>To be sure, there were Americans who found all of the barriers to entry into these deeply foreign worlds to be more bracing than intimidating, who took on the challenge of meeting the games on their own terms, often emerging with a lifelong passion for all things Japanese. At this stage, though, they were the distinct minority. In Japan and the United States alike, the conventional wisdom through the mid-1990s was that JRPGs didn’t and couldn’t sell well overseas; this was regarded as a fact of life as fundamental as the vagaries of climate. (Thanks to this belief, none of the Final Fantasy games to date had been released in Europe at all.) It would take Final Fantasy VII and a dramatic, controversial switch of platforms on the part of Square to change that. But once those things happened… look out. The JRPG would conquer the world yet.

That, and a weird indie project Nintendo had published focused around multiplayer battling and trading called... Pocket Monsters. You may know it as Pokemon.

Pokemon itself was co-developed by two different companies: Game Freak (an indie videogame 'zine turned game developer) and Creatures, a company created from the smoldering ashes of APE, Shigesato Itoi's game development firm that had made a little game called EarthBound. EarthBound was lovingly[0] translated by Nintendo, because it had already taken Japan by storm, it was very well written, and most notably, it was hilariously American[1].

Unfortunately it sold horribly, because Nintendo had made some pretty terrible marketing decisions. First off, the tagline for the game in the US was "This game stinks", because someone at Nintendo wanted to ride the wave of early 90s Nickelodeon gross-out cartoons. EarthBound is not at all like Ren and Stimpy[2]. Second, Nintendo decided to sell the game alongside a strategy guide, which while cool, increased the cost of the game. To make matters even worse, this wasn't even the first time Nintendo had considered doing this. EarthBound is actually a sequel to a game on the NES that Nintendo had fully translated, and then cancelled at the last minute due to worries about production cost. Why? The NES version of EarthBound[3] would have also shipped with a strategy guide, because Nintendo was hellbent on patronizing American players.

Possibly because of this, Nintendo held back on releasing Pokemon for like three years. It didn't even sell well in Japan initially, but some rumors about unobtainable Pokemon that you could glitch the game to get[4] and an animated cartoon based on the game helped it out. The cartoon got licensed to 4Kids in America before the games even got released here, and it did wonders to sell people on the game[5]. What really helped is that the cartoon would actually teach you some of the more obtuse mechanics of Pokemon. No need to give someone the strategy guide if they already know that Eevee plus fire stone equals Flareon.

[0] Minus a handful of annoying content edits for the US market which don't really impact the story

[1] As in, the game was written from the perspective of American kids in a modern-day suburban environment. Also, it was hilarious.

[2] To be fair, there is one section of the game that has you literally fighting a giant pile of vomit. All the marketing focused around just that.

[3] Nintendo now calls this EarthBound Beginnings in the US, because they released their translated ROM on Wii U Virtual Console and later Nintendo Switch Online. It is quite possibly the only NES RPG worth playing today.

[4] Mew

[5] And also gave 4Kids false confidence that they could license any cartoon made for young adults, edit it down for small children, and make bank. This would later bury the company in production cost as they spent way too much money photoshopping out all the guns and text from Yu-Gi-Oh! and One Piece to make it 'kid friendly'.