Phantasy Star Portable Boosts PSP Sales in Japan

In its first day on sale, the team-based RPG from Sega managed to sell 217,000 copies in Japan. This is just shy of the record set by Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G, which has been the most popular PSP title to date, selling over 2.4 million copies. Clearly, the folks at Sega and Sony must be happy that they have managed to make lightning strike twice on the handheld and woo some of the Monster Hunter fanatics over to their competing RPG. Admittedly, Phantasy Star Portable does share many similarities with Monster Hunter, so this might help to explain part of its success.

Like the Monster Hunter series, Phantasy Star Portable is a party-based combat game with a heavy emphasis on stat building. While the handheld version of the game uses the same graphics engine as its online-enabled console predecessors, Phantasy Star Portable does not have support for online multiplayer. Instead, party members must be in the same room together in order to play, something that Japanese gamers evidently love.

The release of PSO also gave a boost to hardware sales, which kept the PSP on top of the charts for a second week running.

Japanese Hardware Sales Charts for Week Ended July 27:

PSP: 67,452
Nintendo DS: 56,968
Wii: 41,024
PlayStation 3: 10,692
PlayStation 2: 9,291
Xbox 360: 4,941

[Via: PSP Fanboy]