Rune Factory 4 is out of stamina, needs to eat something.

If Japan is excited about Switch's summer as I am, you wouldn't know it from looking at COMG's preorders. SMM2 should be at the top of the chart by now. Like I get that it hasn't been detailed at E3 yet, but you'd think hype would be through the roof just off of what was revealed so far. Japan was huge on SMM1. And then there's Fire Emblem. Does anyone have any comparisons? I feel like it's going really slow for an FE game in Japan. Shouldn't it be at like 50 points by now? Yokai Watch isn't the only game lagging, it's just lagging the hardest for what it is and how close to release it is. Code Vein, a delayed game with an unannounced release date that hasn't seen any growth in weeks, is higher than three major Nintendo franchises that the Japanese supposedly love, on the hottest console in the country, releasing in a month or two or three. And the bar for surpassing Code Vein is a mere 36 points. Something just feels really wrong. Is COMG okay?

Slow season, and holidays will affect the hours and traffic of stores. A lot of people leave places like Niigata to go to Tokyo or Kyoto.

And of course the games are very far away.

Games being far away usually didn't stop heavy hitters, especially ones like Fire Emblem. But I'm not too familiar with Japanese holidays, so maybe that's affecting things. I know it's the slow season, but it's worryingly slow this year. I'm not saying the whole chart should be double digits, just that we should have a few 50 pointers given the number of very major games less than 100 days out. There should be more interesting movement on the chart right now than Rune Factory given how close so many normally big guns are. Maybe it's because COMG is normally Playstation centered and Sony's biggest game on the horizon is Persona 5, more than 6 months out?

I was confused too. It was delayed.

Here's what you remember:

https://gematsu.com/2019/01/pro-yakyuu-spirits-2019-launches-april-25-in-japan

Here's what happened:

https://gematsu.com/2019/02/pro-yakyuu-spirits-2019-delayed-to-july-18-in-japan

It's a bit weird to see an annually released sports game delayed like that...

Well Fire emblem echoes had about the same points 21 days from release. So FE: Three houses is much ahead.

And Fire Emblem fates weren't on the chart 87 days from release. So again FE: Three houses is much ahead.

Mario games tend to enter the chart late. I'm not worried, I think you'll see it gain a lot within 30 days of release, and it should do 400k+ FW.

Fire Emblem was never going to be huge. It's actually doing alright showing up early.

Yokai though is a surprise. I know the brand declined but my God has it been underwhelming. I do think it will pick and get past 150 points, but previous entries were doing 1000+ so quite a sharp decline. 

Has there ever been a franchise that experienced a decline as fast and as sharp as this? It's really quite jarring, the way it went from being on top of the world in Japan in 2014 and 2015 to just being dead in the water. It's been in a free fall since about the second half of 2016 and it just keeps getting worse.

Sure their will be some if we only look pre orders.   Especially when they are on a new device but it is the end result that counts.