Japanese Sales Charts

Japanese Sales Charts 1/30-2/5: Resident Evil: Revelations Tops Soul Calibur V in Slow Week

Three days was nearly enough time for Soul Calibur V to dethrone Resident Evil: Revelations atop the Japanese sales charts between January 30 and February 5. Released on February 2, Soul Calibur V sold 42,007 copies between the Playstation 3 and the X-Box 360.

Disclaimer: That’s a little like combining fans of Pocket Monsters and Monsters in My Pocket to end up with a million-billion, since the PS3 version—running just behind the 360 version in America—outsold its Microsoft counterpart in Japan by a factor of seven to one. It’s also down significantly from Soul Calibur IV’s first week, when it sold 74,607 and 34,786 from July 31 to August 3, 2008, despite a strong 37/40 score in Famitsu.

Elsewhere on the charts:

• Popping up out of nowhere as suddenly as a creepy fanboy with a hidden cameraphone is PhotoKano, which comes in at number three despite a full slate of games that aren’t about trying to get kawaii classmates to take their clothes off. Don’t expect an American release, or at least don’t expect an American release that doesn’t automatically register you in some kind of FBI database.
• Game Arts’s RPG Ragnarok Odyssey enters the charts at number four; a US release date still isn’t set, probably because you didn’t buy enough copies of Grandia 10 years ago. The Vita continues to fight its early reputation as an expensive flop—last week it beat the PSP in hardware sales for the first time in 2012.
• Mario Kart Wii’s continued presence on the weekly sales charts suggests that Japanese people buy no more than 20 unique games in any given week.

Here’s the full table:

	Game	Platform	Publisher	1/30-2/5	US Release
1	Resident Evil: Revelations	3DS	Capcom	43,575	2/7/2012
2	Soul Calibur V	PS3	Bandai Namco	34,328	1/31/2012
3	PhotoKano	PSP	Kadokawa Games	34,095	n/a
4	Ragnarok Odyssey	Vita	Game Arts	33,496	TBA
5	Armored Core V	PS3	From Software	30,775	3/20/2012
6	Mario Kart 7	3DS	Nintendo	26,791	12/4/2011
7	Monster Hunter Tri G	3DS	Capcom	24,128	n/a
8	Super Mario 3D Land	3DS	Nintendo	22,817	11/13/2011
9	Gran Turismo 5 Spec II	PS3	Sony	21,416	10/11/2011
10	Dragon Age II	PS3	Spike	19,928	3/8/2011
11	Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure	3DS	Sega	9,511	3/2012
12	Monster Hunter Frontier Online: Forward .3 Premium Pack	360	Capcom	9,047	n/a
13	Inazuma Eleven Go: Shine/Dark	3DS	Level 5	8,960	n/a
14	Tales of Innocence R	Vita	Bandai Namco	8,397	n/a
15	Just Dance Wii	Wii	Nintendo	7,851	11/17/2009
16	Soul Calibur V	360	Bandai Namco	7,679	1/31/2012
17	Monster Hunter Portable 3rd	PSP	Capcom	6,875	n/a
18	Wii Sports Resort (With Wii Remote Plus)	Wii	Nintendo	5,635	7/26/2009
19	Final Fantasy XIII-2	PS3	Square Enix	5,336	1/31/2012
20	Mario Kart Wii	Wii	Nintendo	5,068	4/27/2008

PhotoKano: One Step Forward for Graphics, One Giant Leap Backward for Practical Social Skills

“Falling in love with you on the other side of the viewfinder.”

Western audiences might have their own ideas of what’s considered mainstream gaming, but the line gets blurred in Japan, where dating sims and eroge have prime-time TV commercials and posters inside public transportation. That PhotoKano made it to third place in the week’s sales in only three days demonstrates how much value Kawaii High School Girl (KHSG) has retained within the Nikkei Gaming Trope Index over the last economic slump.

