Note: Charts will be updated with more figures when they become available.

Software

Media Create

Updated every Thursday, full chart viewable here.

Enterbrain*

Updated every Wednesday, chart in Japanese viewable here.

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.

Amazon Japan

Amazon Japan chart is updated hourly, the latest chart can be viewed here.

Hardware

Enterbrain*

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.

Note: Charts will be updated with more figures when they become available.

Software

Media Create

Updated every Thursday, full chart viewable here.

MediaWorks

Updated every Friday, chart in Japanese viewable and here (Top 10) and here (Top 20).

Enterbrain*

Updated every Wednesday, chart in Japanese viewable here.

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.

Amazon Japan

Amazon Japan chart is updated hourly, the latest chart can be viewed here.

Hardware

Media Create

Updated every Thursday, full chart viewable here.

Enterbrain*

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.

Apparently Street Fighter IV is still hot among the Famitsu editors and they decided to interview Producer Yoshinori Ono to discuss more about the game recently (July issue of Famitsu PSP + PS3) where he talks about the pressure in making the game a reality, why he thinks it’s an alumni, his favorite character and also the reason behind Chun Li’s muscular legs.

The game shipped 2 million copies in its second week and Ono is thankful to players who have always supported the series. Not only they made it possible for the rebirth of the series, they have also sent in plenty of encouraging messages during development. He admits that this is the most tiring project he involved in so far, thanks to the amount of time the series spent in “dormant” and the enormous pressure in touching the characters some consider as the king of Street Fighter II. This kind of pressure come from within the company too, there were many ideas being suggested and some even consider everything there is to be done has been done in Street Fighter III.

Ono described SFIV as “alumni” and Famitsu want to know why. When they are drawing up the basic concept for SFIV, Ono’s thought was for it to be like a high school alumni, where everyone gather on a field called “SFIV”. If everyone can run around the field based on their memories, he feels there is no need for manuals or tutorials. Another example he cited is the gatherings at hometown, where memories of those fun moments will naturally come. He also hopes that words like “Ah~ That’s the guy!” will pop up in the character selection screen. He hopes SFII fans will be together again in discussing about SFIV and it’s something that he always had in mind when developing SFIV.

Is there any particular steps he has taken to attract SFII fans? Although as a creator, he would like to make the graphics, system and control more fresh. Ono says he will never force players to accept a completely new concept, something he feels is the main reason behind the good sale of SFIV. If a gamer watch a trailer of the game and say “is this the new version of SFII?”, they have succeeded in their goals.

Ono’s favorite character is Ryu, who he think is somebody he knows very well but at the same time, has plenty of depth, just like a pencil case with seven levels that even has a hidden level in it. Another reason is he is knows Ryu’s controls very well and since this is an alumni, he feels happy as long as he can control Ryu and watch his actions. As a result, he goes online every night fighting everyone with Ryu.

Apparently Chun Li’s legs are a hot discussion among the editors with some very supportive of her muscular legs but some are not so cool with them. Ono says he get used to question like this (laugh) but he think if her legs are too thin, she won’t looks like Chun Li anymore. He brings up the alumni concept again, saying it just like when you are meeting your first love again, if she looks completely different, nobody will recognize her. In order to prevent players from thinking “is she a new character?“, he decided to used the current design.

Famitsu asks what is the new info that the game’s official blog is teasing for this summer. Ono says the PC version of the game is nearing completion and new downloable contents will comes after this.

Playing this game, which I just got my copy from our reviewer Victor, surely bring back all the memories for me as I remember very well now how this game makes my school results look crappy.

Bayonetta picks up plenty of hypes post E3 and attracted plenty of previously not interested gamers like me to the title. Weekly Famitsu (issue 6/26) gave Platinum Games’ grand looking action game a 6-page “Scoop” recently that comes with an interview with Director Hideki Kamiya and Producer Yusuke Hashimoto.

The discussion starts with the mysterious woman in red, Jeanne (above), who Hashimoto confirms will be Bayonetta’s main rival and has an important role in the game. Kamiya says Jeanne’s design is purposely a direct opposite of Bayonetta’s and since she is not a playable character, the design process was done pretty quick.

The rest of the interview is about the game system. Witch Time is one of the key elements of the game’s system. By dodging an attack just in time, Bayonetta becomes the only character that moves in the game, it’s a system that will determine if players can make through a level smoothly or not. Kamiya says he hopes players can feel the “battle of attack and defense” with the system and will realized that button mashing won’t get them too far. Hashimoto adds that they have fine tuned the difficulty so that it becomes easier to trigger Witch Time. Kamiya also want to prevent players from adopting defensive mentality because this is after all an action game and there is no beauty in defending.

