In its first week of launch in Japan, the Wii U exclusive Splatoon has topped the national charts.
Selling over 144 thousand units in its first week, Splatoon has beaten out the competition (including the likes of the recently released Witcher 3).
All this on a console that analysts had deemed finished.
What’s especially interesting about all this is that first and third person shooters tend not to perform very well in Japan.
This is often down to a large number of Japanese gamers who suffer from “screen sickness” when it comes to playing these kinds of games.
Much of this is often attributed down to the manual control of both movement and looking. Instead of more automated systems, such as an orbit based lock-on or vectored dashes that are often used in other games.
Whether players are experiencing the same kinds of symptoms with Splatoon is unclear but it appears that people don’t really care.
As it seems that while the base mechanics of Splatoon are similar to your average modern shooter, the additional functionality of traversing through the paint you’ve laid has clearly garnered some new fans.
What’s more, as this is an all-new intellectual property from
Hopefully Nintendo and other publishers in Japan will start to follow up with more functionally diverse games and bring the long grey march of functional standardization in gaming to an end.
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