14 DAY TRIAL // Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the biggest PlayStation 3 launch of the year and the title that is set to wrap up the saga of Solid Snake has lost the first spot it had gained in the Japanese videogame charts just one week before. It seems that the 465,000 units of the game sold in the first four days will be a figure that the Konami title will never reach again as the second week sales were just above the 68,000 units sold mark.
The unlikely slayer of Metal Gear Solid 4 was Super Robot Wars, a portable game developed by Namco Bandai for the PlayStation Portable which sold more than 100,000 units in the same period of time. The game is a turn based strategy that features over sized robots battling out for world domination.
A Super Mario themed baseball game for the Wii occupies the third place in the videogame sales chart and threatens to take the second spot from Metal Gear Solid 4 next week.
Even with a superb reception from the critics, which emphasized the broad scope of the storytelling and the twists of the narrative of the game, the PlayStation 3 exclusive lasted just one short week on the top position, signaling that Japanese gamers are more interested in the solid turn based gameplay mechanics of Super Robot Wars than in the cinematographic, as some have called it, quality of Metal Gear Solid 4.
Soon, data from other markets will be available and we'll see a broader picture of the success or failure of the game but for now, we can safely say that even in his native Japan, Hideo Kojima's game is nowhere near as popular as the pre-release hype would have indicated. It might be that Solid Snake is set to go out not with a bang but in whisper.