Japan video game sales charts – February 27th – March 4th
After a hiatus, the Japanese video game sales charts return. In this latest installment, One Piece is pirate king of video games, Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy continues to be a nice success for Square Enix and Tales of the Heroes: Twin Brave can’t sustain it’s momentum.
One Piece has been big in Japan for many years. While it’s starting to get its (quite frankly deserved) recognition in the west, One Piece has become such a huge part of the land of the rising sun that it’s even had theme park attractions in it’s name (including a replica of the Thousand Sunny).Point being, Seeing One Piece: Pirate Warriors, the latest One Piece game from Namco Bandai, reach #1 in the Japanese software charts is not surprising. But to see it reach over half a million is a bit of an eye opener.
For One Piece: Pirate Warriors to reach just over 655,000 sales in a few days is sure to make Namco Bandai put on their straw hats and celebrate with a big feast…or however businessmen, publishers and developers celebrate. Next week will be interesting to see whenever it will have a weekly sales that is six figures or five. The praise that Famitsu gave it (36/40) and the popularity of One Piece should see it continue an impressive run.
No other game on the charts has come anywhere close to what One Piece: Pirate Warriors achieved, which is not surprising (and it’s quite sad saying that). Though Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games debuted at the #2 spot, it only sold 43,155 copies. Other debuts didn’t sell any better, with Great Battle Full Blast selling 24,289 copies, Doraemon: Nobita no Kiseki no Shima selling 12,228 copies and UFC Undisputed 3 (PS3) selling a paltry 6,198 copies, though that’s not too surprising and it may have been boosted by the recent UFC 144 event that was held in Japan.In fact, it is quite surprising that Great Battle Full Blast didn’t do any better, since it’s a game that features Gundam, Kamen Rider and Ultraman, three iconic heroes from franchises of the same name.
Biggest climbers were Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy climbing up ten places to #5, Monster Hunter Portable 3rd (PSP the Best), re-entering (again) the top 20 at #18 by climbing up seven places and Just Dance Wii (another re-entry) going up five places to #16. Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy seems to be doing well and it’s drop last week seem to be more to do with stock issues then anything else, as this week shows.
The biggest fall belong to Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Portable, going down 15 places to #19. Asura’s Wrath also dropped seven places to #12. The most disappointing drop however belongs to Tales of the Heroes: Twin Brave, dropping from the top spot down to #10 (it only avoided #11 spot by 139 copies!). Apparently Tales of the Heroes: Twin Brave didn’t sell as much as expected in its first week and the huge drop apparently indicated a lack of interest in this Tales game (it’s more of a Dynasty Warriors type of game then the traditional tales RPG).
Capcom, Namco Bandai and Nintendo all tied with most games in charts at four each. System wise PlayStation 3 has six games, PSP has five games, Nintendo 3DS has eight and Nintenedo Wii has just the one.
