ordered it captain I can't pre-order it any harder :P
Kickstarter style. Allow people to pay more for bonuses, or just for the pleasure of assisting the localization of a game they really want. If it doesn't get enough pre-orders and isn't localized, nobody gets charged, and Nintendo can shrug and just be like "Sorry guys, we tried."
It's good PR and a guaranteed profit. I don't understand why they don't do this...
Also... does anyone else find it a great injustice that Gamestop is reaping benefit from Operation Rainfall whose campaign revolved mainly around Amazon Pre-order of Manado? And Amazon got jack and s($t?
I am the current Co-leader of Operation Rainfall. In response to your first point, maybe YOU haven't heard from the movement since September, but I assure you Operation Rainfall has been quite active since then. We haven’t been covered by media websites such as Destructoid, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been active. We are currently on Phase IV and we have had several missions in each phase. As for the Final Fantasy mission we had, it was just one part of a larger mission as we also mass contacted Nintendo of America as well as had a charity. People like to point to the event as some kind of epic failure. It didn’t work so we moved on. We’re going to have ups and downs that is just the way it is; we have learned from it.
As for your second point, Operation Rainfall HAS NEVER taken credit or even hinted that we are the reason Nintendo is releasing Xenoblade. You’ll notice that the quote you are using where it states Nintendo “caved in”, comes from Destructoid and not Operation Rainfall.
As for your third point. Our current mission encourages people to also mention Pandora’s Tower when they contact Nintendo of America on January 27.
Your third point. Now we at Operation Rainfall strongly believe that how well Xenoblade sells here will determine if we get the other games. So of course we are focusing on Xenoblade. And, with The Last Story releasing next month in Europe, that’s a good reason to focus on The Last Story as well. We haven’t forgotten about Pandora’s Tower as you seem to think we have. In fact, between the end of April and the end of May, we have planned a Pandora’s Tower month.
Your last point. Id’say we are doing the best we can, we’re just a handful of people doing what we can to get some games. Let’s see you do better.
Please walk into traffic ASAP.
It's pretty big but not well organized
Got xenoblade pre-ordered and hopefully TLS will be brought over sometime this year. I've secretly been wanting to do a smaller/similar group so we can finally get Brave Fencer Musashi on the North American PS store.
Now I'm going to go hold my breath until we get a localization annoucement, starting........ now.
And just so you know, I'm completely unaffiliated with the project. I just happen to, y'know, keep up with industry news. And have a passing knowledge of how publishing games works.
I personally doubt that.
I had been saying long before operation rainfall even started that Nintendo would release these games, and even stated why they couldn't just come out and say it.
I don't know if you can look through my comment history or not(I'm not completely sure how that works...), but if you're interested, have at it.
Well I dont feel left out!
While your more humble stance on your groups role in these releases has helped change my opinion of your cause and stance for the better, your rebuttal towards boomingechos was a little harsh, and a bit unbecoming of someone in your position.
Lets all just take a step back....^_^;
Im missing all these European releases! Ive got to go to more sites than destructoid
I stand by what I said, but perhaps my last comment towards him was a bit too harsh. For that, I apologize. It's hard not to take things personally sometimes :)
That's understandable.
^_^
Not sure how someone can be against this movement and not thankful.
It has taken a lot of work. I know personally I spend several hours a day doing Operation Rainfall related work. But it's all worth it. I think we are making a difference by bringing attention to our three chosen games and also the localization practices that no longer seem valid in this day and age. We appreciate your support as well as everyone else's.
Do you realize that without Gamestop, Xenoblade would not have seen a North American release?
I support what these guys and gals are doing but I feel that the most they did for Xenoblade's release was bringing it to peoples attention that we wanted this game. It was Gamestop saying that they would help with the localization costs that Nintendo decided to bring it to NA.
The weird thing is that, like with Xenoblade, the game has already been localized. It's coming out in Europe in February. The only thing NoA needs to do is to burn discs and make cases.
Why NoA are so slow with releasing these titles boggles the mind.
I wish the 100k for Legends 3 group still got this kind of positive coverage though. I mean, OpRainfall's FB page is just around 11,000. GMOTM is closing in on 57,000. The Unity Devroom has about 16,000 registered so far.
Working together with TRIAL Films for the new Protomen movie? No?
Anything? Guys?
Fuck.
- Monolith Soft is owned by Nintendo and have been since the end of last gen. Xenoblade is Nintendo's IP, completely and totally so it can't come to other systems any more than Mario or Zelda could.
- TLS is co-developed by Mistwalker and Nintendo. Nintendo's people worked on it so, gee, let's think about that one - have you ever played anything co-developed by Nintendo on a rival platform? I haven't.
Maybe Operation Rainfall should be trying to convince Gamestop instead of Nintendo of America, because that seems to be the only group that Nintendo of America will listen to.
That or they were holding out because these titles were going to make their normal franchises look as mediocre as most of them actually turned out.
All I can say is that I loaned my Wii out until April (xenoblade) without a second thought or hesitation. maybe I'll get around to finishing skyward sword after I beat xenoblade :P
What pisses me off in all of this is that 1) Nintendo doesn't have any high-caliber RPGs of any kind on this system (if we were lucky we got ports of niche Rogue-like games on the system an poorly dubbed budget RPGs...if were lucky). The Wii desperately NEEDS some kind of quality (at least in terms of resources and effort put in) RPGs. Then 2) fucking Skyward Swords gets millions dumped into its advertising to sell a very pathetic amount. Why not actually put some effort into advertising a NEW AND UNTESTED IP OUT NINTENDO? Even if it doesn't fair well, at least it was something new. Nintendo can't even be bothered to do this when they were perfectly willing to spend millions on games like Skyward Sword or Galaxy 2 (which were flops for all the money spent on their marketing).
At this point I have zero respect for Nintendo. The old fogeys in charge now aren't gamers so much as they are technophiles who are interested in playing with 3D graphics than they are in making videogames with interesting worlds to explore and exciting gameplay to explore them with.
Honestly what Scuffles said may actually be true. Their output as of recently (on the 3DS and especially with how bad OoT 3DS and Skyward Sword have flopped) has been pathetic and I really wouldn't be shocked at this point if they were deliberately trying to hold back releases of these games if only because it would show how pathetic their offerings have been by comparison. Right now they can say "Skyward Sword is doing great!" And compared to what? There's nothing else on the god damn system but Zelda! If something similar in scope and scale that Zelda once had came out and put it to shame, then they'd have to admit that something was going wrong with the franchise and who/what was causing it.
This sounds cynical as hell, but with the way Nintendo has been lately, I really wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
Either way, good luck with Last Story. If you're lucky you'll get a Xenoblade-like Response. But at the end of the day it just come across as some snobbish asshole pitching a fit that he might actually have to get off is his ass and do some god damn work for a change.
As for me I'm done with Nintendo. Until there's a clean sweep in both NoA and NoJ's upper management (this including Miyamoto though he's effectively done with being general manager thank god), they won't be getting another cent from me.
Aim our sights low, that's the Nintendo way!
Yes, I will get Xenoblade and Last Story, however, those will most likely be the last games I ever get directly from Nintendo for a while.