There’s an obligatory adorable-younger-sister-in-love-with-older-brother—featured in the first minute of the video—that Japan’s amateur photographers may start out with as practice subject in their quest to win over the girl of their collective dreams. The protagonist is a high school junior who joins the photography club and gets closer with his various female classmates in order to coax them into new poses and cosplays. There are two directions you can choose between in the game: Love Mode, for cuter and fluffier scenes, or Happy Mode, for getting as risqué a shot as you can manage. The game also features rhythm-based mini games for perfectly timed shots. So there’s that.

There was a promotional event in Tokyo on December 28th—held on a Wednesday from 9 AM to 5 PM, forcing students and salarymen alike to make a very important decision. The event featured three of the voice actresses who talked about the ocean-deep depths of their characters, played the game on an overhead screen, and recited lines from a few lucky winners who mailed in things they would most like to hear from a girl. (“Oh, big brother, I’m so cold!” read one winner. “Come over here and warm me up. Pleeeease!”)

Somewhere between Love Mode and Happy Mode.

Tales of Innocence R Adds Vita, Costumes, Subtracts Hope For American Release

The “Tales” series has long had a tumultuous relationship with North America. Sometimes they go on a date and have a good time and it seems like everything’s going well, but then the next day North America keeps letting its phone go to voicemail.

The 2007 DS version of Tales of Innocence never made it abroad, prompting a complete fan translation. This time around, Namco announced the Vita remake of the game five months before its January release and, again, said nothing about the English-speaking market. The game sold 63,250 copies in its first week of release, and Namco’s already lined up some DLC to keep the yen rolling in.

The latest downloads offer wardrobe changes for the entire cast, each with a delightfully irrelevant theme. The add-ons generally run about 300 yen ($3.80 USD).

Schoolchildren Theme

Bedhead Theme

Previous Life Theme

The Vita version offers a complete graphical revamp, but there was more on offer to push it up to 14th in the Media Create charts–J-pop star KOKIA, who sang the theme songs for the DS version, was called back in for a new theme song and video. There is also a new character, Kyu-Kyu, who’s thus-far earning lukewarm reviews from 2channers, who find her lacking in the cute department.

Here’s a look at the DS graphics vs. the revamped Vita version:

So take heart, American Tales fans: The characters you’ve heretofore been unable to buy are now unavailable to you in a variety of costumes across multiple platforms.

Weekly Famitsu – September 16, 1994

This week’s issue covers the MOTHER 2 Pre-release Party attended by all staff involved in the game. This time the article is not an interview, but a description of the event.

Weekly Famitsu – September 9, 1994

This week’s issue introduces the MOTHER 2 Times: a weekly section in the magazine that ran for eight consecutive weeks. Its main feature was the walkthrough, but also included such things as interviews, comics, and behind-the-scenes peeks. I don’t plan on including the game walkthroughs, but I’ll continue to post any particularly interesting sections.

This week’s issue highlights an interview with the two main programmers for MOTHER 2, Kouji Malta from APE and Satoru Iwata from HAL.

EDIT 2/14/2012: I’ve fixed a mistranslation about “freedom”, which refers to post-programming putzing, not post-ending gameplay (see left of Iwata’s photo). A big thank you to Ice Sage for pointing it out!

MOTHER 1 Review by Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri

In the late 1980′s, before founding Game Freak and hitting the jackpot with his sensational product of grueling labor, Satoshi Tajiri was a freelance writer for gaming magazine Famicom Hisshou Hon. He ran a column in the magazine and covered the newly-released MOTHER in its October 20, 1989 issue. His review offers some interesting criticisms of the game.

Status Update

Just a quick note that while most of my NaNoTraMo translations are done (all old magazine interviews about the MOTHER series), I’m going to hold off on posting them until I follow through with a lead I have on magazine scans. It’d be better to post the interviews along with article pictures from the beginning, instead of editing it after everyone has already read the article and tucked it away.

 

In the meantime, it’s always a pleasant treat when Itoi’s interviews and works are already translated into English. Here’s a blog entry of an American marketing professional who recently interviewed Itoi via mail. There’s some interesting insight into how Itoi chooses to run his company and website.

