Nintendo
Nintendo is a multinational company that publishes games in The Legendary Starfy series. Nintendo have also co-developed games in the series with TOSE and shares half of the copyright to the series. Nintendo of Japan and Shogakukan have also officially produced a manga for The Legendary Starfy franchise and a follow-up series known as Densetsu no Starfy R, based on the events of Densetsu no Starfy 4. They have promoted various merchandise for the series including pencil, playing cards and plush toys.
Localization of The Legendary Starfy overseas
Although there are currently 5 games in the series, The Legendary Starfy (Densetsu no Starfy Taiketsu! Daiiru Kaizokudan in Japan); the fifth game in the series is the only game to have been localized outside of Japan.
Nintendo of America officially localized The Legendary Starfy and released the game on June 8 2008, just over a year from the Japanese release and one day earlier than scheduled. Nintendo of Australia later released and produced the game in Australasia in October 2009, although currently no other branches of Nintendo have localized the game elsewhere.
Nintendo of America appear to have no plans of localizing past games in the series. In a 2009 conference call between Nintendo and six developers of The Legendary Starfy, producer Hitoshi Yamagami joked that the reason why Starfy took so long to debut in the US was that he 'was swimming all the way from Japan' and explained that the series was always developed for a Japanese audience. The developers stated that they always wanted to bring Starfy to the US, but that Nintendo of America deemed the games 'too Japanese' for American audiences. [1] There were various localization changes in the fifth game, where for example the manga style cutscenes in Densetsu no Starfy Taiketsu! Daiiru Kaizokudan were changed and made to read from left to right instead of right to left.
