Nintendo and Tencent have been enjoying a solid partnership in the Chinese market, with Switch console sales beating rivals in the country. With official sales now beyond 4 million units, efforts continue to grow the userbase and increasingly tap into a potentially huge market.
Daniel Ahmad, Senior Analyst at Niko Partners and a popular figure on social media, shared details on a new promotion being rolled out at IKEA and Holiday Inn Hotels in China to promote the system and Super Mario Party. The game was a relatively recent release in China alongside the online multiplayer update that rolled out globally.
In IKEA some show rooms will be branded and give shoppers a chance to try the game. In the case of participating Holiday Inn locations, the game will be playable for free in the lobby and Switch systems can be purchased as optional extras for rooms. As Ahmad explains, the promotions make a lot of sense for the Chinese market, in particular.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Chinese market progresses for the Switch and Nintendo more broadly; initial signs are positive and it’s clear that, should partnerships like these – along with Tencent distribution – pay off it’ll be hugely lucrative.
And … oh man, don’t get me started. That’s what’s unbelievable about TWEWY’s localization. Both titles speak to the toxic mindset the PC has to over come. It’s called “It’s a wonderful life” in Japan because the mindset is that the current state of things, the obedience to tradition, blindly accepted the path your parents choice for you and your place in society is the problem. No a lot of people in the US have that problem! So the game is called “The world ends with you”, the toxic idea being that perceptions outside your own, your own desires, the path you chose for yourself don’t matter. Everything that matters literally ends where you end.
So now they have created a game where the localization carries the EXACT OPPISITE message, but they are able to keep all the themes, dialog, motif mostly intact in the telling of both stories. In the first game, you loss your memories in the US because the most important thing to you is your individuality. In JP you loss your knowledge of where you fit in society and what others want from you, because the most important thing to you is doing what everyone expects of you. In the 3rd game, in the US you give up all other players because you’ve grown and accept your connection with others as the most valuable thing in the world, in JP you give up the same, but because you’ve grown to see everyone as an individual and not just product of social pressure and you feel strong enough to resist that pressure as well, so the most important thing to you is learning about people as individuals. Literally the opposite. You go from individual good to group good in the US, and group good to individual good in JP. It’s the same for the NPCs. The unbelievably tragic Rhyme can’t remember Beat because his sister’s LOVE was the most important thing to him in the US, but in JP it was the hopes and aspirations she had for him after his parents gave up on him. She was the only one who thought he could still contribute to society.
Sadly you can’t do that with an anime, because most of the story is dialog and you have a lot less wiggle room. As such, the anime builds on the JP message, so sadly for US viewer they are completely different characters who went though a completely different character arch in the game and that spills over into the game itself being completely different, because the “rules” of the game are just context used to move the story along.