Shigesato Itoi’s Office Tour

This week, Japanese celebrity photo journalist Yoichi Watanabe visited Itoi’s Hobo Nichi headquarters for an interview. Watanabe is famous for his relaxing speaking style and… well, for being a photo journalist in a country where people become mainstream celebrities for being a specialist in a field and wearing the same outfit all the time.

One of the main activities of Itoi’s company is celebrity interviews. There’s an endless list of people Itoi has interviewed in his office, but this time it’s especially interesting because we are treated to an in-depth tour of Itoi’s Tokyo office with Watanabe in full Photo-Journalist Mode.

You can see the gorgeous and unorthodox layout of the winding hallways, all-wood interior design (complete with natural fresh wood scent), and the office chock-full of oversized Macs. These are all extremely rare in a country full of outdated Windows computers still equipped with floppy drives and interior decorating that looks like a run-down hospital full of men in stuffy business suits.

Halfway through the video you even get to see Itoi’s personal office! There are mini figurines of his dog Buillon, a Mr. Saturn plushie, a trophy from a fishing tournament he won a long time ago, and a fossilized dinosaur egg. Watanabe paused at Itoi’s desk for a minute because he was moved at how the flashlight on the desk was the same heavy-duty kind they used in Afghanistan.

Incognito Saturn gets his own incognito nook!

Weekly Famitsu – January 31, 1997

[No images available. Please contact me if you have information on this issue.]

This is a dialogue showcased in a section featured once every few months in Weekly Famitsu. One of the editors, Yasuhiro Nagata, conducted several interviews with Itoi during his time with the magazine. Nagata later went into freelancing for a few years before eventually working for Itoi’s company, where he is now.

This dialogue is different from other interviews in that it has a very casual tone to it and is less focused on the nitty gritty. It feels more like you’re eavesdropping on three Japanese men at the bar who just happen to be talking about Nintendo 64 games.

Let the wackiness begin!

The 64DREAM – November 1996

[No images available. Please contact me if you have information on this issue.]

This is the first ever official issue of The 64DREAM (currently “Nindori”), but Volume #2 after an initial unofficial release in June. It treats us with a treasure trove of juicy insights into the creation of MOTHER 3 for the Nintendo 64. Itoi’s team had an impressive amount of the game finished even by 1996, which really accentuates the troubles they went through and how looong it had dragged on.  It’s amazing to think about how the project was scrapped even after taking years and years of their time!

In interviews and statements over the past five years or so, it seems clear that Itoi thoroughly enjoyed his game-making experiences but sees it as a closed chapter of his life. We can see this in interviews like this one from 2009.

Itoi: [...] Games demand many more lines of dialogue despite the fact that the main characters don’t talk, so I couldn’t keep making them. That’s why I felt deep down after making three of them, “Well, that was a neat experience.”

Shiraiwa: So you’re done with them?

Itoi: Yes, that’s right.

In the nineties, however, when Itoi was at the height of his video game endeavors, it was clear in interviews at the time that he was so passionate about making video games, he’d be brewing with ideas for new ones before his current game was even close to completion. (Earthbound 64 had been the same way; he was well into the brainstorming stage by the time they were still putting together the puzzle pieces of Earthbound programming.)

The fact that this interview takes place in the early stages of MOTHER 3 development means the game was still in the process of being programmed for the Nintendo 64DD.

Interesting points in the article include:

• Itoi’s aversion to assigning “themes” to video games
• Itoi’s original intent to make MOTHER 3 in 2-D
• The extent of completion of MOTHER 3 even by the fall of 1996
• Itoi’s inspiration for the story of MOTHER 3 and desire to make a detective novel in game form
• A Mr. Saturn spinoff game!?
• Itoi’s phone calls to his game designer about MOTHER 3 in the middle of the night–before MOTHER 2 was even done
• The origin of the name of the Nintendo 64
• Itoi’s personal relationship with Nintendo

On to the good stuff!

Hippon Super! – November 3, 1994

Hippon Super is a gaming magazine with a slightly different tone than that of the more mainstream Weekly Famitsu. There are a couple adult games featured in the magazine, and even the interview with Shigesato Itoi has a different tone than usual. There isn’t much new information in this interview, but there are some really bizarre metaphors and confusing meta-speak.

