Misblamed / Nintendo

• Animal Crossing: amiibo Festival gets a lot of hate from people who assumed it prevented a true Animal Crossing game from appearing on Wii U. The main reason there was no Wii U installment in the series is because one was never planned. While the next mainline entry began conceptualization immediately after the release of New Leaf, series director and producer Aya Kyogoku stated during the marketing cycle for New Horizons that they were thinking about it as being a game for Nintendo's next portable console, which would ultimately be the hybrid Nintendo Switch.
• Donkey Kong:
  • Shigeru Miyamoto was often blamed for the lack of Donkey Kong Country characters in Jungle Beat and the general sorry state of the franchise throughout the '00s, with the evidence being an old interview where he supposedly bashed the first DKC with the statement "Donkey Kong Country proves gamers will put up with mediocre gameplay if the art is good." Not only is there no proof Miyamoto ever said that to begin with, he was closely involved with the creation of the first Country installment, supervised the Donkey Konga series (all of which feature DKC characters), and was the most supportive of Retro Studios reviving the series with Returns. If certain characters don't show up, it's because the development team doesn't feel like using them.
  • A lot of people seem to misblame Rare for the lack of Kremlings in some games (e.g., Donkey Kong Country Returns), mistakenly thinking the British developer still owns them. By the contrary, Nintendo retained the rights to the Kremlings and any other enemy characters they created for the Donkey Kong series following Rare's purchase by Microsoft, and used them in several titles such as Donkey Konga, DK: King of Swing, DK: Jungle Climber, and Donkey Kong Barrel Blast. Once again, their infrequent appearances are the result of given development teams not wanting to use them.
• Dragon Quest VIII's 3DS remake had a few changes, among them censoring a scene with stabbing and notably changing Jessica's outfits so that they are less Stripperific. Being that the 3DS port was published by Nintendo of America and came following a lot of outcry over changes made in Fire Emblem Fates' localization, many people in the West pointed fingers at Nintendo for censoring it. Actually, these changes were present in Japan, too — CERO (Japan's game rating board) had enacted stricter policies, and such changes were required in order for the game to retain the CERO rating that it got back in 2004.
• Fire Emblem:
  • In the Fire Emblem: Awakening fandom, before the game was officially brought to the USA, some unofficial translations made the Henry x Olivia ship extremely popular due to Olivia apparently going "I Can Change My Beloved" on Henry. Then the game was released in the West, and the fans went berserk at how their ship was "ruined" and "made uncute" by the apparent All Girls Want Bad Boys swing the supports took. Then Japanese-speakers showed that the translation most shippers based their preferences on was... not entirely accurate anyway. Oops.
  • Many fans were surprised that the Japanese rerelease of Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE for the Nintendo Switch used a localized version of the North American version. NoA was blamed for pushing Western values on Atlus, but similarly to the aforementioned Dragon Quest VIII example, the change was due to CERO becoming much stricter on sexual content; the existing censored version made for Western audiences conveniently fit the new standards required to retain the old rating.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The original The Legend of Zelda is known for being a "Blind Idiot" Translation. As shown here though, the game's most infamous and confusing hints, "Eastmost penninsula is the secret" and "10th enemy has the bomb", aren't in the Japanese version at all. They were actually created specifically for the English version, replacing the more straightforward "You can't use arrows if you run out of money" and "Look for the Lion Key". It is unknown why these unique hints were created, but it nevertheless took the fandom decades to understand what either of them meant.
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link features a strange man in a house in Ruto who, when spoken to, says the bizarre phrase "I AM ERROR". It was commonly believed to be a translation error or some kind of coding bug, but Error is his actual name, and was spelled phonetically in Japanese; if you talk to another character in Mido, he tells Link to ask Error about how to find the secret entrance to the Island Palace in the graveyard. The actual translation error comes from another NPC in the game named Bug, who mistakenly had his name translated directly from the katakana as "Bagu".
