The Japanese-localized version of Torchlight for XBLA has been canceled, which is a good thing because it never existed in the first place.
Bad news, everyone: Torchlight isn’t coming out for Xbox Live Arcade in Japan. It’s a shame, really – sure, the Xbox 360 is dead in the water in Japan, but there were probably a few Japanese gamers looking forward to playing Runic’s excellent dungeon-looter.
The unfortunate news was broken by Microsoft Japan, who attributed the game’s cancellation to a bug in the game’s text. That must have been one pretty whopping severe bug, but hey, Japanese is a complicated language, right? Better luck next time, Microsoft.
Except Runic Games says that a Japanese version of Torchlight never existed at all. Runic president Travis Baldree told Joystiq:
We’re not privy to the decision making process in providing the game in Japan – but it was not due to bugs in the translation because the game has never been translated to Japanese. Since there was no existing Japanese version of the game, the complexity of a new translation combined with the randomly generated naming scheme for Torchlight made it beyond the scope of the project.
Abwuh?
There’s a saying about the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and that probably goes double when one hand is in Washington State and the other is in Tokyo. But you’d think that there’d at least be some communication on whether or not a game is actually being localized.
It’s probably a good thing that the Japanese Torchlight was canceled, then, or else that release date for a nonexistent game would have been pretty embarrassing.
UPDATE: Microsoft has clarified the situation with the following statement: “We made the decision to not launch “Torchlight” on Xbox Live Arcade in Japan due to localization complexities; not due to bugs. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
