Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Le sigh: Tomodachi Collection isn't coming to the States

I'm sorry if this is old news to some of you; I was a) on vacation and b) laid up with a bad back when it "broke" (the news, not my back) a few days ago.

Anyway, during last week's E3 event 1up.com's Jeremy Parish asked Tomodachi Collection producer Yoshi Sakamoto whether or not the Animal-Crossing-meets-The-Sims title would be released stateside. Sakamoto's answer:

"Tomodachi Collection is something we're really interested in bringing to the U.S. The problem is that we only built Japanese language generation into the software, and that's a very important part of the game. We can't make it work with English, so we won't be able to release the game here."

A 1up.com commenter perfectly summed up my feelings on the matter when he posted the following in response to Parish's article: "Our stupid, cobbled-together language screws us again!"

(Via 1up.com)

2 comments:

Viewtiful_Justin said...

I haven't heard of this game...or...I don't recall hearing about this game. But...boo!

Bryan Ochalla said...

I know I wrote about it late last year, Justin, but that's probably it.

From what I've read, it's a pretty interesting game. Unfortunately, the game's speech synthesizer (which enables characters to talk with users in complete sentences) is one of its main draws -- and the tech just wouldn't work with the English language. (Japanese, as far as I'm aware, is phonetic in nature and, thus, is a better fit for the tech used in this game.)