I remember Itoi mentioning in another interview how he was careful with all the details, right down to the pauses in the script and text scrolling. In this interview, he states that the sound guy was so particular that he even had a fit about those small details. Perhaps Itoi wasn’t the only one polishing it up after all…?

This interview takes places soon after the release of MOTHER 2 and two months after the informative Weekly Famitsu interview.

NaNoTraMo 2011

As someone who has all the inklings potential writers do regarding ideas floating around my head, I know I need to just jump onto them with a violent tackle and tame them onto paper. Floating isn’t doing anyone any good.

I tried to do NaNoWriMo last year, but only made it about a fourth of the way through and ran dry of ideas. Really dry. A barren desert of formless potential.

So my original story is back on the shelf. (Literally. I write better in notebooks.) I’ve always loved writing. I hear the cliched–but true–phrase being thrown around by artists that they’ve been drawing every since they could hold a pencil. Well I can apply that to my story-writing. I’ve been making stories ever since I could hold a pencil. (I didn’t use a pencil, I just, you know, had developed the motor skills to hold a pencil by that point.) I used to read stories to my younger sister, but she was two years younger than me and couldn’t read yet so I ignored all the words on the page and would make up stories to go with the pictures. She was none the wiser, but once she could read she’d yell at me to stick to the story on the pages. Then at night I’d recite stories aloud off the top of my head, but a few years later that got old to her too and I lost my audience. That’s about the time we got some ghetto IBM with a blue screen and white text and I dove into the new world of word processors. Which is unfortunate, because I have no record of any story I’d made/written in my active 15 year time span of a flourishing storytelling childhood.

But despite my vaguely antisocial self growing up completely engrossed in storytelling, once I hit college I stopped writing, and started studying Japanese. I completely lost my ability to come up with new, fresh material, and my bubbling imagination seemed to entirely fizzle out. Even now it’s incredibly vexing, but once I got into fiction translation, I rediscovered the passion I had for writing. Even if I lost my fountain of ideas, translating fiction is extremely difficult. Well, anyone with language ability can translate fiction; it takes a true writer to translate fiction well. To make it sound like it’s always been in English, and yet keep the nuances that the original novel based its story development on. Every novel translation is riddled with fine lines, and there’s something thrilling about walking that tightrope.

Recently, my translation projects have been collecting dust because I’ve been preoccupied with working towards publication. (As an end goal, I need to make sure not to lose sight of this while treading water in all my beloved volunteer projects.) This also includes the reason that I will not be posting my Shigesato Itoi short-shorts online, but details on this will come to light when all is said and done.

So with all my previous projects starting to face neglect, I’ve decided to go back to NaNoWriMo. But I beat up the novel-writing, punched it out big time, kicked its butt, bit its head off, spit in its eyes, and made it wet its pants. Then I replaced it with translation.

I’m sure that come 2012 I’ll have a full-on novel to devote to my newly-formed NaNoTraMo (National Novel Translating Month), but seeing as I already have a pile of things in my personal In-Box, I’m going to spend this November cleaning house.

So my plan is to finish the entirety of Let’s Meet in a Dream once and for all. But there are limitations to what I can post online from this, and surely it doesn’t fit NaNoWriMo’s 50,000 word count goal. So after that I’m going to turn to non-novels and focus on the collection of Shigesato Itoi interviews in gaming magazines; there are quite a lot. I’m a collector at heart, but I don’t actually collect anything; recently however I’ve found myself scavenging Japanese Geocities websites from 1997 and going to used bookstores to find old Japanese gaming magazines from the mid-90′s. I’ve got a good collection gathered, but now my queue of interview translations is pretty big. So now is the time to finally sit down and churn out English versions to post online.

I’m not good at word counts and I don’t know what 50,000 words is going to mean for any of this, but at least I have a goal thanks to the heart of the NaNoWriMo concept. Let’s see where this ends up in a month.