Its so funny, I made two polls talking about this and her 1st week predictions for this release over a month or so ago; I personally REALLY hope she does and think she more than deserves it since this is her pre-extended sabbatical encore, and not just because of my bias as a fan of hers. She just honestly has the best to offer this year for J-pop (admittedly a particularly easy feat even though she's made an art out of doing so for over a decade) with even but five new songs and the 15 previous classics...

I'm not saying the other artists aren't necessarily legitimate, because if there wasn't a diversity of music to listen to besides Hikki it would of course be mundane and irrelevant like it would be with anyone else. But you just wish that those demographics will pull through and just buy the damn physical CD even if it a mere greatest hits (its not like they don't do it for the endless re-packagings and glut 'Best-Ofs' by the likes of Ayu, Arashi,EXILE,and Koda even when they also buy their singles and studio albums physically)...I know her sales won't be once they once were simply due to industry trends that seemingly can't be reversed but you just really want something like this to be successful when it was obviously such a labor of love, with the promotion to boot!

Her chances are still looking relatively good on landing in @ #2 Yearly at best for the 1st to next 3 weeks, but we'll see, only 'time will tell' (and the people's fickle preferences) ....(I just don't know why people aren't going as frantic buying it out w/ all this promotion and high expectations for her pre-sabbatical hiatus); it's just disheartening that she can't do the numbers she once could not just because of a receeding industry format but because of the mainstream's fixation with absolute flack; there are exceptions to that point but there should just be a more dominant following of commited CD purchasers, who knows really, but things can and have a funny way of turning around when we least expect them)...