This here.

The Wii's Tales spinoff, DotNW, did ~160k on its first week. That's higher than any non-SE/Pokemon RPG on the DS could manage.

People seem to prefer their RPG's on consoles (I guess the PSP is closer to one than the DS).

Tales of Phantasia, Tales of Symphonia, and Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of a New World are connected, although very vaguely in concept only. You don't need to play Tales of Phantasia to enjoy Tales of Symphonia, although playing tales of Symphonia would make you enjoy Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of a New World just a bit more.

Tales of Destiny and Tales of Destiny II are connected.

Tales of Eternia, Vesperia, Legendia, Abyss, Hearts, and the rest are in their own little universes.

Thats as far as I know.

Main series was born on SNES: home consoles. So they sell best there.

Tales of the World started with the Phantasia spinoff for GBC and became a full blown fanservice subseries on the GBA.

Basically what I'm saying is that one hasn't found much success on handhelds while the other has always thrived there. Hearts was Namco's 3rd attempt to push a handheld mothership title and it still seems to be selling the same (albeit better than its DS predecessors). There's some barrier they're not breaking with the fanbase about handheld mothership titles.

Radiant Mythology 2 is the latest in a long line of fanservice games, the way it's made is pretty ingenius actually. The Destiny fanatics (check out the Destiny games sales in the database) may not be interested in Hearts but they'll flock to ToW because Stahn, Leon and company are part of the game.

It's like why Dissidia outsold Crisis Core. CC appeals to the fans of a particular FF but Dissidia is based around most of the numbered games and is attracting even lapsed FF fans who abhor anything post-FFVI. 

Can't see this.

DS: 14,87M (78 RPG titles) - FF, DQ, Pokemon not included - average RPG title ~0,19M.
PSP: 6,86M (39 RPG titles) - FF, MH not included - average RPG title ~0,17M.

+PS2 (just for comparison, but data largely incomplete): 18,85M (80 RPG titles)  - FF, DQ, KH not included, MH included - average RPG title ~0,23M.

I guess niche games sell almost equally on any viable platform, that's why they're "niche". Lead platform just get them more. Some of you, guys, just trying to make some conlusions out of isolated cases and pretend that you don't see the bigger picture.

Okay, maybe the bolded (in particular) wasn't a valid conclusion. It may still hold for Tales though, as they've seen higher numbers on the PSP / consoles. I'd lean towards Claude's theory.

Also, I don't think totalling all RPG's like that is a fair comparison. Needs to be done case by case.

I don't think it's about fanservice, just look at the sales of 'Tales of Mythology' games on GBA - they didn't compare with the mainline Tales sales at the time. People should give credit where it's due, and in this case it just looks like the most of the Tales fanbase is on PSP.

1. The entire point of TotW is fanservice, it's hard to deny that when it's the basis of the games. With every title they add more characters. It's the selling point.

2. Actually their sales did compare. Narikiri Dungeon 2's sales weren't that far behind Legendia's. You can't gloss over something like that and then try to dismiss it. Radiant Mythology is more advanced and has more characters and fanservice than the GBA games ever did anyway, it would be kind of sad if the PSP games didn't at least sell on par with the GBA games. The install base has been there for years to support that kind of game.

3. I don't think you can "credit" the PSP for having the majority of a fanbase for a series that's recently notorious for being platform agnostic, especially considering that the PS2 would take that crown, not the PSP.

Yeah, ToW is like a fan-service game (my gf compared it to FF: Dissidia). She enjoys most of the Tales of.. games and she really likes the ToW (both PSP games) because of the abundance of Tales of characters in the game.

I think now she wants to play my copy of Vesperia as there are some of the Vesperia characters in the new ToW2 PSP game, which she has been playing since I got it for her 2 weeks ago.(She cleared Tales of Hearts just before getting ToW2!)