It is a momentous day, fellow gamers. Nintendo of America has finally announced that it will bring the incredibly popular Xenoblade Chronicles to North America next April.
Rumors ran rampant this morning as a NeoGAF thread posted a picture of the GameStop upcoming release system for Wii games and showed an upcoming listing for the previously Japan and Europe-only title. The listing also suggested that the game would be available exclusively at GameStop.
The rumor mill churned harder when Nintendo updated their official Facebook page with art and other pictures from Xenoblade.
GameStop then had a listing at multiple retail locations, as well as their website, that the game was available for pre-order immediately.
The official confirmation came when Nintendo updated their own main site to include a Xenoblade Chronicles page, with pre-order links leading to their own store as well as GameStop’s page.
This comes after several months of the fan-driven movement entitled Operation Rainfall has been fighting very loudly that they want Xenoblade, along with Wii games The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower, localized for a North American release.
Why is this game such a big deal? Not only has it seen massive success in the parts of the world where the game has been released, but the game itself has the famous Tetsuya Takahashi on the team, famous for working on such legendary projects as Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy IV, V, VI and VII, as well as anything with “Xeno” in the title (Xenogears and Xenosaga.)
My personal congratulations to the thousands strong supporting Operation Rainfall on this victory. However, you kids aren’t done yet. At the very least, The Last Story needs to be localized.
What say you, gamers? Did you ever think you’d see this day?
