This Week In Sales: Role-playing Games For All!

It looks like everyone chose to release everything the week of January 24th – 30th. Okay, maybe not everything, but you’ll recognize a lot of names on this week’s top-20 software sales list. Naturally, some of these games fared better than others. Let’s take a look.

Mistwalker and Nintendo’s The Last Story led the new release charge at the #1 spot with 114,722 units sold in three days. The closest comparison we’d make is the PlayStation 3 version of Resonance of Fate — also an entirely new franchise — which debuted at 118,000 units back in Jan 2010.

Certainly not a bad number, but when you consider the talent associated with The Last Story, one would have hoped to see a bigger release. Thankfully, The Last Story’s debut numbers are a slight improvement over Nintendo’s last RPG, Xenoblade, which moved around 83,000 copies during its own launch. Next week’s numbers should give us a better idea of what to expect of the game.

At #2 was Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles 3 at 102,779 units. Something to note is that Valkyria 3 is exhibiting the best debut numbers in the series yet. The original Valkyria Chronicles opened at 77,000 units while Valkyria 2 debuted at 94,000 units.

Following Valkyria 3 were My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute, Kenka Bancho 5 and A Certain Magical Index, all on the PSP. #5 saw the release of another high-profile role-playing game, Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins, published in Japan by Spike.

The next batch of new releases that caught our attention were Tsuku Monogatari and GalGun, at #12 and #13 respectively. Tsuku Monogatari, which is developed by Lux-Pain developer, Killaware, in particular seemed interesting to us, and we covered it on the day of its Japanese release.

Games that failed to crack the top-20 included: Mindjack, Scribblenauts and the Sly Cooper Collection. The top-20 software sales list for the week was as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media-Create.