This Week In Sales: The Little Battlers W Has A Bit Of Growing Up To Do

Period: The week of October 15th – October 21st (2012)

Top-seller: The Little Battlers W (PSP) – 77,457

Nintendo 3DS sales: 22,447 | Total sales: 6,965,008

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 37,785 | Total sales: 781,902

PlayStation Vita sales: 6,791 | Total sales: 1,015,044

<< Last week’s software sales chart

Last week’s biggest release in Japan was The Little Battlers W, a sequel to the original game that started the series, The Little Battlers. Level 5 released The Little Battlers W on both the PSP an PlayStation Vita with cross-play functionality.

On PSP, The Little Battlers W sold 77,457 copies. On the PlayStation Vita, it sold just 16,842 copies. There are two important points to note in light of these sales:

• Both PSP and Vita versions combined failed to sell anywhere near the launch week numbers of the original The Little Battlers game (166,187 copies).

• The PSP version of W didn’t sell all that much more than The Little Battlers: Explosive Boost, an updated version of the first game, released earlier this year on the Nintendo 3DS.

Explosive Boost, which was the third version of the original The Little Battlers game, sold 54,354 copies on the Nintendo 3DS when it was released back in July. Given the sequel’s relatively weak performance, and Explosive Boost’s relatively strong performance on 3DS, it’s looking very likely than we’ll see an updated version of The Little Battlers W released for 3DS at some point in the future.

In other news, Resident Evil 6 is performing rather admirably, as it clung on to the #2 spot in the chart, beating out Bravely Default, which dropped to #3 in its second week. On the subject of Bravely Default, retailers have reported sell-outs and stock shortages, so it appears to be doing very well for itself.

The top-20 chart for the week was as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer, Media Create and Geimin.net.