Nintendo And Tencent Launch Super Mario Party And Switch Demonstrations In China

Put some wah wah comments here about Tencent inclusion.

Can't wait to see people get pissy about politics on this completely non-political report.

I think the bigger news here is "there are Holiday Inn Hotels in China?!"

@Anti-Matter The truth or just made up BS.

@Noid Or people complaining on censorship in games cause they just didn‘t care early enough.

🙄

Honestly surprised that Super Mario Party actually took this long to get into China considering it probably wouldn't need a lot of censoring or anything of the sort

@HammerGalladeBro
They have pretty much all major international brands in China except official releases of entertainment products. I’m glad Chinese gamers have access to Switch now but stinks they missed out on earlier Nintendo consoles. They should be complaining about not getting Mother 1 and 2 in addition to Mother 3.

"China does not have a console culture"

Don't people lose "Social Credit" points there for playing too many videogames. 👀 I thought the government didn't like them.

@Noid
I don’t understand why Western governments care so much that China isn’t a democracy. They definitely don’t actually care about human rights in China. If China is a democracy, it would actually be bad for the West because political candidates would run on issues such as past grievances from their century of humiliation and want that addressed.

I remember travelling around the USA with my family and the hotels with SNES were the best. Sounds like a good idea.

@noobish_hat Where in China have you been? I've seen numerous ones and even lived down the street from one.

Took me some effort to keep a straight face when reading about a promo collab between a console maker and a hotel network. I blame the recent AVGN ep.😆

I saw "Demonstrations in China" and got excited 🥺

@noobish_hat Easiest one to mention is the Holiday Inn near the Worker's Stadium in Beijing.

wah wah comments here about

@Anti-Matter I'll remember your comment if things ever become... hot in the Strait of Malacca, champ.

Awesome, let’s hope Nintendo will get into the North Korean market.

@nhSnork However I don't expect this collaboration to have an annoying dude harassing his guests.

I can only imagine what would've happened with the SEGA and Howard Johnson's collaboration if one said they had an SNES or a Game Boy over a Genesis or Game Gear.

I thought SMP was already released in China...

...but either way, I hope China can hold off on SMP for the upcoming and much superior Mario Party Superstars...

@HammerGalladeBro I know, could only be more startling if you told me there are Howard Johnsons too.

Wait for it… wait for it…

OMG the switch doubles it's official library with a second game! What a great day for China

@StephenYap3

The only game officially released and on E-shop was Mario Kart, but bootleg games are the norm. Games are often localized for China even though they can't be sold there with the understanding grey markets are all over SEA

@Anti-Matter

Well, the chinese System is a Deal with the Devil to make more Money and nobody can deny it.

Isn't this like, only the 4th or 5th game they can legally sell in China? Or was that only at launch that they released the Switch with like, no games?

Oh, and the criticism of Tencent is warranted for a lot of reason. Just saying.

I can honestly care less about China but I think it's pretty cool kids get to finally play the games they're forced to make.

Besides the obvious weirdness of Tencent, Nintendo, and a hotel chain teaming up to promote games (plus Ikea), I'm wondering why they're doing this for Super Mario Party when Superstars is coming out in just a few months. I know they're trying to get as much bang for heir buck as possible, but is Superstars really going to take that long to get to China? It kind of invalidates Super's existence, and that's coming from someone who thinks its a solid game.

@Andrew5678
Considering that they have less than 10 games released for Switch in China over the course of over a year and a half, yes it will be a while if they ever get an official localized version.

@Toy_Link Okay, that makes sense. I forget how hard it's been for Nintendo to get into China until recently.

@Anti-Matter eh, the wah wah comments are somewhat justified, even if they're getting old.

@HeadPirate
Why would anyone buy a Switch in China just to play 4 games released there. Why would Nintendo try to get into the China market just to sell 2% of the total games released elsewhere? Nintendo should try Vietnam instead, it’s nowhere as restrictive.

@Heavyarms55 As far as I know this is the second game on Switch approved by the government, but before 2020 there were around 400 approved games total.

You can play things like the reskinned China friendly versions of DOTA2 or LOL, the FF series, Hunter x Hunter, Naruto: New Generation, My Hero Academia, Pro Evolution Soccer ... so the reality wasn't THAT bad. They approve almost NO US games however, have no guidelines, and don't tell you why your game was rejected.

Then the pandemic. China approved almost 1300 games in the last 16 months, so the flood gates are pretty open. The rumour is that 6 switch games were approved, so we might see 5 more releases soon.

@Don Because a lot of video games are localized for China and sold in Japan, Korea and the Philippians. It's kinda like speeding ... I'm pretty sure the government is aware 4 million people are not JUST playing Mario Kart and you can buy grey market physical games basically everywhere, but for now they don't seem to care much. So that's increased game sales for Nintendo, seeing the game are coming from retailers (at first)

Also remember unlike most consoles, the Switch is sold at profit, so they are making money off hardware.

Why does it take so long to localize a game into Chinese? Let's assume that the game in question gets approved with any major changes, just be simple. Is it the lack of people Nintendo has in that region? Is the problem that there can't be ANY Latin characters in the games at all? (Other than the buttons) I mean, I get why games like BoTW take a long time to localize because of how much text there is, but I doubt Super Mario Party took THAT long to translate.

@HeadPirate The problem is, that's 1300 games TOTAL. That's a tiny percentage of games released in a given year for all platforms. Side note, of those 5 other games, I doubt they are New Horizons nor Three Houses, for different reasons. While I don't have to explain the latter, the former does. See, while New Horizons has a fully translated Chinese option, the freedom of Animal Crossing is a bit TOO free for the Chinese Government. Remember that there were protests about Hong Kong during the pandemic. So either they remove the Online of Animal Crossing (Which strips much from the experience) or not release it at all.

@HeadPirate So basically, when games are rejected it's on the biases of "Because I said so." or "Nah, I don't like it."?

Side note about TWEWY, I feel like the anime of it was disliked so much because of the differences between the original game and the localized version. If they ever do a dub of the series, I have a feeling that it would be fitted to be more in line with the Worldwide release of it.

@NatiaAdamo

Yeah, basically!

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.

@Don They care because of major human rights violations, like the Uyghur genocide and the treatment of Tibetans and other minority groups. It’s not all just cynicism and nihilism coming from the west.

@CactusMan Chinese Switches can't do that. The E-Shop is connected to Tencent servers only.

You know, as much as I hate mobile gaming, Mario Party would make a killing as a mobile game. I wonder why it hasn't happened yet? That should have been Nintendo's first mobile game.