AC3's Official Localization: The Post-Mortem

Not all Japanese games are brought over to the West. It could be for any reason: because the publisher has no idea how, or doesn't want, to market the game overseas, the game being deemed unprofitable, high localization costs and sometimes it's just plain bad timing.

There are a variety of reasons and combinations of factors that can make a game remain Japan-only, letting it fade into obscurity. As it turns out, there was actually a legitimate reason for Namco Hometek's cutting of AC3's story and characters even though the game had always been meant to receive a proper English release.

This post contains all information that I could find about the localization that AC3 was supposed to get but never actually got. I hope the information contained here will give fans a clearer view on the history of AC3 and why the american and european editions ended up the way they did.

Hidden extra "bonus options" menu screen

Our resident digital treasure hunter Fabian has found even more things hidden inside AC3's files. In this post you'll see the music player and movie player that we can normally access only with the AppenDisc and a model viewer that was completely left out of both the game disc and the AppenDisc but seems to be functional from what our AC3 scholar says.