Japan Shuns The Wonderful 101, 3DS Domination Broken According to Major Retailer’s Weekly Sales Charts

Giuseppe Nelva August 26, 2013 12:44 AM EST

The Wonderful 101 is one of the exclusive titles Nintendo has been counting on to push sales of the Wii U, but according to the weekly sales charts just released by major retailer Tsutaya, Platinum Games’ new title might have failed quite badly to perform, at least in Japan.

Tsutaya’s charts are looked at by many as a quite precise indication of what the more “official” Media Create charts will look like on Wednesday, thanks to the fact that the retailer has a very high number of stores spread across the whole country.

Here’s how the top 20 chart about the week going from August the 19th to August the 25th looks like (new releases are bolded):

Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Maso Kishin III: Pride of Justice – PS3 Conception II – PS Vita Disney Magic Castle: My Happy Life – 3DS Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Maso Kishin III: Pride of Justice – PS Vita Mario & Luigi: Dream Team – 3DS Youkai Watch – 3DS Tomodachi Collection: New Life – 3DS Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara – PS3 Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies – 3DS Earth Defense Force 4 – PS3 Conception II – 3DS Dragon’s Crown – PS3 Fantasy Life Link! – 3DS Animal Crossing: New Leaf – 3DS Pikmin 3 – Wii U The Wonderful 101 – Wii U One Piece: Romance Dawn – 3DS Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc – PSP Toukiden – PSP The Last of Us – PS3

The Wonderful 101 failed to make the top ten in its debut week, ranking only 16th and beaten even by Pikmin 3 that has already been out for several weeks. In its behalf the game can count on sales only from Saturday and Sunday, but most of a game’s sales in Japan are normally focused around its launch day and its first weekend, so some kind of resurgence next week is highly improbable.

To provide a term of comparison, Killer is Dead, that debuted rather disastrously as well in Japan, ranked 7th in Tsutaya’s charts in its first week, and ended up selling only 17,709 units on the Media Create charts. It’s very likely that The Wonderful 101 will appear on the Media Create charts with numbers even worse than that.

On the other hand, after two weeks of complete domination of 3DS games, the trend has been broken by some new PlayStation releases, with Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Maso Kishin III: Pride of Justice for PS3 and PS Vita grabbing first and fourth places, respectively, while Conception II defies the 3DS’s massive installed base by selling quite a lot more on PS Vita. The peculiar baby-making JRPG ranked a very respectful 2nd place on Sony’s portable, while the 3DS version didn’t make the top 10, falling in 11th.

Platinum Games fans might hold some faint hope on the possibility that word of mouth and a full seven days of sales may revive The Wonderful 101on next week’s charts, but considering how the Japanese video game market works, it’s very unlikely, and Nintendo will probably have to count on the western market to achieve better sales for Hideki Kamiya’s latest brainchild.

Of course Kamiya-san doesn’t seem to care about sales, and in this case that’s probably a good thing.