Nintendo has not yet said if it will publish The Last Story, an acclaimed new role-playing game by the creator of Final Fantasy, outside Japan.
Image: Nintendo

The most charitable thing that we could say right now about the lineup of games for Nintendo’s Wii console is that it is not quite a barren wasteland. There’s the epic adventure The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. The Wii debut of the addictive, original music game Rhythm Heaven. And another Kirby game. All these are coming at some indeterminate point in the future.

And that’s about it, at least for those of us who are fans of deep, challenging experiences, or the sort of things we used to call “videogames.” Nintendo’s got plenty more on tap for the casual audience, of course: virtual board games like Mario Party and Fortune Street, find-the-object games like Mystery Case Files and Mii mini-game playgrounds like Wii Play Motion.

That’s in America. In Japan, where Wii has not been as explosively popular, it’s a different story. Nintendo continues to make grand overtures to the hard-core gaming fans in its home country. Most notably, over the past year it has released two role-playing games called Xenoblade and The Last Story, created by some of Japan’s most famous RPG designers. The games are exactly the sort of thing that Nintendo’s system lacks; full-scale adventures with solid gameplay, high-quality graphics and music and interesting stories.

So it came as something of a shock when Nintendo did not take the opportunity at E3 to announce U.S. releases for these two games. Over the years, Nintendo of America has often declined to release many of its more hard-core Japanese games, but these seem to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for many fans. A group of them has started a social-media letter-writing campaign. Most interestingly, they have mobilized enough fans to pre-order Xenoblade on Amazon (using an outdated entry for the game’s old working title Monado) that it was for a time the #1 selling game on the site.

While it is still possible that Nintendo plans to release these games in the U.S. and simply has not announced them yet, given its track record there is good reason to be skeptical bordering on pessimistic. Nintendo, like every other publisher on the planet, has every right and duty to decline to release certain games. What makes Nintendo unique is that it refuses to let other publishers release the games, either. What good does it do anyone to sit on content — especially when there’s barely anything else on your platform?

As for me, I’m lucky. I speak and read Japanese, and so I was able to buy and play Xenoblade and The Last Story (after buying a Japanese Wii, of course, following Nintendo’s unfortunate decision to region-lock the console). I actually started studying the Japanese language specifically so I could play games that weren’t released in English, the most notorious of which at the time was Final Fantasy V.

These days, many more Japanese games are released here, and with much faster turnaround times. Small publishers like Atlus, NIS America and Aksys do a brisk business in releasing many niche role-playing games in small batches for hard-core fans. Today’s gamers don’t need to crack the books and study kanji characters simply to play the games they want.

The one maddening exception is Nintendo of America, which for reasons it flatly refuses to discuss has greatly cut down the number and types of games that it releases. The omissions that fans have found to be most egregious are the ones in established game series. Nintendo partnered with Tecmo Koei to release the latest in the Fatal Frame series exclusively for Wii, a survival horror franchise that was quite popular in the PlayStation 2 era. It was never released outside Japan.

Early in the life of Nintendo DS, Nintendo released two intriguing puzzle-adventure games called Trace Memory and Hotel Dusk. It produced sequels to both games, which were released in Europe, but not America.

Two excellent GameCube games, Pikmin 2 and Chibi-Robo, were re-released on Wii in Japan featuring motion controls. Neither came here.

I won’t belabor the point. (Okay, I will: Mother 3.) Yes, every other game publisher routinely decides that it does not have the money or bandwidth to release certain games in all territories. Recently, Capcom’s U.S. branch said that it would not release the latest Nintendo DS Ace Attorney game in the U.S., after five critically acclaimed installments.

When asked why, senior vice president Christian Svensson was quite forthcoming: “The costs of localization are higher than the forecasted return,” he said on the company’s official forums.

Third parties have abandoned Wii, and Nintendo apparently does not see fit to change its game lineup to make up for that.

While it’s unlikely that Capcom would let another publisher handle the game, many large gamemakers do actively seek out other outfits that are all too happy to translate and release the games they pass on. For example, Namco Bandai declined to release the wonderful Retro Game Challenge, which was picked up by XSEED. Sony didn’t want to tackle What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord?, and NIS America jumped on it.

Nintendo used to allow this; its first-party Japanese games Cubivore and Polarium Advance were released in the U.S. by Atlus. This is a company that I am fairly sure would be positively ecstatic to release any or all of the games that Nintendo passes on.

And yet, for some reason unbeknownst to us common folk, Nintendo sees more benefit in sitting on the games and never releasing them at all. Saving them for a rainy day, perhaps? If so, it’s pouring now. The list of upcoming third-party Wii games that Nintendo distributed at E3 tells the rest of the story: There is not a single game coming to the Wii from them that is not either aimed at the casual audience or otherwise based on a kid-friendly movie or TV license. It’s over. Third parties have abandoned Wii as a serious platform, and Nintendo apparently does not see fit to change its game lineup to make up for that.

With practically nothing on the Wii that isn’t licensed shovelware or casual mini-games, this would be the perfect time for Nintendo to partner with smaller third parties and have them handle the localization and release of some original games.

This is especially true in the case of Tecmo Koei, who produced Fatal Frame and Takt of Magic for Wii. Do you know what Tecmo Koei is releasing on Wii this year? Champion Jockey, a racetrack-betting simulator. Do you think it would rather be releasing Fatal Frame? Why yes, I believe it would.

It’s not that these games are all amazing. Xenoblade and The Last Story are very good, but I think many of the others would get middling reviews. But being selective about which games to release makes some sense only if players are otherwise spoiled for choice. If that was ever the case on Wii, it is not anymore.

Hey, I get it: Casual gamers are Nintendo’s bread and butter. It sold millions more copies of Wii Sports Resort than it sold of Metroid Prime 3. It makes perfect sense that it would exert more effort there, given that Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 own the hard-core gamer market. But Nintendo always said that it did not intend to abandon the core. And with its emphasis on core games for Wii U and 3DS at E3, one would think it would make at least some token effort to retain those fans through the Wii’s final year and a half.

I should probably note at this point that the absence of Xenoblade and The Last Story from E3 does not mean that they have been canned. There is a great chance that fans are organizing a letter-writing campaign over products that Nintendo already has every intention of releasing.

Indeed, Nintendo has a history of holding games back from E3. Remember that in 2008 it waited until October to announce Punch-Out!!, Sin & Punishment and the DS version of Rhythm Heaven. Perhaps it did not want the games to be forgotten in the whirlwind of E3.

But if gamers find themselves pessimistic about these games’ chances, Nintendo has only its own disastrous track record to blame.