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The Most Ambitious Classic Nintendo Wii RPG Is Back
This week, Nintendo finally ported Xenoblade Chronicles to the Nintendo Switch 2. It’s available as a paid $10 upgrade if you already owned the Switch 1 version, otherwise they’re asking $70 for it.
I foolishly thought that the company would port this entire long-running series to their new console within months of it first shipping a year ago. Instead they’ve slow-walked the effort. Prior to this, Xenoblade Chronicles X got a…complicated port with some baffling image quality decisions, and the remaining two games in the series won’t be out on the hardware till later this year.
There’s some weird precedent for this strange lack of enthusiasm on Nintendo’s part. When the original game hit the Wii back in 2010, Nintendo’s leadership weren’t even planning to release it in the US. It took a coordinated fan campaign called Operation Rainfall—complete with letter-writing waves to Nintendo of America and Amazon preorders for a nonexistent listing—to finally get a US release in April 2012. The localization was produced by Nintendo’s European office and it almost felt like a rogue effort by folks who saw the potential that Nintendo’s main leadership seemed ignorant of.
I love these games, and I think they are some of the most interesting and intricate RPGs to come out of any company. Nintendo should be as proud of…
