My favorite thing about the whole Operation Rainfall business is that I know there must exist an alternate, parallel reality to our own -- possibly just the one -- in which:
1, Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, and Pandora's Tower were all shown off at E3 2011 and released in America within the next twelve months;
2, consequently, Operation Rainfall was never a thing;
and 3, because Operation Rainfall was never a thing, there was very little hype around any of the games and they all bombed, ironically proving the Nintendo of our own reality correct while punishing the Nintendo of the alternate reality for taking a chance on some niche titles.
Alternatively for 3, maybe Nintendo spent loads on marketing to ensure that there WAS hype for the games, and they sold slightly better, but not well enough to justify the marketing budgets they needed to get sales that high.
I'm loving Xenoblade and can't wait to start The Last Story (bought it at launch), and I'm glad we got them and I hope to get more JRPGs in the future, but if there's anything publishers likely took away from this whole mess, it's "Don't announce localizations of your games until your fans beg loudly enough for them to reduce the amount of marketing you have to do to zero."
