If they translated the difficulty names properly...

[JimboIMeanNemo]

...would this game have sold better?

Radiant Dawn has one of the lowest meta scores in the series (78 i think). Gamespot was super-harsh in their review because of how hard the game was on "normal" difficulty. A few other reviewers were too. I can see the metascore being bumped up at least a few points with the proper difficulty names. 80 or 81 looks a lot nicer than 78, even if it's just a few points difference, and we all know how much metascores can affect sales (probably the reason why awakening was a huge success). It also makes me wonder how much the series' direction would have been different today if RD sold better. 

[Yexin]

review scores are the last thing i'd be interested in, tbh
they're not what makes a game sell (or rather, they're not the only factor, and definitely not the most important one) and also, Metacritic is pure and utter garbage

anyway, to answer your question properly, i imagine it would've sold a bit better, but not much
not even the presence of voice acting in different european languages helped, so imho RD was doomed no matter what
and it's not the game's fault at all, of course

Edited January 8, 2022 by Yexin

[lenticular]

If the translation issue was the main thing holding the game back, then we'd expect the game to have sold excellently in Japan but poorly elsewhere, but that wasn't really the case. It had pretty mediocre sales figures everywhere. Possibly it did a little better in Japan than the west (I don't know the exact sales) but not enough to think it could have been a major success.

My assumption has always been that it just wasn't a good fit for the Wii. There wasn't that much overlap between the sort of person who wanted to own a Wii and the sort of person who wanted to play games like Radiant Dawn. Being a direct sequel to another game probably didn't help its case either. While you can play RD without having played PoR, the story won't be as meaningful or impactful that way, and that was probably enough to discourage some potential buyers.

[Dark Holy Elf]

49 minutes ago, lenticular said:

My assumption has always been that it just wasn't a good fit for the Wii. There wasn't that much overlap between the sort of person who wanted to own a Wii and the sort of person who wanted to play games like Radiant Dawn. Being a direct sequel to another game probably didn't help its case either.

I'd say the second point is if anything stronger than the first: RD was billed as a direct sequel to another game. Said other game was already a poor seller (we can debate how much that is due to the GameCube having something like 20% of the install base of the GameBoy Advance, versus any other PoR-specific issues). They weren't really setting themselves up for success there.

Difficulty didn't help though. Some of it's the translations on the difficulty modes, but even if one plays on NA Easy/JP Normal, the difficulty is incredibly front-loaded and this could be off-putting (I've witnessed it myself among people I've recommended the game to). It's a neat narrative choice to make the Dawn Brigade feel like underdogs, but it probably doesn't work well with bringing in new players. (Contrast how Blazing Blade, which I'm fairly certain was the most successful FE internationally prior to Awakening, started off an easier campaign to let newcomers get their feet wet.)

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

5 hours ago, Dark Holy Elf said:

I'd say the second point is if anything stronger than the first: RD was billed as a direct sequel to another game. Said other game was already a poor seller (we can debate how much that is due to the GameCube having something like 20% of the install base of the GameBoy Advance, versus any other PoR-specific issues). They weren't really setting themselves up for success there.

That's implying that Radiant Dawn was "billed" as anything. That's the biggest issue IMO - the game received next-to-no advertisement in Western markets. How is this game supposed to sell to anyone who isn't already invested in the series?

13 hours ago, JimboIMeanNemo said:

...would this game have sold better?

Radiant Dawn has one of the lowest meta scores in the series (78 i think). Gamespot was super-harsh in their review because of how hard the game was on "normal" difficulty. A few other reviewers were too. I can see the metascore being bumped up at least a few points with the proper difficulty names. 80 or 81 looks a lot nicer than 78, even if it's just a few points difference, and we all know how much metascores can affect sales (probably the reason why awakening was a huge success). It also makes me wonder how much the series' direction would have been different today if RD sold better. 

You're asking two different questions here. As @Yexin said, a well-reviewed game may yet sell poorly, while an ill-reviewed one can still bust sales records.

Anyway, the notion that listing the difficulty levels as "Normal, Hard, Maniac" rather than "Easy, Normal, Hard" would produce better sales and/or reviews is... a mystifying one. What reviewer is docking points for something as arbitrary as a difficulty name? Which potential consumer says "Nuh uh, I'm not gonna buy a game with a difficulty labeled 'Easy'." If said people are out there, I can't imagine that they constitute a bloc of any influential size.

[lenticular]

18 minutes ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

That's implying that Radiant Dawn was "billed" as anything. That's the biggest issue IMO - the game received next-to-no advertisement in Western markets. How is this game supposed to sell to anyone who isn't already invested in the series?

