Maybe I'm just ignorant, but why all the fuss over Operation Rainfall?

Just yesterday, the Wii we use at my house has been sent to be repaired. It had been showing problems for a while, making strange noises, sometimes taking a while to recognise the remote, not reading some game discs, but in September of this year it finally packed in. And yes, it's just been sitting there all those weeks. I am slightly concerned that all my downloaded games would need to be re-bought at considerable expense, but that's barely crossed my mind. What instead I've been thinking of, besides being able to hold onto a good education that my past qualifications should by rights deny me, is a game called Xenoblade Chronicles that I haven't been able to play because of the aforementioned breakage. More specifically, I've been thinking about just how much attention the game has gotten and how everyone seems to be holding it up as this earth-shattering breakthrough that's going to bring about a new age of enlightenment and prove the Wii to be the serious gaming platform that we had all decided it wasn't for whatever reason, and that just seems to be quite a lot of weight to be put on the shoulders of what looks from a distance to be an utterly absurd concept wrapped around a modern console-rpg without any kind of multiplayer at all.

I reiterate that I have not yet played the game, and have only seen as far as the opening on internet videos, and am open to being proven wrong. As for those of you who are luckily unfamiliar enough to not have read through all the seemingly endless paragraphs of internet types clambering over each other to tell you how it's going to change their lives, Xenoblade Chronicles is a Nintendo-published console-rpg released last year in Japan by small-time developer Monolith, whose previous credits include a small part of Super Smash Bros Brawl and some games with weird German titles, with the creative lead being someone whose name I have conveniently forgotten. The central premise is that the world was formed on the bodies of two gods who got into a scrap and just died standing up, which immediately raises the question of how anything survives higher than their feet, but I'll get to that. A English-language version was released in Europe back in August, but has yet to be released in America, much to the disappointment of some fans.

If XenoChron, as I will shorten it as, was just looked at by the community and press as a good game, I probably think nothing of it besides 'this seems interesting', but they've decided to hold it up on a different pedestal altogether. Now it's this grand masterpiece that changes the way we look at games and is going to breathe new life into the apparently flagging console-rpg genre, on both a mechanical and intellectual level.

And yet it seems to have come from nowhere. Maybe if someone like Akihiro Hino was involved, but I'll say once again that Monolith haven't really done a whole lot previously and the creative lead's only previous game to get any real attention was based around giant robots.

In fact, the hype has been large enough for a letter-writing campaign called Operation Rainfall to demand that Nintendo release the game in America, along with two other games that I'll talk about in a moment, to get featured in videos by at least two professional video game journalists. Even if I end up enjoying the game, I highly doubt it can be influential enough on either level to warrant all this attention.

On a mechanical level, XenoChron may well be unique in how it is designed or structured, but any amount of uniqueness does not automatically equal a leap forward. The box tells me that the game is a single-player only affair, which I'm afraid simply can't be ground-breaking anymore after the success Zynga's been having. Now you may believe that a game doesn't need multiplayer to be influential, but this is 2011, not 2006. Any group of people who've played New Super Mario Bros Wii, Portal 2 or Dragon Quest 9 together will agree that a game that comes from traditionally single-player roots can most definitely work with more than one person playing in any one instance, and I don't even need to give an explaination about the mainstream phenomena that are Pokémon, World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. XenoChron can only really offer a unique set of mechanics, nothing more and nothing less.

As for on an intellectual level, I already made my point 5 paragraphs ago. When a piece of narrative fiction gives us its premise slash back-story right from the get-go, it better be reasonable it'll bring the rest of the piece down a peg. And XenoChron presents its utterly ludicrous mythos as the first scene. I'm probably not open-minded enough but I just have trouble accepting that an entire civilisation can take shape on the back of two corpses that are standing up several thousand feet above sea level. Even if the rest of the game turns out to be absolutely stellar, the greeting the game gives the player is utterly silly and makes it ever-so-slightly harder to take seriously

Now, for a point of comparison, let's briefly look back a decade and a half to a game that people hyped up as being just as intellectually important, if not more so. Final Fantasy 7 (which I also haven't played, but have watched a good chunk of someone's Let's Play) was one of the first games to undersell its explicit content. By which I mean that it contained strong language, bloody violence and sexual themes, but that wasn't the point. In fact, you probably didn't even notice. Instead of using its mature content as a cynical publicity stunt a la Mortal Kombat, the writers merely used it to inject some gritty realism into an impossible fiction, providing a sense that this world was not one full of joy, but an unpleasant world where the wrong people can become too powerful. There was potentially offensive material, but it avoided making a song and dance out of it. If that's not an intellectual breakthrough for the medium, then what is? Also, the mythos of the game world is not only slightly more plausible, but not immediately thrown in the face of the audience.

XenoChron, therefore, may well be a unique and enjoyable game, and I will be able to find out for myself once the Wii is fixed, but as far as I can tell it simply cannot be the leap forward that everyone seems to say it is. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, but I'm also sure that it's hardly the sort of thing to beg on your hands and knees for to be published in your country when you can just import. Which brings me back to Operation Rainfall, and the other games that the Americans have decided belong on the same level for some reason.

Admittedly, I don't have a whole lot to say on The Last Story and Pandora's Tower, I won't be able to have much of a real opinion either way until the English-language trailers provide some context, but I can give my initial impressions just from what I've read. Last Story seems to have much more of the right idea than XenoChron, Sakaguchi looks to have actually tried to bring something new to the table in terms of this whole character-interaction in real-time, co-op and PVP with named characters as opposed to avatars thing. Pandora's Tower on the other hand, well, what's Pandora's Tower? Seriously, what is this game, what's it supposed to be about, who made it, where has it come from to be held up on the same pedestal as the possible swansong of the guy who served as producer on arguably the best game of the 2D era? I'm sure it's alright, but the attention it's been getting is just uncalled for, especially when hundreds of Japanese games made by complete nobodies don't ever get translated.

As for whether Operation Rainfall will ever be fruitful, I'm not going to speculate. I feel the campaign has really got out of hand, especially when only one game they're campaigning for looks like it could be a legitimate breakthrough. I don't know, maybe I'm just ignorant.