- and June 14th for Europe and Australia. I really can't wait for this game to come out. Word from Japan seems like this is the first game in the series to take big steps forward rather than the incremental upgrades Wild World and City Folk offered- or at least I hope so. Wild World was excusable at the time because it was still a new experience for a lot of people and it was the first time the series was portable. Popular opinion (including my own) was that City Folk was pretty lazy and uninspired. At the very least, New Leaf seems to at least understand that the status quo isn't going to do it anymore.

When it comes to the actual release date, though, what happened? This is a little bit of a complaint, but I'm also just curious. Japan got this game on November 8th of 2012 and we didn't even know when this game was coming until 3 months later. It doesn't actually come out until over half a year later. I guess it's expected with Nintendo now with their generous use of the "launch window", but this really stretching "Early 2013" quite a bit.

I've seen 2 popular theories, but I'm not entirely convinced of either of them

1) Animal Crossing is a low priority outside of Japan. I don't see how that can be true. Animal Crossing isn't going to move copies like Mario or Zelda and it won't do as well here as it did in Japan, but it's not like those games completely bomb over here. Wild World did pretty well (from what I remember, I can't find numbers) and City Folk did around 500k copies even though it wasn't very good. Even if AC is low priority, then what's getting the attention? The 3DS isn't the desert wasteland it used to be, but other than Fire Emblem recently and Luigi's Mansion in March, I'm not really aware of any games coming out. And Fire Emblem is super niche in the US and LM's localization can't be very complicated.

2) Translating Animal Crossing is Very Hard

I don't doubt that it is, but I don't think that explains the 7 month gap. I remember reading a really interesting interview with Nate Bihldorff years and years ago about how translating the first Animal Crossing was really difficult. However, historically this gap doesn't make much sense. Wild World came out in the US only one month after Japan. City Folk came out in the US three days before Japan, which is kinda weird, but whatever. Also, there's no voice acting in AC.

Well, whatever. I'll be there Day 1, even if they delay until 2014. I'm just kinda bummed out, I really want to play that game. :( Thanks for reading my rant. I'm going to look into the new Harvest Moon game and see if that can fill the void in my heart.