Mr Khan said:
Well, a September release for Xenoblade would be 1.25 years, and localizations definitely shouldn't take that long, unless they were waiting for sales results in the Japanese market before they made a decision about even going ahead to localize. So either of us could be right, pending a lack of information... |
localization shouldn't take that long, true, but it's all dependent on what kind of localization teams Nintendo has and how much effort they put into it. If we assume that Fire Emblem was done at their localization team's normal pace then it would just be a question of if Xenoblade could plausibly take almost twice the amount of work as Fire Emblem to localize.
I'd imagine that your more common JRPG with tons of exploration takes more effort to localize than a Strategy JRPG where scenarios are compartmentalized. But maybe Xenoblade was particularly short, I'd have to look into it. Regardless I don't think that taking a long time necessarily means that they did that by choice.
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