Jedi Academy launch date set for Japan

TOKYO--Software firm Cyberfront announced it would release the PC version of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy on November 7. The company has a long history of bringing US market PC games to Japan, in both localized versions, with Japanese interfaces, and unmodified English versions, supplemented by Japanese manuals.

Previous Cyberfront PC releases for the Japanese market include: Homeworld 2, Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life Millennium Pack, Sid Meier's Civilization III, Unreal Tournament 2003, and Unreal II. In addition to these games from the US, Cyberfront also handles ports of some of Japan's most popular arcade games, offering PC versions of games like Raystorm and the classic Raiden II.

Considering that Jedi Academy hasn't launched in Japan yet, it's already selling quite well, currently standing at number 255 on Amazon.co.jp's top-selling software list with a price of 5,616 yen ($51).

To put that into perspective, Amazon's most popular games in Japan are now MS Flight Simulator 2004 and Final Fantasy XI (PC version), at fifth and sixth place respectively, while prerelease sales for the November 11 launch of Halo for the PC put Microsoft's FPS--a blockbuster title in the US--319 spots away from first place.

Clearly, the cachet of the Star Wars franchise is worth more in Japan than a port of Xbox software--even when the port in question is Halo.