(By “interesting,” I mean I was struggling with if I should call this “racist.” But, ultimately, I won’t go that far, even though if this happened in America, people would certainly call it that.)
Alright, so we know the Japanese Yen is very weak now. It’s worth approximately 50% less than the big, beautiful American dollar (calm yourselves). To combat overseas scalpers, Nintendo is charging 20,000 yen more for multi-language support on Japanese Switch 2 units. The standard Japanese-only price of 49,980 yen will instead cost 69,980 yen for anyone who can’t speak Japanese.
You may be asking: but what of foreigners living in Japan who simply want to play their games in English? Well, here’s Nintendo’s answer: screw you. You need to pay 20,000 yen more too.
A Better Solution
I understand tourists needing to pay more, but what if a permanent resident simply showed his or her Residence Card or Visa? Nintendo has no system in place for this, screwing over millions of potential foreigners living in Japan.
At the end of the day, it feels like a racist Gaijin tax for permanent residents in Japan (even if it’s not). And that’s not cool. Again, I understand the price gouging is useful for tourists to prevent scalping, but there should have been a process to accomodate permanent residents, students, and so forth.
By the way…screaming “LEARN JAPANESE!” isn’t helpful. It takes thousands of hours to learn Japanese, more time than most people are ever living in Japan. And even if you do learn the language after 6+ years of study, you sometimes want to enjoy content in your native language regardless. It’s just a shame some people will be punished for such an innocent thing.
Oh, Region Locking Is Back
This isn’t even getting into the implications of region locking, which is a clear downgrade over the original Switch. There’s no good way to spin this. The Switch 2 is expensive, and it’s removing some amazing features of the original Switch unless you pay almost double (at least in Japan).
So… this news sucks. Try to spin it in the comments.
We’ll likely be making a video on this topic in the near future. There’s just way too many stories to cover this week!