Sunday, December 8, 2013

I Called It 2 Years Ago: Operation Rainfall Didn't Mean Squat...


I've been waiting a long time to write about Operation Rainfall, the upstart little segment of the game community that really wanted to see Pandora's Tower, Xenoblade and The Last Story get localized to the west, but haven't because they've very plainly fallen off the face of the earth in terms of creating ridiculous plans, just to get seen.

My story with "Oprainfall," as they're being called now on their site that's become less of a movement and more of an excuse to post "niche video game goodness" in the form of gaming news we could all pretty much get elsewhere, is a little deeper then I'd like to go into here; but lets just say, for the sake of saying at all, that they weren't very open to the possibility of concurrent causes against the weird things Nintendo was doing 2+ years ago, that may have mutually benefited each other if forces were joined to butt heads with the company against. 2 fronts, one "enemy." But they passed, and I was told how what I was proposing "isn't noteworthy."

It seems like -2 years removed- the tables have turned and I get to bask in the fact that Rainfall's cause wasn't noteworthy either, with Nintendo pointing out the obvious that 100k signatures on a petition doesn't mean 100k people are buying the game they're signing it for. Or simply that it doesn't mean a good idea will mean an exchange of money for product.

What it signifies for me is how right I may have been all along about this cause being nothing more then the usual selfish gamers looking to go on about things they want but "couldn't have" (quotations intentional: They could have had them. More on that later.). But because they never bothered to champion another game (that I know of) after or around the release of the 3 games they wanted so badly, and because they spent more time promoting themselves and brashly acting like the owners of the rights to these games, then asked for a large sum in donations, THEN sort of just faded into the shadows -it's become easier for everyone else to see them for what they were, in hindsight.

Problem for them was few still cared until Reggie decided to give them a drop of attention again. And funnier thing is, this sort of vindication has actually happened once before. But I guess Christmas still gets to come early for me this year.



And it still confuses the hell out of me over what they actually did with all the money they got through donations for the cause, since it didn't seem like they actually went and pitched the games to publishers they were saying they needed 100k each to pitch to (totaling to 6 publishers, meaning 600k).. Or why no ones bother to probe deeper into what happened with any of that money. (Really, why aren't we?).. But that's a whole different issue altogether; but slip covers can't cost that much. Could they?

Either way, below one of the many things I said 2 years ago (in response to this article), as brought to my attention again by one of my D-toid friends, Excel, and had probably said in some way on just about every Operation Rainfall article that Destructoid (and possibly Kotaku at that point) ran. It's amazing how true it all rings now (Pachter, I'm coming for your job, Brotha! Ready the steel cage!!!):

"I really hope they know that they probably had nothing to do with Xenoblade and Last Story released other then proving to publishers that gamers are whiny and misguided.

The fact that they need to ask for donations when they can't come up with the money amongst themselves is sad..

The fact that they're going to give people a slip cover to hold all 3 games, as if they own the rights to all 3 games simply because they fought for them, is egotistical.

"The only catch is this plan is not a guaranteed thing, and the donations will be used as they come in."

Problem is that no donation based anything is an absolute, that fact is not limited to just these guys. And I'm fairly sure theres no refunds on donations usually.. But I'm probably wrong there.

Plus... THESE GUYS AREN'T MAKING THE GAME.. They're pitching hypotheticals to companies on something THEY DON'T OWN THE RIGHTS TO. Seriously, what they're doing should be illegal.

"It seems weird to me that Operation Rainfall is going this way about it.."

In a way its not.. They really didn't have personal success with getting the other titles here, I believe 100% that Nintendo just finally did it on their own, and that shows in how Nintendo only bothered to half ass their releases then thinking they'd be strong enough for a real one.

Now that Rainfall is seeing the Kickstarter craze taking off they figure they can jump on it, but it a way that's completely stupid. If they were raising the money to send to the Pandora's Tower team with a note saying "this needs to be used to pitch the game to publishers for the west, and only that" then yeah, it'd be nice.. But they're basically going rogue at this point, and frankly I don't know how anyone can trust that they'll really get results when they have NOTHING to do with the game beyond wanting it released this, ridiculously, bad. Just cause they may get one of these companies to agree to publish it, doesn't mean the Pandora team even agrees with the terms at all.

