B2G1 Wii Operation Rainfall At Gamestop?

Gamestop Operation Rainfall B2G1 Sale

Over the last week, Gamestop has been making headlines revolving around Xenoblade Chronicles. Seemingly out of nowhere, Gamestop claimed that they magically found a secret cache of elusive copies of this highly collectable and rare game. Some are guessing Gamestop just reprinted a few thousand discs, calling them used, and are now charging a premium. Or perhaps they did horde these games in a secret warehouse somewhere given the exclusivity of Gamestop being the sole retailer of the game outside of a couple online marketplaces.

But what about the other two games of Operation Rainfall?

Pandora’s Tower just dropped in price right in the thick of this Xenoblade drama. Now retailing for $20, this game received a $10 price break while The Last Story still retails for $30 if are lucky enough to find a new copy sitting on a shelf. It is unknown if this $10 price drop was intentional, building off the media spark of Xenoblade, or if Gamestop just wants to start liquidating their copies of this Wii exclusive. Either way, the timing is impeccable.

Over the last couple years, I have been documenting my unique gaming deals. Gamestop is no stranger to firesales and they are currently running a pretty sweet promotion on used Wii games – Buy 2 Get 1 Free. With the mountains of shovelware on the Wii, this deal normally wouldn’t really receive much attention but since I missed out on the initial release of the Operation Rainfall games I thought I would do a little research.

Using the “see if it is in stock” option on Gamestop’s website, I actually found a location that had BOTH used copies of The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower in stock. Although I would really like to play XC, I couldn’t justify spending $90 for a used copy so I turned my attention to these other two games.

After traveling several miles out of my way, I was excited and surprised to see both PT and LS in near perfect condition, complete with case and instruction manual. Unlike XC, these two games are not a part of the Club Nintendo program so missing that paper insert didn’t mean anything. So now I got the two games that I wanted in the condition that I wanted them in. My problem now, however, was finding a 3^rd game that was similarly priced to take advantage of the B2G1 sale.

Bit Trip with Pandora and Last Story. A decent B2G1 deal.

I was really hoping to find a used copy of Kirby: Return to Dreamland to embark on some co-op-ey-ness but they did not have a used copy. I was considering buying a used copy of Wii Play instead but the higher price pointed me away. Fortune Street and Chocobo’s Dungeon would have been cool Wii exclusives to own but those were not available either. The same goes for Little King Story and the Mario Party games. See, herein lies the problem with these Gamestop sales – you are limited to the random stock of each store. It would much better if I could buy one game from three different locations to earn the B2G1 sale. Sure, I could buy all these games online but then you run the risk of just being shipped the disc in a generic Gamestop case and I don’t roll like that. I need the case and instructions. Like many other game collectors and completionists, it is the biggest complaint about Gamestop; all games are guaranteed to work but you never know if they will arrive naked or complete in the box. And with the collectability of these Rainfall games, I would not buy them unless they were complete.

After searching through the double sided multi-racked shelf, I decided to go with the Bit Trip Saga. I have been looking to pick up this compilation for a while and even came with the soundtrack CD. Score.

Buy 2 Get 1 Free with two of the three Operation Rainfall games?! Not bad. But wait, it gets better. Besides getting my usual 10% off with my PowerUp Rewards card, I also scored an additional 20% because GS was nice enough to send me a “get 20% off coupon” for my birthday.

Here is a price breakdown of my final order:

– Pandora’s Tower – $17.09

– Last Story – $20.15

– Bit Trip Saga – $0.00

Grand Total = $37.24

Then at the end of the transaction, I was given a coupon for an extra 50% Trade-In Bonus from August 19^th through September 15^th. I will be coming back and taking advantage of this situation. Do I really need that extra copy Zumba Fitness taking up shelf space? No, no I do not.