Witch Walk is another key system that allows our heroine walk vertically. Kamiya says they have spent plenty of time on the system in order to make the various stages feel like playground and painting. Hashimoto adds that Bayonetta can also engage battle during this period and it makes the game feels three dimensional. However, there won’t be any puzzle solving elements or gimmicks for the system.

There are times when Bayonetta stand on top of her giant enemy, a situation Kamiya says will make battles more fun compare to just fighting on the ground. But he also doesn’t want to force players climbing to the top of these giant enemies, so they will find themselves on top of their enemies automatically most of the time. Besides this kind of situation, there will be more variations depending on the type of enemies Bayonetta is facing.

Torture Attack gets plenty of attention during E3 and it was designed to allows players to turn the tide of the battle with a special move. Kamiya says this will make battles look beautiful and more dramatic. Players can also summon devil (called Beast Within, above) to fight for them in the game. Both systems are created to further highlight the fact that Bayonetta is a witch and Kamiya says torture is among the first things that come into people’s mind when they think of witch. As for their usage, Hashimoto says it will depend on the type of enemies.

Another trademark move Bayonetta has is switching weapons freely during battles. A system that was created in order not to limit players’ freedom. Kamiya says when designing the game system, it’s never about “what we want to do” but how players will make use of the options they have. An RPG-like weapon (above) was shown in the report and is said to contain the soul of Lieutenant Kilgore, which is also its name. Kamiya says it was not designed based on what kind of weapon Bayonetta will use but more of a representation of her fighting styles.

One of the screens also shows Bayonetta riding a motorbike and although he can’t elaborate any further, Hashimoto says players will be able to move around the stages with it. Finally, Kamiya says he doesn’t want to make a game that’s done after the story is finished but something that players will keep on playing and he has a wild hope the game will has the kind of content that players will spend their entire life playing.

Note: Charts will be updated with more figures when they become available.

Software

Media Create

Updated every Thursday, full chart viewable here.

MediaWorks

Updated every Friday, chart in Japanese viewable and here (Top 10) and here (Top 20).

Enterbrain*

Updated every Wednesday, chart in Japanese viewable here.

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.

Amazon Japan

Amazon Japan chart is updated hourly, the latest chart can be viewed here.

Hardware

Media Create

Updated every Thursday, full chart viewable here.

Enterbrain*

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.

Loving the theme song from Bonnie Pink very much here and Production I.G.’s animation is always something special for me. Here’s a special promo video to announce the special showing of Tales of Vesperia Movie on October 3rd.

Source: Official website

Didn’t get to write anything about The Last Guardian’s recent unveils but needless to say it’s a truly jaw dropping trailer for me. To think that I will be able to interact with this giant eagle (as the official Japanese title “Hitokui no Oowashi Trico” infers, I thought it’s a cat) and explore the dream-like setting soon feel a little unreal for me. Although we get to see many actions from both the boy and the animal, plus plenty of gameplay mechanics being shown, the trailer is still so full of mystery for me. Luckily, Weekly Famitsu gets to interview Fumito Ueda, the game designer and director for the title, and he shared some of the thinking that went behind the animal and the game as a whole.

Note: This interview has been professionally translated at 1Up and IGN, I simply re-translate with more details. Famitsu has also published the interview online here.

The interview starts with discussion on the giant animal, which the development team is calling it a giant eagle, which is an idea that was there since the very beginning of the development. They would like to make relationship such as those between the protagonist and Agro in Wanda to Kyozou (aka Shadow of The Colossus) the main feature of the game design. Recent videogames and PS3’s performance in Japan are not lively enough so they want to create a big theme to stirs things up a little.

Players will be controlling the little boy in the game. The basic idea behind the game design is since the boy is too young to do some of the tougher stuff, the giant eagle will help him out in these situations. This is the kind of game balance they are trying to achieve. For example, in the trailer there is a scene where the boy is hiding from the enemies, that’s because he is too weak to take them on alone. However, if he can bring the giant eagle over, the problem can be solved very quickly. As a result, the game has a “slow and fast” design that will create a sense of “restraint and release” or “still and move”.

Although it’s not impossible to recreate a cat or dog for a game, Ueda think people, especially pet owners, will notice any unnatural part very easily. So the team strive to remove anything that makes players feel unnatural while keeping the overall game design’s consistency in mind. He admits that even he himself think the animal seems mismatched since it’s created with elements from different kind of animals. At the same time, this is exactly the kind of mismatch that they are trying to achieve because a “weird living thing” is a very important theme to the game.

