The Power Review

What’s the deal with Regional Exclusive Games?

Alright, so when it comes down to it, there are tons of games that are exclusive to specific regions.  But no one is ever complaining about the lack of Kanji Learning games that are brought over to the US for the Nintendo DS.  What it all boils down to is that there are two different target audiences: Japan, and the rest of the world. 

It just so happens that most of the regional exclusives that anyone cares about are only on the Playstation 3.  This is simply because since Sony is a Japanese company, there are more developers for the system that don’t have the funding to pay for the localization of their games.  Additionally, there are larger Japanese companies that release games in Japan almost a full year before they are available anywhere else in the world.

This poses multiple problems.  Because Blu-Ray discs are a region free medium, it is often very tempting to import these titles that do not have an announced release date in North America or Europe.  But most of all, there is no reason to not release them across all regions.  Now, let’s look at specific examples:

• Valkyria Chronicles (Sega) -   Released 7 months earlier in Japan than the rest of the world.  This was one of the front runners for Game of the Year and best RPG according to multiple experts.  Apart from that, this was my favorite game release all last year.  However, the wait was excruciating.   It also doesn’t help the argument that the PS3 has no games, if games that you are going to mention that are amazing aren’t even released in all regions.  (By the way, that argument holds absolutely no water anymore).

• White Knight Chronicles (Level-5) – Released at the end of 2008 in Japan, this game has a tentative release date of Winter 2009 for North America, and is still TBD for Europe.  The issue here is that this is one of the fastest selling games to date for the PS3 in Japan.  Even more importantly, the game was published by Sony themselves.  How can there be an excuses for not bringing this amazing co-op and single player RPG experience over to different regions.  On a side note, there are over 100 hours of gameplay for this title!

• Demon’s Souls (From Software) – This game was just recently released in Japan in February of 2009, but once again there are no announced release dates for the rest of the world.  Like WKC, this too was published by Sony and has yet to have been mentioned to be taken to any other region besides Japan.  Are you guys starting to see a pattern with the RPG titles?

• Final Fantasy XIII (Square Enix) – This is obviously big title that everyone is expecting to hear about.  Like most of these other games, console owners from anywhere in the world besides Japan will be forced to wait about a year in order to play this highly anticipated next installment in the Final Fantasy saga.  This is longer than localization has taken for past Square Enix games, as players in North America were forced to wait an additional 6 months to play Final Fantasy XII on the PS2.  But unlike that last game, this will be region-free, so it will be interesting to see how many PlayStation3 owners in the rest of the world will be willing to wait an entire year to play a game that they know will run on their system.

This is obviously a problem that the developer of these games can be in charge of a console, yet they are not marketed to a wider audience.  This is especially the case because there is a large market for these types of games (RPGs) in regions besides Japan.  This problem seems to be plaguing only the PlayStation3 currently, but that is simply because it is a Japanese company and I’m living in North America.  If I were a Xbox 360 owner living in Japan, then there would be a laundry list of other complaints that I would be listing right now.

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