  • For years, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's distinctive cartoonish visuals were credited as the work of Yoichi Kotabe, a veteran Toei animator who worked for Nintendo from 1985 to 2007. It seemed like a reasonable assumption to make as Kotabe had done illustration work on prior Zelda titles, and Wind Waker in particular bears a lot of aesthetic similarities to classic Toei animated films he'd worked on like The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon, but Kotabe had no personal involvement in Wind Waker's development. He has stated as such in multiple interviews, and his name doesn't appear anywhere in the credits, which instead list Yoshiki Haruhana, Satoru Takizawa, and Masanao Arimoto as the design managers. Javed Sterritt of The Hyrule Journals has a video going into detail about this misconception and how it came to be.
• Team Ninja were originally blamed for much of Metroid: Other M's failings. In reality, most of the decisions that fans took issue with were decisions made by series producer Yoshio Sakamoto: from Samus Aran's portrayal and her English VA's performance, to the story, to the linear gameplay. Even the single Wii Remote control scheme was a mandate from Sakamoto, since he personally struggles with 3D games and analog controls, with Team Ninja having vocally fought against it.
• Pokémon:
  • The idea that Nintendo created and owns Pokémon gets the company hit with both praise and anger whenever something happens regarding any facet of the series. Though Nintendo does have a large stake in the franchise, Game Freak (an independent third-party studio) is the one who created the series and actually develops the core mainline titles. Meanwhile, it is the joint venture company "The Pokémon Company" — founded by them, Nintendo, and a third studio called Creatures Inc. (which handles the trading card game, toys, and 3D modeling for the various games) — that manages every aspect of the brand. This misconception has even affected Nintendo's stock price at various times, with one notable instance being the success of Pokémon GO causing Nintendo's stock price to more than double shortly after release, prompting Nintendo to explain that they had no involvement with the game and only receive a small cut of the licensing fees.
  • Smogon's critics near-universally hate on Sleep Clause as "another of Smogon's stupid rules". Sleep Clause was in fact an official rule created by Game Freak, found in every Pokémon Stadium game and seeing use in many early tournaments. The only clauses specifically created by Smogon are those dealing with Evasion, Moody, Dynamax, and One-Hit KO moves.
  • The scarce news updates about Pokémon Sword and Shield prior to release (and every Pokémon game since, for that matter), was not Game Freak's decision. Rather, it was because of a new marketing process at The Pokémon Company that required everything shown pre-release to go through a slow, convoluted chain of approval. To give an idea, a journalist for gaming site IGN would state shortly after an interview for Sword & Shield that there were four Japanese businessmen standing offscreen; all four needed to approve of a comment for it to be allowed to be made public.
  • One of the complaints made about Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Let's Go, Eevee! concerned how the title changed the dialogue of the old man outside of the Celadon City Gym so that he doesn't lecherously comment about the gym being full of girls, but instead of strong Trainers. The dialogue change was done first for Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, 8 years before.
  • Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl saw many fans point fingers at Game Freak for the various problems found in the titles. This is despite it having been announced from the start that Game Freak wasn't the developer for these remakes, with the job instead given to ILCA.
  • Many people immediately blame Ken Sugimori, the lead character designer and art director of the franchise, when discussing Pokémon designs they don’t like. This also works inversely, as he is also given praise for Pokémon he didn't design. In actuality, while he is responsible for approving creature designs as per his role of art director, there is a team of several artists that are involved in conceptualizing and designing the series' various monsters.
    • Many people blame artist James Turner for the numerous "object" Pokémon that have been in the series since Gen 5. While he is infamous for designing the Vanillite line during that generation, the only other objectmon he designed during his time at Game Freak was the Sinistea line in Gen 8, which was actually well-received.
  • Pokémon Scarlet and Violet:
    • After the game was released with a number of technical issues, many fans and critics blamed the hardware, stating the Switch was simply too weak to run the game. However, the Switch is host to several Wide-Open Sandbox games that are greater in scale and complexity, yet lack such problems, such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which was a launch title). The graphical issues were the result of poor optimization, theorized to be due to the game being Christmas Rushed.
