Korea’s Empty Virtual Console

me being from Korea, i can confidently say gaming has come a far way. i remember korea not having dedicated Nintendo/SEGA/Sony etc. division at all. and samsung daewoo etc. used to localize stuff pretty poorly. best ways to get games and systems was to go to i guess unofficial import places which weren'y really legally important anyways.

PS2 era was when it really surprised me. i was long living in the states and i saw GASP! translated games! fully in korean and having sony of korea distributing the PS2 etc. not sure when this really stated but for me the first time was then.

this was really great though because they translated many games, especially RPGs that were never really here and i had a great time playing em

like Hanjuku hero for PS2, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne (it took awhile to come out here i had beaten this game long before localized here by atlus), and i got to play Onimusha 3 with the japanese voices intact :)

its getting better but still needs alot of work. if u think about it, not many countries in the world have their own dedicated nintendo/MS/Sony division and locally distribute systems and games.
largly there are Japan, Europe and of course US. (gonna leave out the minor master system success in Brazil etc)

anyways these days however, i see less games that i see i want to get from korea because US translates alot of games, especially those JP only RPG extensively than before.

only one i got recently was Super Robot Taisen Original gen for PS2

Well it is a two sided situation. The selection stinks, but at least the ones there are pretty much all quality games. No need to wade through mounds of crap to get to the gems. There, that is my positive outlook for tonight.

Oh wait, I almost posted that. I almost missed Urban Champion. Seriously though, nice quality to crap ratio.

These games are not in Korean. Some of them are in Japanese like the River City Ransom stuff. Others like the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past are in English.

well, that sucks :/

I really think these companies should bring over some games that never did it… I mean, only virtual console game I bought was Sin and Punishment, because it was previously unreleased, similarly, I'd buy Fire Emblems, Seiken Densetsu 3, Star Ocean (the snes version although with the remake some might wonder what the purpose is), Terranigma, Tales of Phantasia, Live a Live, and we could go on. I think by only putting in it games I already own, or, if I were to buy I'd track down a cartridge, they're loosing some pretty big window of opportunity here.

And of course, I think Korea deserved to see these games translated, specially seeing that a lot of these games have little to no text taking menus aside. I remember Nintendo translated a lot of N64 games into chinese, for the iQue, so… why not?

Oh I should specify that the games published by Nintendo of Korea, like take Wii Fit, Super Mario Galaxy and Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass are in Korean. It's just the Virtual Console games that aren't. They do have Korean instruction manuals though.

the games are translated into korean though, right?

most US/PAL games are just a rom that is lying around anyway and is released with the location process done and no further development. Well, not most actually… more like all but Sin and Punishment.

I don't know, I am always shocked at how many Hong Kong releases are still in Japanese. Usually the only thing they do is include a Chinese/English manual in the game. Well to be fair most of these games could probably be played in a foreign language with little problem. I would think the major expense would be in creating a Korean language manual. Sans a couple of course. Certainly they do that at least.

Sadly that is what I expected. It is sad that people outside of the main three regions get treated like secondary customers. Do they at least make Korean manuals Spencer?

This is pretty much the point I was making. It seems sad that with most of these games not being very text heavy that Nintendo or whoever is not putting in the minimal effort to localize these games.

That being said, this isn't only Nintendo, it seems to be every publisher. It applies to disc based games as well. I remember getting a SEA copy of Bumpy Trot. I found it odd that the game, an RPG was in complete Japanese considering that most of the areas this was being sold in were Chinese/English speaking areas. The only change made was the manual was in Chinese with a small English insert with control layouts. My SEA copy of Initial D for PS3 is the same. The manual is dual language but the game is still in Japanese.

Perhaps the most interesting point to this, IMHO, is that publishers and developers bitch and moan about piracy in SEA countries but at the same time they do almost nothing to properly support their products there. If a person can't get a legit copy of a game in Korean or Chinese then why would they want to support the developer. It is kind of a catch 22 I suppose since piracy discourages publishers, but it still just seems like an odd situation.

EDIT: I realize that my examples apply to areas like Hong Kong and Singapore but I have read that the situation is pretty similar in Korea. Though I do notice that PS2 and PS3 both have Korean sections on Play-Asia.

you guys in NA really are lucky. Here in our country, we have to import everything from Singapore. We are not being distributed officially by any of the big three companies. Im not sure about Microsoft and Sony since I heard they planned to do it but never really saw the light of the day. Its really very hard to track down games here. Though we have dedicated stores for original games, our country is infested by piracy everywhere. Also, another thing to note is that console games are not the main market here, its mostly MMOs that are very popular. *sigh* console gaming here seems to be very small