Super Robot Wars Ignites Busy Japanese Charts

After weeks of seasonally low sales, the Japanese sales charts has burst into full life, with even titles at the bottom of the top ten selling around 30,000 units each. The top selling title, though, is a PlayStation 2 remake of the two Super Robot Wars: Original Generations games first released on the Game Boy Advance, with an impressive 345,600 units sold. As with other titles in the franchise, which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year, it is a strategy role-playing title featuring different robots from series as varied as Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion. On a less busy week, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the Nintendo DS would have retained its number one spot, with still impressive sales of 136,586 units. As it is, this marks one of Nintendo’s less dominant weeks in the charts, with just four first party titles in the top ten. The second highest new entry of the week is what is known in the West as Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters for the PSP. As with previous games in the series though, and following the lead taken with Crash Bandicoot, Sony Japan has redesigned the character of Ratchet to be more appealing to a Japanese audience. The title has also been renamed to become part of the core, numbered series, with the changes resulting in first week sales of 38,682 units – making it the only PSP title in the top thirty. The next highest entry is the two versions of Tales of Fandom Vol. 2, which, like the core Pokemon games, feature a slightly different range of characters in each. The game is a spin-off from Namco’s Tales role-playing game franchise and includes a number of games featuring characters from various different iterations of the franchise, including Phantasia, Symphonia and Abyss. Enjoying a fairly modest debut at number nine is what will be known in the West as Wii exclusive Donkey Kong Jet. Originally announced as DK Bongo Blast on the GameCube, the game has not so far proved a significant hit, with just 30,137 unit sales. The final new entry of the week, at number ten, is a new Nintendo DS English language training game from publisher Benesee, also with approximately 29,910 unit sales. The company’s other new Nintendo DS release, which roughly translates as Reading Training, is at number thirteen. Other new releases of note in the rest of the top thirty including lone PlayStation 3 game Rainbow Six: Vegas at number nineteen and the first iteration in Marvelous Interactive’s Legend of the River King series on Nintendo DS at number twenty-four.

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