    • Due to Hitoshi Ariga being a Pokémon designer who's previously worked on the Mega Man franchise, he's considered to be the creator of Armarouge and Ceruledge, whose designs reminded people of Mega Man characters. However, the only Gen IX Pokémon he's confirmed to have created are the Nacli line, Espathra, Flutter Mane, and Ogerpon. The creator of the two Pokémon was eventually revealed to be Tomohiro Kitakaze instead.
• Many people blame Shigeru Miyamoto for Star Fox Adventures being rushed and simplified compared to what was originally planned for Dinosaur Planet (Rare), as he supposedly told them to make it a Star Fox title at the last second. In reality, the suggestion didn't come that late into development, being done before the title had even shifted from the N64 to the GameCube. The actual reason the game was rushed and had so much planned content removed was because Microsoft began the process of buying out Rare during production, necessitating that they scrap more than a third of the game if they wanted to get it out before the purchase was finalized.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • It's widely and mistakenly thought that Nintendo of America refused to release Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels stateside solely due to the belief that Western players couldn't "handle" its high difficulty. While the brutal difficulty did play a role (with NoA president Howard Phillips personally citing it as such), the other reason for the change was because it was deemed to be little more than a Mission-Pack Sequel that would have looked outdated compared to other NES games at the time.
  • Miyamoto receives a lot of hate for the failings of the Mario RPGs since Paper Mario: Sticker Star, especially the Paper Mario games. While he did ask that Sticker Star not be a repeat of The Thousand Year Door and asked for as few original characters as possible and less story, that is the only major role he had. According to an Iwata Asks interview, Miyamoto even said the final version of Sticker Star was "boring". Everything else was the work of the creative team making the games. He was also not behind Color Splash using the same gameplay. Similarly, while Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam similarly utilizes few original characters, that was a decision made by the creative team so they could focus on the differences between the regular Mario & Luigi cast and their paper counterparts.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash got this bad. Being a direct sequel to the poorly-received Paper Mario: Sticker Star, it's often pointed to by fans as "evidence" that Nintendo is growing increasingly out of touch with their fanbase and that they didn't learn a thing from their mistakes. In reality, development on Color Splash started almost immediately after Sticker Star was released, so by the time the negative fan response started to roll in, it was too late to turn back. And even then, they made sure to fix some major complaints about the gameplay.
  • The version of Super Mario 64 included in the Nintendo Switch Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection is often blamed for doing things like patching the Backwards Long Jump glitch or removing the "So long gay Bowser" line. In reality, this is the result of the collection using a localization of the game's previously Japan-only 1997 re-release that added Rumble Pak support.
  • In regards to the Philips CD-i games, many assume that Animation Magic Inc., developers of Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, also created Hotel Mario due to all three games featuring similar so-bad-they're-good animated cutscenes. In reality, Animation Magic had nothing to do with Hotel Mario, which was developed in-house by Philips Fantasy Factory. Even the aforementioned cutscenes have clear stylistic differences between them that suggest they were made by different teams, with Hotel Mario featuring stiff Limited Animation while the Zelda titles are much more fluid and bizarre.
• The Moveset Clone characters in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U (Lucina, Dark Pit, and a returning Dr. Mario) were hated by some fans due to being seen as "slot thieves", implying that the work done getting these characters into the game could instead have been used to add other, more unique characters. Sakurai himself had to step in and clarify that adding a fighter with a unique moveset would have required significantly more work than adding three clone characters, and that when the initial roster was planned out, these characters were initially intended as mere alternate skins similar to Alph and the Koopalings, so if anything, these characters are responsible for adding more "character slots" to the game.
• Gunpei Yokoi, famous for creating and leading development on various pieces of Nintendo hardware, is solely blamed for Virtual Boy. However, many of the issues that people had with the system were things that Yokoi was aware of and wanted to fix; the system was Christmas Rushed to serve as a stop-gap between the SNES and Nintendo 64. Also, Yokoi's resignation wasn't because of the Virtual Boy's failure; he had actually planned to retire earlier, but postponed it precisely because he wanted to avoid it appearing as though he was fired. In fact, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi didn't want him to retire at all.
