Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem

[A Black Falcon]

http://kotaku.com/from-japan-with-change...1747960323

This is a pretty good, and good-length, article on this subject. It's definitely worth reading the whole thing!

The lack of dark skinned Nintendo characters does factor into things. A lot of people ask "why doesn't Nintendo make Japanese characters?" but that's really a matter of artistic style. Japanese people, from what I understand, see Link and Zelda as Japanese.

Well, they probably are supposed to be European, but yeah, it is a bit vague there -- ever since OoT the series has put lots of Japanese cultural elements into the games, after all. And also, in anime-0style art Asian and Caucasian people usually have the same exact skin colors, something you see in almost all anime. The white people are the same color as the Japanese ones, just with ubiquitous blond hair, because all Caucasians are blonde, right? :) So yeah, I can see seeing Link and Zelda as Japanese. Mario & co. certainly aren't, though. All Mario characters are white Caucasians or fantasy creatures, and Nintendo's one major black character is Ganondorf. A villain, of course.

This lends itself to the singular fact that Japan is actually more culturally xenophobic than even us Americans.

Japan is 99-point-something one race, so it's not too hard to see why they would be xenophobic... the less diverse a culture is, the more likely it is to be xenophobic, I think. But yes, this is quite true, they are. It's bad in America, but even worse in Japan or South Korea. As a white person in a ~95% white state, though, I can kind of understand it... it's easy to dislike things you do not know. Racism in this state is usually less overt than other ones, but that's probably mostly just because of how few nonwhite people there are... and even with white people, the stereotype is that you can never really become a Mainer even if you've lived here for decades, if you were originally "from away" (ie born somewhere else)...

As for Disney, I don't mind them changing the names of the stories, but if they really think that black characters won't sell because of The Princess and the Frog, then that is an unfortunate and surely inaccurate lesson.