Here are the games that will be hitting PlayStation platforms in Japan during the month of May.
On May 1st, we get Child of Light for PS3 and PS4.
No new games ship for a while, thanks to Golden Week. During this time, you can expect to see sales of hardware and software spike to higher levels overall than any other time of year, apart from the year-end/New-Year holidays and Obon (August). When they do, you can enjoy watching people who don’t know much about Japan give their fake sales analysis of the “surprise” increase. 😉
What you’ll want to watch for is the extent of the increase. Japanese people haven’t been spending as much money on luxury goods lately, since the recent tax increase raised prices on nearly everything money can buy.
On the 15th, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed ships for PS3 (and Wii-U), just barely beating Mario Kart 8 to the market by a narrow two weeks. Expect Mario to trounce Sonic in overall sales though. Oddly, Sonic’s racer was on Vita and 3DS abroad, but it doesn’t seem to be getting handheld releases in Japan. Speaking of handhelds, God of War Collection and this “erotic anime” RPG (probably NSFW) arrive on Vita this same day.
Japan can experience PS4’s inFamous: Second Son on May 22nd, along with World Soccer Winning Eleven 2014 on PS3 and PSP.
The 29th brings Trials Fusion to PS4, while the PS3 gets Arcana Heart 3 Love Max. Vita and PS3 will share Gundam Side Stories.
While it’s good to see PS4 getting some games, it’s a little sad to see exclusives taking so long to roll out, especially Japanese ones. inFamous is nice to have, but the other two inFamous games didn’t sell huge amounts in Japan — only around 30,000 each in their debuts. In June, PS4’s only exclusive game is Musou Orochi 2 Ultimate. Will it be enough to bring the system back up to a decent weekly sales average? We shall see.
