Why Isn't Sakura Taisen Number One?

Many Sakura Taisen fans who voted on the Internet Video Game Top 100 Chart may have wondered why Sakura Taisen (1 or 2) never reached the Number One position even though according to the voting results in the Details section, it should have been #1 many times (yes, even beating FF7 on many occasions!).

The reason that Sakura Taisen never made it to #1 is because the chart maintainer, Jurgen Appelo, suppressed the votes for Sakura Taisen to make sure it'll NEVER be on top!.

And the reason why Jurgen has done such an unthinkable thing is because, according to Jurgen himself, he does not believe Sakura Taisen deserves the top position on his chart, and so he fudged the votes deliberately to make sure Sakura Taisen can never reach #1.

I'm sure all Sakura Taisen fans (myself included) are outraged that their favorite game has been so unfairly treated in the IVG Top 100 Chart. The reason Jurgen gave for doing this is so that his chart can reflect the "true" popularity ranking of the games better. While this is certainly an admirable aim, we disagree with the way it's done because:

  • Jurgen has assumed that he has thorough knowledge of the "true" popularity rankings of all video games all over the world, and he'd fudge the votes on his chart to make the results look like the "true" rankings. But then why bother asking people to vote at all? Why not simply present the "true" rankings he knew so well and save us the trouble of voting for nothing?
  • Jurgen has no justification to single out and penalize Sakura Taisen, because all Sakura Taisen fans followed the rules when voting on the IVG Top 100 Chart, and thus all their votes are legitimate and should have been counted like any other votes. This is the first basic rule of any democratic voting system (which Jurgen has claimed his chart to be): Any and all legitimate votes have to be taken into account equally.
  • By fudging the votes for even only one game, Jurgen has effectively nullified any hope of authenticity and respectability for his chart. How can we believe the other rankings in his chart when he admitted that he deliberately suppressed the votes for a top-ranking game?

    • What are Jurgen's justification for singling out and penalizing Sakura Taisen and not other games you may ask. According to Jurgen himself, he penalized Sakura Taisen for 2 main reasons:

  • 1. He doesn't like the "lobby votes" for Sakura Taisen, as he put it.
  • 2. He has never heard of Sakura Taisen before and he had a hard time finding info about the game, thus he concluded that Sakura Taisen must be an obscure Japanese game which has no place in top position on his world chart.
    • Jurgen believed with stubborn conviction the above "justifications". Unfortunately both of these "justifications" are completely groundless, and here's why:
  • 1. What Jurgen called "lobby votes" are nothing but votes gathered by people putting the worldchart banner on their Sakura Taisen webpages and asking other fans to vote for the game. But this is EXACTLY what Jurgen himself asked people to do! Check e.g. what he wrote on his weekly news letter:

    "Support your favourite games! Use a button on your homepage, and make other people vote for your favourites! See: http://www.worldcharts.com/_button.html"

    Hey Jurgen, that's exactly what WE did. We put worldchart banners on our webpages, following your suggestions, and helping to advertise Worldchart at the same time. So what "lobby votes" are you talking about Jurgen!?

  • 2. Jurgen's own ignorance about Sakura Taisen can hardly be used as proof of the game's unpopularity, it's rather proof of his own ignorance about the game, and about the Asian gaming market in general. This is all fine if his chart is the "Western Top 100 Video Game Chart", but Jurgen claims that his chart is the "World" Chart Top 100 Chart, which makes it unforgivable for Jurgen to ignore the HUGE Asian game market simply because he doesn't know anything about it! Didn't Jurgen know that the world video game market literally belongs to the Japanese? The top game consoles nowadays are made by Sony, Nintendo and Sega, all of them Japanese companies! If Jurgen has even the slightest knowledge about the Asian video game market, he sure would have noticed the phenomenal success of Sakura Taisen (and a dozen other hit Asian games which never even made it to the Worldchart, presumably because Jurgen doesn't know about them either!) and would not have questioned the game's popularity. For Jurgen to bias himself and his "World"chart against Asian games is chauvinistic at best, if not outright racist!

    • So is there anything Sakura Taisen fans can do about this? Nope, according to Jurgen. He has made up his mind that he'll keep suppressing Sakura Taisen votes no matter how fans object or how well the game actually does. And he'd do this not because Sakura Taisen fans have done something wrong (he admitted he couldn't find any fault in what we did), but only because he believes Sakura Taisen doesn't deserve the top position.

    So should we boycott Jurgen's chart and not vote on it? Nope, not until we can find another better-known and fairer game chart to vote on (please let me know if you know one). Even though Sakura Taisen has been suppressed unfairly on Jurgen's chart, it's still gaining publicity worldwide through the chart, and we should keep voting for it weekly to keep it in at least top 10 position.

    Feel free to write Jurgen and complain if you like, but be forewarned that he will not listen to anything any Sakura Taisen fan has to say on this matter. Still it's a good way to show Jurgen just how popular Sakura Taisen really is.

    [After this commentary was made public, the rankings of all Sakura Taisen related games plumeted on Jurgen's Worldchart. Whether this is due to Jurgen's further suppression of Sakura Taisen votes, or whether it's because fans can no longer bear to vote on a blatantly unfair game chart ,is not yet clear. But fans should know that by not voting for Sakura Taisen, they'd only serve Jurgen's purpose of ridding his chart of all those pesky non-western games.]