• Nintendo got mis-blamed in December of 2013 when an update by Google to YouTube's copyright algorithms caused videos to get unnecessary copyright claims from not just Nintendo, but other major gaming companies like Square Enix, Capcom, and Ubisoft, and even claims from non-gaming sources like Hasbro and Japanese record labels started to pop up. Why did Nintendo catch most of the blame for a YouTube problem? First documented cases of this problem occurring seemed to happen with video makers who specialized in Nintendo coverage, with the news that this was a wide spread issue across all of YouTube with many different companies not becoming as well known until later.
• At the height of the Wii's popularity, Nintendo was heavily blamed for "allowing" shovelware games to plague the console and how Nintendo should have been more restrictive with the games as they supposedly had done years back with the Nintendo Seal of Quality. In actuality, the Seal of Quality was never a assessment of how good a game was, even if marketing enjoyed giving that impression. It was just assurance that the game went under Q&A testing (i.e, was tested for bugs and glitches) and it runs well enough without the game crashing from a single button press or blowing up the console. Basically, that the software can manage to accomplish the bare minimum required of it. Most shovelware games fall into this category. Somehow, the developers of the shoddy games themselves rarely get blamed. Regardless, the confusion festered long enough for Nintendo to rebrand the seal simply as the "Nintendo Seal".
• Reggie Fils-Aime, former president of Nintendo of America, was blamed for things such as not improving the Wii's infrastructure, for withholding potentially good games for the Wii, and is also blamed for not releasing EarthBound (1994) on the Virtual Console, or Mother 3 at all outside of Japan. Reggie had no significant control over any of that, with such things being the final decision of Nintendo's Japanese headquarters. As for EarthBound's case, the reason it took until 2013 to be re-released outside Japan is because Nintendo simply believed there was no interest for the game outside a vocal minority.
• In the early production cycles of the Nintendo Switch, it was discovered that a lot of left Joy-Cons had a defect where it wouldn't calibrate properly and sometimes not work if something was in between it and the Switch if one plays it undocked. People were quick to blame Nintendo for making shoddy and cheap controllers, but it turned out to be a manufacturing error rather than a design flaw. Nintendo allowed people to send in their controllers for a replacement at no cost and they quickly corrected the source of the error.
• Nintendo inevitably gets blamed for whenever a game someone liked isn't yet on the Virtual Console or included as part of Nintendo Switch Online. While a valid criticism when concerning games that Nintendo owns the full rights to, when it comes to third-party titles, since Nintendo is neither the developer nor the publisher for such games (thus they do not hold the license), there is no guarantee that they can successfully get permission to put it on their system. This includes titles such as Super Mario RPG, where the rights for the game and its characters are split between Nintendo and other parties.
  • When it came to games that had no international release but are available on the Virtual Console, NES/SNES Mini or Nintendo Switch online in Japan, Nintendo also gets blamed for being "lazy". In order to give games an international release, they need to file new trademark(s), licensing, and receive a rating from the local rating(s) board, which means these titles are oft more expensive to add.
  • Nintendo, like others, also receives blame for being "lazy" and ignoring fan translation patches. Even if they were offered for free, companies are legally urged not to use the fan translation patch(es) because this can cause legal trouble for a variety of reasons.
• Whenever a Nintendo 64 game has less content than its PS1/PC version or a similar game on those systems, it's often blamed on N64 cartridges having a maximum ROM size of 64 MB, whereas CDs can hold up to 700 MB. Except only a small number of games were released on 64 MB cartridges, and they weren't produced until 1999-if anything, the problem would be that early N64 devs didn't even have 64 MB to work with. Doom 64, for example, had to cut a few Doom II enemies and utilize Limited Animation on first-person weapon sprites to fit into an 8 MB cartridge, while Doom II isn't even 16 MB, meaning a 64 MB cart would be more than enough room for the complete enemy roster and properly animated weapons.