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The release you’ve been waiting for…

Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 7:56am by デール

runsamusrun.gifI know a lot of people felt sore that us Wii owners here in Japan got Super Smash Bros. Brawl a little bit early, but I thought it’d make you all feel better to let you know that Metroid Prime 3 Corruption just hit Japan a few days back. That’s right, a 6 month delay! And what did they spend all that time doing? Adding online play? Nope. How about Japanese voice-overs? Nah- it’s subtitled! Most likely the game’s under-the radar (and very very late release) have to do with its going quite contrary to Nintendo’s extremely family oriented marketing campaign for the Wii in Japan (with heavy promotions for Wii Fit, Daily Knowledge Training, and other games you can play with your grandparents).
With so many games geared towards family and away from nuking aliens, it’s hard to see if there’s enough of a hard-core Wii crowd left in Japan to support this title. I wouldn’t have been too surprised to see the Japanese release cancelled where it not a 1st party staple. Then again, maybe Nintendo just wanted to warm gamers up with a month of Brawl before releasing a more involved action game.

Thanks to The Shuyguy Kingdom for the sprites that I used for the little animation!

7 Comments

  1. benthedorklord says...

    aww, no online play? too bad.

  2. Lifeisaglitch says...

    …Yeah im still gonna complain about Brawl not being out anywhere that matters ;)

    Come on we are like three times as many people as you guys!

  3. Apok says...

    I think it just has more to do with the fact that Metroid is just much more popular outside of Japan, so it just isn’t a priority.

  4. wii wii says...

    Metroid has never been a big deal in Japan. Looks like it never will be.
    So, they dont care if it is delayed.
    There loss, really.

  5. InvisibleMan says...

    I would have exchanged our Metroid Prime Corruption release for your Etrian Odyssey II release any month of the year!!

  6. vertol says...

    Is Samus running away from Japan?

  7. Dan says...

    Ya I think prime has two things going against it here in the Japanese market. 1) It’s metroid… never been that big here. 2) Starting with prime they added the first person view which also isn’t well liked in Japan since many people complain it makes them dizzy or disoriented.

    Game’s not gonna sell to well but maybe they’ll make a profit if they kept their porting costs low from the NA version.

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