Nintendo and their localization efforts on the Wii.

[Kenryoku_Maxis]

Onyxmeth said:

Kenryoku_Maxis said:

Onyxmeth said:

This would have been a far more effective argument if we were talking about the DS. That's where a lot of the poor localization occurs. As it stands, there's only 1-3 games that legitimately should have been ported over to a region they weren't. Not a huge deal considering some of the great games regions outside of Japan have missed in the past.

@Claude-I still want to play GiFTPiA! Speak for yourself!

Regarding making western oriented games, I don't think that's entirely necessary. Nintendo's strength has always been their ability to create software that is understood and loved around the world. Narrowing their development studios to create western games is almost as limiting as what they do with these low budget japanese flavors. Unless Nintendo is specifically looking to get into a western licensed endeavor like professional sports again, they should stick with what they do best, which is create the best software for everybody.

Uh....can't we just say that there's been games on both systems that should have been brought over?  Frankly, considering the state of the Wii (as I laid out in my post above), the fact that most Japanese companies tended to ignore bringing their better games over in the first 2-3 years is a lot bigger deal on the Wii than on the DS, which is doing fine and has always seen strong software sales.

The simple fact is, with the DS, while titles did get withheld, there was just 10x more support for the DS than the Wii so at least some titles did come over.  With the Wii, the ratio of games was much smaller to begin with and the ratio of good games actually being brought over from Japan to the west drops to about half or less.  Being told that you have a 50% chance to get a game that's being developed on the leading console this generation is horrible odds.  Muramasa, here you go.  Fatal Frame, nope.  Little King's Story, sure.  Captain Rainbow, nah.  Hajime no Ippo Wii, okay.  Another Code R, sorry.

You and I aren't even talking about the same thing. I'm speaking directly about Nintendo, and you're going on about all Japanese publishers.

A few comments and questions:

1. What better games in the first 2-3 years did Japanese companies not bring over? 

2. @the bolded: The Wii and DS both see strong software sales. I'm not sure what exactly you're looking at that is giving you the impression there's no problem with the DS' localization efforts since it has "always seen such strong software sales" since the same can easily be said for the Wii. In fact just this week's charts show the Wii crushing the DS in software totals.

3. So half of the Wii's good games are still stuck in Japan? This doesn't even seem to be something you can conclude, since one man's "good" is another man's Ninjabreadman, but go ahead and list them. I want to see this monster list of good Wii games that never got localized and might have actually stood a chance at moderate to great sales.

I listed three off the top of my head.  Frankly, I don't want to go look up the list of games from 3-4 years ago based on a 'challenge' most likely just to have you say 'well those games most likely weren't good enough to warrant being brought over here' or 'well those games are here now so whatever'.

Yes, I've had this conversation before.  Sure, we did finally get games like Muramasa and Little Kings Story, 9 months after Japan.  And we're going to get Monster Hunter 3, ARC and Fragile....more than a year after Japan.  I'm just trying to point out that the Wii has been getting faultering support through its entire lifetime and especially in its first 2 years.  Its pretty sad that Japanese companies are bringing over their games a year later or not at all and when they finally do, we consider sales of 10,000 or 20,000 to be 'good'.  This is because of their lackluster support.  When we get such lazy support from Japanese developers for so long, there's little incentive for people to go out and buy more games, even the good ones.