This Week In Sales: Japan Invaded By Heavy Rains And Resident Evils

The week of February 15 – 21 saw the release of two fairly high-profile games. Resident Evil 5: Alternate Edition debuted at the top of the charts, knocking God Eater down to the #2 position. Meanwhile, Heavy Rain sold a somewhat respectable 26,775 units. Dante’s Inferno, on the other hand, only managed a measly 4,800 (approx.) units.

While it’s not on the top-ten charts, it appears Taiko no Tatsujin Wii: Do Don to 2 Daime has reached approximately 290,000 units, since its release back in November. That’s a fairly significant number and explains the taiko-less re-release of the first Taiko no Tatsujin.

The top-ten ranking for the week of Feb 15 – 21 is as follows. More hidden sales tidbits after the chart:

For those that are curious, Zangeki no Reginleiv is up to about 30,000 units now. In an interesting twist, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks’s price drop seems to be keeping it on the charts every week — it’s up to around 528,000 units so far. That’s about half of what Phantom Hourglass sold. Perhaps it’s time to go back to the drawing board if Nintendo intended for the "Celda" style to appeal to the Japanese market?

Meanwhile, Dynasty Warriors Online on PS3 debuted rather abysmally, in the range of 8,000 units.

Portables appear to generate the most revenue for Square Enix as Birth by Sleep continues to consistently sell a few thousand units every week. It’s up to around 775,000 units now. While it probably won’t hit a million, one also needs to take into account that Kingdom Hearts traditionally performs very well in the west, and the fact that it’s on PSP probably means production costs were very reasonable. By comparison, 358/2 Days has sold around 522,260 units to date, according to Enterbrain data.

Given the success of 358/2 Days and Birth by Sleep, one wouldn’t be surprised in the least to see more portable entries in the franchise going forward, especially in light of recent comments on spin-off games by Tetsuya Nomura.