No help from Nintendo in bringing this to North America, it turns out

With Nintendo of America's announcement that it had no plans to release Xenoblade Chronicles or The Last Story coupled with their recent emphasis on bringing more third parties to the table, some hoped that the Big N would allow a smaller Western publisher to do the honours and thus end their long-standing reluctance to allow other companies to publish their titles in territories where they did not plan to do so themselves. XSEED seemed a likely candidate – while NOE is releasing the Namco Bandai title Solatorobo: Red the Hunter in PAL territories, XSEED is doing the honours in North America.

Don't get your hopes up, though. In a recent interview with Siliconera, XSEED stated that they hadn't spoken to NOE at all through the entire process and that future projects localising its games are unfortunately unlikely. When asked whether the process opened up channels of communication with NOE, Ken Berry, Director of Publishing at XSEED, responded:

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No, actually. Everything, all of our communication, is done directly with Namco Bandai of Japan. Yeah, we’ve never licensed a title from Nintendo before, so I would think the prospects of that happening would be very slim.

They also elaborated that their previous work with Namco Bandai on Fragile Dreams and Sky Crawlers strengthened the relationship between the two companies and opened discussions about localising Solatorobo. Developer CyberConnect2's passion in getting the game out also helped:

This is a title the developer, CyberConnect2, are super passionate about and they really wanted to see it released in the U.S. and they worked with us to make it happen.

[source siliconera.com]