Operation Rainfall has claimed a partial victory.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/rumor/27146
The Last Story and Xenoblade Chronicles may be heading to North America after all, despite Nintendo of America's continued insistence that the company has no plans to localize those titles.
On the official Operation Rainfall blog, a post has gone up claiming that the American localization of Xenoblade has been finished for over a month, and the process is well underway for The Last Story. No word was given on the potential localization for Pandora's Tower, but even with the first two titles, this is a major win for those hoping for more RPGs to play on their Wii later this year.
Although Operation Rainfall was unwilling to disclose their source, who allegedly resides within Nintendo, they maintain confidence that the information is true based on that source's identity.
Well, I certainly hope their sources are true. While I still have issues as to how Nintendo of America has handled this situation (especially if they were planning on bringing these over all along), just having the games brought to the U.S. would be enough to satisfy me for the moment. Not getting Pandora's Tower would be unfortunate, but if there was a game of the 3 I had to lose that would be the one.I rather lose Lost Story. I was looking forward to Pandora's Tower when its weirdness started to show.
Starfox 2 (allegedly), Mother, Disaster... yeah, I'm not going to believe it until I'm putting a Club Nintendo code in.
I have to point out, that part about "Nintendo of America's continued insistence that the company has no plans to localize those titles" is INACCURATE. What they actually said was they had "no plans to bring [them] ...at this time". Aside from the obvious "at this time" part, there's another key difference between what you reported and they actually said-- "Bringing" and "localizing" are two very different things. All this source actually confirmed was that there was a localization. And NOA never actually said they weren't still localizing.
I hate to have to rain on everyone's parade, but it should be at least noted that localizing doesn't necessarily indicate plans for a release. Especially in a case like this where NOE had already taken care of 99% the job already. Since an English translation has already been done and paid for by NOE, and NOA could easily throw together a NTSC build with very little expense. In fact, would be dumb not their part not to have one already prepared in the event if the games sell well enough in Europe to make them reconsider. It could also be handy to already have one ready for a third party to buy the rights to publish.
There's plenty of reasons to make a localization and just sit on it. So, we shouldn't assume this means anything. Nevertheless, I still am confident we will see a release for Xenoblade unless it's a total bomb in Europe.
Nintendo always says stuff like they have no plans to release a title until they decide to officially announce it, just standard practice.
I got so far as placing XenoBlade in my Amazon cart before I decided not to pre-order it. After thinking about it, I probably would not buy the game when it launched, not because I'm not interested, but because it does not appeal to me as much as Nintendo's other upcoming games (Mario Party 9, Fortune Street, Kirby Wii, Zelda, etc).