The late 2000s were a bit of an odd time for video game marketing. Paper magazines were very much on the way out by that point, and for decades they'd been a mainstay of how game publishers had got news of their games out to their potential customers. But trade shows, press releases and the things that had worked in the past weren't really working any more by that point. On the other hand, this was before Nintendo Direct was a thing, which has since become one of their biggest marketing tools.

It certainly wasn't a well-advertised game, but I don't entirely blame Nintendo for that. It was a time when games marketing was in transition, and there wasn't really an established best practice for how they should have been trying to promote relatively niche titles like Radiant Dawn.

[Eltosian Kadath]

4 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Anyway, the notion that listing the difficulty levels as "Normal, Hard, Maniac" rather than "Easy, Normal, Hard" would produce better sales and/or reviews is... a mystifying one. What reviewer is docking points for something as arbitrary as a difficulty name? Which potential consumer says "Nuh uh, I'm not gonna buy a game with a difficulty labeled 'Easy'." If said people are out there, I can't imagine that they constitute a bloc of any influential size.

The logic is that the mistranslated difficulty made the game seem a lot harder than it was, which wasn't always seen as a good thing. It sorta feed into the feeling that Radiant Dawn was catering to a more hardcore audience of fans at the expense of the general audience, but being a direct sequel to a game released on a separate console, both of which with a notable narrative focus, did that better than the difficulty ever did (and the lack of marketing feed into that too).

[JimboIMeanNemo]

7 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

That's implying that Radiant Dawn was "billed" as anything. That's the biggest issue IMO - the game received next-to-no advertisement in Western markets. How is this game supposed to sell to anyone who isn't already invested in the series?

You're asking two different questions here. As @Yexin said, a well-reviewed game may yet sell poorly, while an ill-reviewed one can still bust sales records.

Anyway, the notion that listing the difficulty levels as "Normal, Hard, Maniac" rather than "Easy, Normal, Hard" would produce better sales and/or reviews is... a mystifying one. What reviewer is docking points for something as arbitrary as a difficulty name? Which potential consumer says "Nuh uh, I'm not gonna buy a game with a difficulty labeled 'Easy'." If said people are out there, I can't imagine that they constitute a bloc of any influential size.

I say this because my understanding is that when a critic reviews a game, they'll try it on the normal difficulty. If the normal difficulty is really hard (which it should be for the average critic) or seemingly unforgiving then they might dock points for it being unforgiving in their eyes, which is exactly what Gamespot did. And some reviewers might not know they changed the names in translation. 

And there have been tests correlating metacritic scores with sales. Here's some of them.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

8 hours ago, lenticular said:

It certainly wasn't a well-advertised game, but I don't entirely blame Nintendo for that. It was a time when games marketing was in transition, and there wasn't really an established best practice for how they should have been trying to promote relatively niche titles like Radiant Dawn.

That is fair. Still, a shame we never got a "What happened to Nolan?" TV commercial for the game.

4 hours ago, Eltosian Kadath said:

The logic is that the mistranslated difficulty made the game seem a lot harder than it was, which wasn't always seen as a good thing. It sorta feed into the feeling that Radiant Dawn was catering to a more hardcore audience of fans at the expense of the general audience, but being a direct sequel to a game released on a separate console, both of which with a notable narrative focus, did that better than the difficulty ever did (and the lack of marketing feed into that too).

...Okay, I see the rationale now. That it would be played on "Normal (Hard)", rather than "Easy (Normal)", making for a more difficult experience, and thereby harsher reviews. I'm not sure how it would pan out with consistently translated difficulty levels, but I can see the argument.

2 hours ago, JimboIMeanNemo said:

And there have been tests correlating metacritic scores with sales. Here's some of them.

They're not "tests" so much as "studies". And the correlation is there, but in both observed cases, it's a relatively weak one. I never argued against such a correlation existing - my point was, it's not strong enough to definitively link "better reviews" with "better sales".

All else equal, would a version of Radiant Dawn that got better reviews sell better? Yeah, probably a bit. But the "All Else" (i.e. being a sequel, receiving next-to-no advertising) is a much bigger deal here. Moving a few thousand more units isn't enough to turn a "bust" into a "boom".

[JimboIMeanNemo]

You might be right. Hopefully the Tellius games will get remastered or remade and will get the higher popularity they deserve. 

[NinjaMonkey]

It would have helped if they hadn't released it so close to the release of Super Mario Galaxy.

[JimboIMeanNemo]

2 hours ago, NinjaMonkey said:

It would have helped if they hadn't released it so close to the release of Super Mario Galaxy.

Which is funny because back then Nintendo was known for intentionally delaying games so releases wouldn't clash with each other 😕