"Besides, what's a measly $10 for a great cause?"

Now say that another 20 times, for a plethora of games, without realizing it adds up -you just missed your rent and those games may still never be released. Its hardly a great cause when the developers should be doing this themselves -And seriously, what about the fact that they haven't?"



Overall, at the other end of this expansive maze, I'm happy the games that got localized (err.. Naturalized? I mean, the games were already translated for other countries, they just weren't brought to them). But in parallel to that I'm also happy that it didn't work out so well out of the basest human spite for people I've pretty much always perceived as selfish, who otherwise got high praise for being so plainly selfish. I'm also more then willing to have a good laugh at how Gamestop took this and ran with it.

I just wish others were willing to point out what was going on with Rainfall sooner. I also feel like they more-than-likely would have been met with the same eye rolling, "your whining about whiners.." comments I had.

Or, at the very least, if more folks were willing to point out how Operation Rainfall didn't matter in the grand scheme of things, because the exact thing they've fought for these 3 games was something that had been going on for decades, and simply wasn't going to stop because of them.

I know I keep tapping into this one source of frustration, but someone fighting for a real cause would still be fighting the fight, even if we really wished they'd stop (or at least turn their attention elsewhere). If Rainfall was really looking to be the champion of some, they should have been the champion of all, and really made a lasting mark. But I'd say, for the sake of gamers making movements for the right, longer lasting, purposes, it sets a bad precedence to have such a high profile cause to pull a pump and dump just for (literally) the few scant items and nothing else, whether their efforts were successful or not.

There doesn't appear to be a bigger cause here now, it was just a shopping list.

With all honesty, that's really all these people needed to do: Make a shopping list. All they had to do to play these games was mod their Wii's, or import one that would play the game natively, and then import the game (specially since these games had been translated already). Instead Rainfall came off as players who didn't want to spend the extra money -that people have been doing for ages now- to import 3 games and chose to get others to spend money so they can troll a company that probably didn't have the resources to go through such a risky endeavor in the first place, but didn't really want to take the steps to say it out loud -Or, you know, their stocks would fall like a rock and they'd be hurt even more.



In hindsight, from all the evidence we've had since this whole thing started, from not localizing these games to the woes Nintendo is fighting with the Wii U, there was a much bigger picture puzzle at play here as to why Nintendo wasn't going through with pushing the these games west, one that 3 highly niche games obviously wasn't going to solve -one that many feel may never get solved. But I bet Layton could have done it in a heartbeat.

That guy gets all the puzzles.

In a large way I wanted them to be the champions they were making themselves out to be; at least so more games that normally wouldn't have a chance to make a westward journey, games some of us would never have a hope in the world to play, would. But then you take a curious glimpse at the true face of something bigger, behind the mask, and sometimes you simply get let down. (Then you get to tell people about it and they act like your crying wolf)

Some other thoughts and observations while editing this whole mess together:

Some of the comments I'm reading on the article that brought me to writing this have been really funny after having found myself deep in the trenches of this 2+ years ago. Times, and further evidence, really do have a funny way of changing things. Makes me wonder what would have happened if Reggie Fils-Aime had simply said exactly this years ago.

Oh, who am I kidding.. People would have called him a liar and a company man (I wouldn't call him the former, but he's definitely the latter).. They'd still need the hard proof that Nintendo was struggling to sway their hearts.

Also, in looking for images for this post I found this: http://gamedesignreviews.com/scrapbook/operation-rainfall-coins/


So.. Did Nintendo turn around troll fans pretty heavily here? And if so..why just Europe (since I can't seem to find if it also happened in the US)?

I do find it extremely guffaw worthy that the blogger had zero clue what Operation Rainfall was when he got the coins, but bought all 3 games on his own steam and was lucky enough to score these. Guess that says something about both the cause and what Nintendo was doing -because there was at least one player out there willing to buy all three games without prodding.

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