Japan gets its first League of Legends trailer, and it’s not looking great

Riot Games Tokyo, set up earlier this year, has released its debut trailer for the Japanese League of Legends audience. It’s one of the first attempts to really get eSports going in a country that, despite dominating the global gaming landscape for years, has never really seemed interested. We’ve embedded the trailer below.

[fve]http://youtu.be/e9hmWMiCmzQ[/fve]

After watching the trailer, though, I can’t say it looks as professional as I’d hoped. Dubbing over an English trailer, not translating any of the in-game content (what’s the point of showing in-game menus in a language the audience doesn’t understand?), not focusing on region-specific interests like attractive (male and female) champions…it comes across as lazy.

For the Chinese version of the game, the company reworked much of the in-game art to suit local tastes, but for Japan they didn’t even remove the English voice-over, so you can still hear it under the Japanese dub.

Is Riot not taking Japan seriously enough as a market? Given the challenge of selling the region on a whole new kind of game experience, you’d hope they’d try harder than this.

Here’s how other Asian countries are doing in LoL: