Just ahead of its launch in North America next week, Atlus Japan announced via their official Twitter account that they have successfully shipped more than 300,000 copies to retailers and that the retail chains are running out of copies faster than they can manufacture and ship them out. Success much, Atlus?
Dualshockers rocked the embedded tweets into an article and were kind enough to provide some translations for the tweets. Instead of re-embedding the tweets and breaking down the coherency of the context, I'll just compile them into a nice little press-friendly quote for readability purposes, check it out below, courtesy of the Atlus Japan Twitter account...
More than 300,000 copies of the PS Vita and PS3 versions of Dragon’s Crown, that we launched on July the 25th, have been shipped (including the digital download version). It’s thanks to everyone’s support. Thank you very much.In addition to that, the PS3 and PS Vita software Dragon’s Crown is very popular, so there are shortages at retail. We apologize, and we are doing our best to improve the situation. We’d appreciate if you could be patient.Those that would like to purchase the PS3 and PS Vita software Dragon’s Crown, please consider purchasing the digital download version on the PlayStation Store.
This is great news for the financially troubled publisher, also it's great news for Vanillaware who had a lot of trouble getting this game greenlit and funded. Capcom and UTV Ignition were a few of the publishers who turned down lead creative designer, artist and president of Vanillaware, George Kamitani and his idea to produce the game.
In addition to running into publisher troubles, Kamitani has had a ton of flack from gaming media and industry related pundits talking up a storm of negativity on the designer, the company and the game over the art-style depicted in Dragon's Crown. While I don't necessarily agree with some of the proportion choices for the characters, I respect Kamitani's amazing talent and style that he's used to bring the visually stunning game to life that looks like a painting in motion.
I also find it somewhat disheartening that while someone like Phil Fish gets cut a ton of slack for trolling the community, his own fans and other designers, someone like Kamitani and his crew are scrutinized under a spotlight of negativity despite being low-key and just working to bring a game to the masses... a fun game at that. A fun game that's also become a very rare genre, I might add. A fun game in a rare genre with an extremely rare hand-painted and hand-animated art-style... in addition to everything else.
Hopefully the success of Dragon's Crown will sail the great seas and manage equal success Stateside and in PAL regions. I truly hope that we can see creativity spawn and grow in great treads throughout the industry – at each turn we should be nurturing the growth of originality and fostering the spirit of hard work and artistically original endeavors, even if we don't always agree with how those artistic endeavors are expressed.
I know the support of ideas and art that we don't always agree with rolls on a fine line, with individual art tastes usually ending up in the spotlight of controversy when they push boundaries. Nevertheless, so long as the content isn't aimed at purposefully promoting harmful ideas, it's at least good to see an artist going full-in on a passion project that also managed to turn into a success story... in Japan, at least.
Dragon's Crown has recently released in PAL regions just a few days ago and it will release in North America just a few days from now. You can learn more about the game by paying a kind visit to the official website.
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