Four Great Nintendo Wii Games You'll Never Be Able to Play Outside of Japan

Given that the Wii was produced by Japanese company it makes sense that there would be a few games for the console that would only be available to gamers living in the land of the rising sun, which is a massive shame because there are a lot great Wii games that have yet to be localized for Western consumers and also quite a few that, for whatever reason, never will be.

Captain Rainbow

In this game you play a guy with his own TV show, a super cool yo-yo and a magical belt that turns him in to Captain Rainbow. Through a very bizarre turn of events involving a makeshift raft and a pink rabbit you find yourself without your magical belt and yo-yo and stuck on an island called Mimin. As well as being home to a lot of Nintendo's most famous and iconic characters, it is also full of puzzles, mini games and quests you must complete in order to gain your powers back. I'm not exactly how well a game this off the wall would fare in any other place in the world but I'd certainly like to at least try it out.

Eyeshield 21: Field Saikyou no Senshi Tachi

When it was released in 2007 this game was touted as a glimpse at how the Japanese saw American football. As is typical for Wii games you have to waggle and shake your way through an extremely stylized version of the popular American sport. I've never been able to make it the whole way through a game of British soccer let alone American football, but I would have loved to had a go at this anime influenced comedy sports game that seems more like a bonkers arcade game than any Western sports game I've seen.


Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen

Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen, which literally translates to Zero: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse was released in 2009 and though its name is a tad misleading it is actually the fourth and most recent instalment of the Fatal Frame series of survival horror games. Better known in Europe and the US as Project Zero, the Fatal Frame series comprises of some of the most terrifying games ever made and usually involve haunted mansions full of wailing ghosts and evil demons and a magical camera that functions as your only defence against them. The original versions of this game featured some fairly fear enhancing vibrating controls and I'd like to hope the functionality of the Wii had capitalized on this even more, as all great Wii games have before.

Wii Chess

This last one is actually a bit of a cheat, because whilst it was originally region exclusive to Japan it has since been localized to the European and Australian markets, but oddly enough not the US. I've included this here because I'm absolutely baffled as to why a game as universal as chess would be, at least for a certain amount of time, deemed unsuitable for an international market and also because the idea of having a chess game on a console like the Nintendo Wii, when I could just go to my granddad's house and play it for free.