Etzel

What I said about fan translations is true. And if I had unlimited time and patience, I would defend it. But at this point I simply don't care any more, because trying to deal with you is absolutely exhausting. If your aim was to convince me to stop supporting Operation Rainfall or to motivate me to support a fan translation, you did not succeed. You scored more points than I did, but you failed to persuade me. Although, something tells me that scoring points was your conscious and primary goal from the beginning.

If that's how you feel, make a Kickstarter project for it. Or do something. Don't sit back in your armchair and tell those of us who are actually putting effort into this that we're doing it wrong. Lead by example. However, I will not follow you. Fan translations are already in legally questionable territory. Those that ask for donations moreso. I am willing to pay less for fan translations than for official releases because they are worth less. The quality is almost universally poorer. There is no physical product. They require the use of an emulator or pirate hardware. Emulators reduce the quality of the experience, while pirate hardware costs extra money and is also legally questionable. Very few people are willing to pay any money at all for fan translations, and for good reason. I must say, your rhetoric is pretty confrontational. It is enough so that I am not particularly enjoying discussing this with you. Neither I, nor anyone I spoke with, believed that this game's American release was a certainty. We thought it was likely, and therefore decided to wait a little while to see if it would pan out. If you think that was a poor decision, what do you think we should have done instead? Should we have started our "harassment" campaign as soon as this game was announced in Japan? It's never too late for a fan translation, so I don't see what you're driving at other than to insult us. EDIT: Minor grammar mistake.

I stand by what I said. I just wasn't expecting to be so harshly rebuked for a somewhat poor choice of words. The situation that I described accurately describes reality, even if it is not entirely fair to describe it as a "trick." We spent the last year assuming NoA would release this game, and rightly so. NoA remained silent and allowed us to keep believing it; whether they did it deliberately or not, the result is the same. It became impossible to muster the meager support of the online Fire Emblem fanbase until now, and now is clearly too late. If NoA had announced that they weren't releasing this game earlier, we would have had a very slim chance of convincing them otherwise instead of none at all. I understand that NoA just doesn't work that way. Operation Rainfall did succeed in one very big way; they got NoA to officially announce that they aren't going to release those games, which is something they would never have done otherwise. It's just not a very happy victory. It turns out I was ignorant about something else, though. You recall NoA's policy of halting support of their previous console to force users to upgrade to the new one, as I described in an earlier post? Operation Rainfall was already about raising awareness of and convincing NoA to discontinue this policy. The three Wii JRPGs they chose are just their means to an end. So... yeah. Support them if you care about this game. If you aren't interested in the games they're supporting, but you don't really know anything about them, you should at least check them out. I doubt NoA is going to move on this one, but the very least I can do is throw my support behind the largest group that ever organized against this policy.

Now who other than NoA could anyone possibly blame for the game not being localized? It is not the incumbent duty of fans to campaign for every game they want released as soon as it is announced in Japan, regardless of how likely an American release seems at the time. Your post was accusatory in an entirely unnecessary manner.

One problem is that Nintendo of America basically tricked us. Up until E3 2011, most of us assumed this game would come out in America, and we had no reason not to. If we'd known immediately that they had no plans to release it, campaigning for it then would have been a slightly less futile gesture. We waited until the DS was dead in the water before we got off our asses and did something about it. I signed the petition, I'm embarrassed to admit, but the number of signatures is pitifully small.

You're right, Operation Rainfall is our best shot at this. I sent them an email asking them to consider focusing on NoA's policy of dropping support for the old system whenever a new one is announced. Hopefully, I was persuasive.

Unless you organize a large number of people to join you, and these people ACTUALLY all stop buying Nintendo products for a prolonged period of time, and you make it clear to Nintendo what your demands are and how many people are with you, this is an ultimately futile gesture. I would support you in this, if it looked like you were gaining significant traction. But you are not the first person to echo this sentiment. Rather than specifically focus on Shin Monshou or the Rainfall titles, I would hope to campaign against the larger issue: the way Nintendo of America immediately stop supporting the older system the moment the new one is announced. They've pulled that stunt with every new console and handheld they've ever released. It's why we didn't get Mother, or Seiken Densetsu 3, or Terranigma (which was translated by friggin' NoA and released in Europe!), or Mother 3. And it's likely why we're not getting Shin Monshou or the Rainfall titles. It is utterly infuriating.

Well, someone in Nintendo's PR department needs to be fired over that little stunt. I completely understand it if they decided it wouldn't be financially wise to localize them. But the whole "check back for an update soon!" bullshit got everyone's hopes up, which was unnecessarily cruel. No mention of Shin Monshou, which was spammed PLENTY in that thread. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

I can't say I approve of spamming, but I did look at that comment thread and the number of people asking for this game was encouraging. It's nice to see support for the game outside of Fire Emblem forums.

Call me crazy, but I actually really liked Shadow Dragon. I wasn't a big fan of the visuals, and I wished there was a better way to unlock the gaiden chapters, but apart from that I was quite pleased with the experience. The laundry list of complaints everyone else had about it (bad script, no rescue, no supports, etc) didn't really bother me. If the majority opinion about the game had anything to do with NoA's decision not to release Shin Monshou, well, then I have a reason to be extra angry about it.

I would be willing to devote some of my time to the cause. I've tried bringing it up elsewhere on the internet, though, and people seem largely apathetic about the issue. The few who even seem to know the game exists are mostly of the consensus that "Shadow Dragon sucked, so this will suck." It's a little surprising to see so much effort put into these third party titles while one of Nintendo's own falls through the cracks.

There's a reason you can't always apply more than one patch to a ROM. It's mathematically ambiguous. Try applying the patches in the other order. That sometimes works.