On June 23, 2011, Mathieu Minel, at the time the marketing manager of Nintendo France, said that Nintendo of Europe wished to display Xenoblade at E3 2011, but that Nintendo of America (NOA) denied them since they had no plans to localize the game. 11 days later, Minel had departed from Nintendo. As a response, numerous role-playing game fans from the IGN message boards started a campaign titled "Operation Rainfall" with the intention of pressuring or persuading NOA to release Xenoblade, as well as two other high-quality RPGs that were left out of E3, namely The Last Story and Pandora's Tower.