Pokémon, the Internet, and International Release Crap!

About a week ago the latest game in the Pokémon series Pokémon Black and White came out in Japan. It's the 5th non-remake title in the main series and it sold like hotcakes. Here in USA, the game is slated for release in "Spring 2011", which means we're going to be waiting at least 6 months to buy this game. But that doesn't mean you have to wait to play it.

Last weekend anyone who wanted to could download the ROM of this game and play it on their computers, free of charge. Again, nothing is really surprising about this if you know you're way around the internet. What was surprising was that Game Freak, the company that makes these games, fixed the game so that any illegally downloaded ROM of the game has experience points locked out, leaving you with Pokémon incapable of leveling up and getting stronger. This was quickly fixed, and a patched version of the game was available before this week was halfway over. Then, last night, a patch for ROMs of Black version came out which changed the game (partially) into English. Mind you, there are probably a ton of grammatical, all of this has been accomplished within the course of a week. Give it two more and you should be able to get both games in English. Meanwhile the official release is still six months away.

Am I the only one that thinks that this insane? Huge releases on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 can see GLOBAL release within WEEKS. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was out within a span of about 6 weeks of it's Japanese release. Resident Evil 5 was out in North America, Japan, and Europe within a week. Pokémon Black and White is going to take 6 months to get translated? And that's not even taking into account Europe and any other market outside of the United States and Japan. Meanwhile, various internet groups have gotten around the one big anti-piracy trick and are right now in the middle of translating the whole thing into English. Two weeks from now, if they're keeping pace, they could probably have the whole of both game translated into English. And it's going to take Nintendo and Game Freak at least SIX WHOLE MONTHS to get fully translated versions of the game out for purchase? Within the next 6 minutes, you could probably go onto 4chan and find everything you'd need to download to play a partially English version of the game. In weeks, probably a fully translated version. This just baffles me.

Now, I'm willing to admit that I'm being a tad bit critical here. The target audience of this game (children, for the five people who don't know that) probably has no idea this game even exists yet and as such does not care. There's probably a huge list of Pokémon names that need to be changed on top of other localizations, not to mention setting up stuff for all the internet integrated features (there's a lot), and a massive amount of beta testing to be done. But that doesn't change that fact that all of this could've been done months ago. Hell, this would probably be a great release for the holidays. And in this day and age where anything is readily available for free (albeit illegal) distribution, there's no reason why major markets should be waiting as long as they are for this kind of stuff.

(Note: I do not condone piracy, nor do I endorse it. Pay for your crap like everyone else, even if that means you're not going to be playing it for a few months.)