Cute characters are everywhere in today’s videogames but it always feels purposely designed to be so. The real charm of animals are much more complicated and Ueda think only PS3 has the ability to completely recreate this kind of cuteness. Their challenges are trying to show the feeling of animals other than little actions like eyeball movements, how they close or open their eye, their movements and the way they raise their furs.

Ueda also have dogs, cats, monkeys and ducks when he was small and their actions always float inside his head. Both Ico and Wanda to Kyozou have very little dialogs and since animals don’t talk, he think it’s a good way to take this kind of setting even further.

When asked exactly how the little boy meet the giant eagle, Ueda says it is still a mystery. Besides feeding it with food, the little boy can also pull out the arrows on its body. Players can interact with the giant eagle anytime in the game but having to always take care of it is quite a hassle, so they are working on the balancing for this aspect. Although nurturing and solving stage puzzles in the game are important elements, observing the animal’s actions will also helps your adventure. For example, the giant eagle might be hard to understand sometimes, this is also one of the reasons to use animal as the theme of the game. Besides, there are other yet to be announced new elements that they are tackling and it will be revealed in upcoming reports.

Famitsu asks if elements like catching, clinging and climbing will be featured in the game. Ueda says not only those, as players will be able to touch the giant eagle and depending on the which part of its body the boy catches, it will has different reactions too. Unlike previous titles, the game make use of real physics calculation but it’s not purely because it’s a new technique. Instead, what’s more important is what kind of theme you can do with these techniques. For example in the scene with the giant eagle eating food inside the barrels, it’s not purely a simulation of eating but there are collision detection between the mouth and the barrel and only then, the natural animation of food eating takes place. The development team is very serious at presenting things like this correctly.

They are mixing the AI calculation in Ico and collision detection in Wanda to Kyozou for the game and recreate them with PS3. This is not only for players to enjoy the feeling of the two titles before but also make them feel comfortable about the game’s world and want to explore it. Famitsu think the game’s Japanese title Hitokui no Oowashi Trico is quite challenging. In Japanese, Trico could mean prisoner, imprisoned, a baby bird or bird and cat. Ueda says they would like to not only present the physiology behavior of animals but also their savageness.

Moving between stages will has no loading but Ueda says that the places players can visit has their orders. Due to the enormous size different between the giant eagle and the boy, there are indeed some difficulties in designing the stages. However, the giant eagle won’t always follow orders and players have to throw something to lure it over sometime. As a result, the game is more about making use of the giant eagle’s natural behaviors rather than ordering it or asking for its help. For example, sometime players can make it through certain part of the game as long as the giant eagle stays still but as an animal with low IQ, players can’t expect it to accommodate them all the time.

Famitsu noticed that wind and air are well presented in trailer too. Ueda says it’s another thing that they are very particular on in this title. The giant eagle’s fur are all calculated individually and will move according to wind direction. Making use of PS3’s ability to process calculation separately, they will be able to present more information on screen and further increase the sense of reality.

So are those guards human? Ueda mentions something about fogs enemy but would like to keep this as a secret for now. As for online support, he can’t really promise but there are certain areas that they would like to make use of PSN. Finally, with regards to release date, he simply says there’s a reason why they announce the title now. He will be happy if he can enliven the life of Ico and Wanda to Kyozou fans, people who anticipate their latest title and PS3 owners with Hitokui no Oowashi Trico.

More breathtaking screens from the game can be viewed here.

Will buy this game for the music alone, it also helps that the game has likable characters and looks really great. Rorona no Atelier: Arland no Renkinjutsushi is coming out real soon, less than two weeks, in Japan.

Idea Factory, Gust and Nippon Ichi Software is working on the next PS3 RPG with characters from Atelier and Disgaea series. One of the features they highlighted for Trinity Universe is the AAA system (it stands for Active Animation Adventure), which is an advanced animation system used to make the characters look lively while talking to each on screen (read the overview of the game here). Does it works? The above video should tell. The game will be out this September in Japan.

Note: Charts will be updated with more figures when they become available.

Software

Media Create

Updated every Thursday, full chart viewable here.

MediaWorks

Updated every Friday, chart in Japanese viewable and here (Top 10) and here (Top 20).

Enterbrain*

Updated every Wednesday, chart in Japanese viewable here.

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.

Amazon Japan

Amazon Japan chart is updated hourly, the latest chart can be viewed here.

Hardware

Media Create

Updated every Thursday, full chart viewable here.

Enterbrain*

*Unofficial figures (source), to be updated when I have the magazine in hand.