The holiday season officially arrived at the Japanese charts with three titles selling over 250,000 copies. Animal Crossing: City Folk took the top spot as expected with 350,000 copies. Chrono Trigger and Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Gundam have a close fight for second and third spot, they sold 271,000 and 267,000 copies respectively. It will be interesting to see if Gundam’s multiplayer focused mechanics will be enough to make it stay longer on the charts, the figure also made the game the fifth fastest selling PSP game so far. All these big numbers mean that not even 1,000 Prinnies are enough to push Prinny: Ore ga Shujinkou de Iinsuka? into the top 10 although the 17,000 copies it sold is actually quite impressive.

Gundam’s incredible sales also includes the hot looking PSP Pack that has a special edition PSP inside. As a result, earlier numbers show that PSP hardware sold around 60,000 units, a 20,000 increase from last week. Another special edition PSP is coming out this week with the Patapon 2 Donchaka♪ Winter Gift Pack. Patapon 2 is also among the nine PSP titles that are coming out today in Japan, so next week will be even more interesting.

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As expected, Shonen Jump got the early scoop on FFXI’s Shantotto joining Dissidia Final Fantasy. The condition to unlock her is still unknown, but she is seen walking alongside Cosmos and the mag think it has something to do with Warrior of Light. Click on the picture for larger view. Three more weeks before release date!

Acquire’s Tenchu 4, out on the Wii just last month in Japan, is confirmed for release on the PSP next February as reported in this scan from the upcoming issue of Weekly Famitsu (Siliconera had earlier found the game listed as coming to PSP). Nothing much is revealed here though beside the fact that it is a port of the Wii version and players can enjoy many of the killer moves found in there. Not sure how they will implement those nunchuck and Wii-mote based actions but Acquire are pretty good with developing for the PSP, so the ninjas need not worry too much about the lack of actions or atmosphere :)

Source: VideogamerX

No info on Shantotto’s announcement yet but this week’s Weekly Famitsu has a small report on Dissidia Final Fantasy with quick info about the EX Modes of the FFII characters, Emperor & Frionel. Click on the image for larger view or see the full scan here.

It looks like Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Gundam is off to a really great start in Japan as the multiplayer focused mech action game sold 240,594 copies in its first week according to Enterbrain. However it’s not the biggest selling game of the week, Animal Crossing: City Folk and Chrono Trigger started with 303,204 and 276,049 copies respectively. This is the best first week performance for a PSP game since Phantasy Star Portable’s 340,000 start in August.

Source: Famitsu

Square Enix made a little surprise announcement for Dissidia Final Fantasy at their FFXI event “Vana Fes 2008 in Korakuen” last Saturday. Final Fantasy XI’s black mage Shantotto was confirmed to make her appearance in the battle between Cosmos and Chaos with Megumi Hayashibara as the voice actor. Expect more information about her from the Japanese mags soon.

Another Dissidia related news is there appear to be an option for “Command Battle” which lets players who are struggling with this type of action game to set their character to fight in typical RPG’s command-based style. The feature, which FFAC reunion said was mentioned in one of the developers interviews, was found listed at Dissidia’s POP displays in video game stores, sounds like something useful for poor fighting action gamers like me :)

Thanks to Kyon again for the tips.

Source: Gpara, Famitsu & FFAC reunion

Koei sent out some new screens of Shin Sangoku Musou: Multi Raid (aka Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce) to provide new details about the features in the game’s multiplayer modes and its special items. More information after the jump.

Source: Game Watch

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A couple of new stuff for the PSP version of Musou Orochi: Maou Sairin were announced by Koei today. Dramatic Mode appears to be a short story kind of missions that are more suitable for portable gaming while the install function will reduce loading time for the game (194Mb is required). Plenty of new screens were released today, the game is really good looking, check them out after the jump. The game is coming out next week in Japan.

Source: Game Watch

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Didn’t know there will be downloadable content for Yuusha no Kuse ni Namaikida or 2 too but SCEJ just announced its plans to expand the quirky dungeon management game today. The DLCs will come in the form of short stories made up of a few stages and each of them will cost 300 Yen (around $3.20). The first DLC will be available today, with two more to come for December and January. Check out the full schedule after the jump.

Note: Check out my (incomplete) tips for the game here.

Source: Famitsu

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SCEJ says there are 90,000 downloads for Ad-Hoc Party in two weeks’ time and added 33 more titles, including the just released Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Gundam, to the list of supported games. Quite a wide variety of games in there, check them out after the jump.

Source: Press release

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