Like soccer and absolute monarchy, the Wii game Xenoblade might only be big in Europe.
The Japanese role-playing game, which publisher Nintendo released in PAL territories Friday under the name Xenoblade Chronicles, will likely never make it to U.S. shores. Despite fan campaigns and media outcry, Nintendo of America says it has no plans to bring Xenoblade or its fellow Japanese RPG The Last Story to the land of the free.
Meanwhile, as if to rub it in our faces, the European press is raving about Xenoblade. Eurogamer calls it “the strongest JRPG to emerge in years” and “a towering triumph.” The notoriously harsh critics at Edge magazine called it “a glowing comeback for the Japanese RPG, and an injection of creativity for some tired hardware.”
And it’s not just the enthusiast press that’s noticing; London’s Guardian newspaper also loved it: “[In] the twilight hours of the Wii’s life this is a game of rare quality and depth, a title that revitalises a genre whose resistance to change was seeing it slowly slide towards irrelevance in the eyes of western gamers.”
It currently has an impressive 91 on Metacritic.
Pickings have been slim for Wii owners this year, and a game like Xenoblade Chronicles could bring a new breath of life to a console in its waning days. There’s always a chance that Nintendo of America changes its mind at some point in the next few months, but for now, no news is bad news.
Chris says: As irritating as it must be for North American gamers to read the Euro press wax orgasmic over Xenoblade, this is encouraging news. Had the game launched to the same sort of middling reception that Japanese role-playing games often receive in the West these days, Nintendo of America might have taken that as confirmation of its fears.
Instead, the universal praise, which in the case of the Guardian story was accompanied by a note that the game is not scheduled to be released in the U.S., has likely caused NOA to take more notice of just what it passed up. Xenoblade is no Mother 3, anymore — no obscure Japanese game no one has ever heard of. With reviewers calling it something just short of a new high-water mark for the genre (and, importantly, the Wii platform itself), more and more American Wii players will be asking why these games got spiked.
It’s more likely now that Nintendo of America will bring Xenoblade and The Last Story to the U.S., although what will likely happen is that it will take well into 2012, by which time European gamers will be playing whatever other new awesome games Nintendo of America decides not to release.
Jason Schreier is a contributor to Game|Life and an NYC-based writer/editor. But he really just wants to be your friend.Follow @jasonschreier and @GameLife on Twitter.
