I've seen some younger JP folk commenting on a peculiar titling trend among games released for Nintendo's long-dead DSiWare service, and it's something that I imagine most intl folk weren't aware of, so lemme run it down here:
Nintendo's early forays into digital storefronts were notorious for being incredibly simple: you could buy/sell/download games, search via title or browse/sort the library via a few very broad filters, but that's pretty much it; discoverability was virtually zero, and the Wii and DSi were so low-spec that they could only list a small handful of games at a time before having to slowly load the next page of results, so even the notion of casually checking for new games was completely unrealistic as you'd spend 75% of your time idling as you flicked in and out of menus.
This was especially true of the DSi Shop—thanks to the low resolution of the DS screen, the search results/filters could only display two(!) games per page, so if you weren't searching for a game by title or a game wasn't on the front splash by virtue of being a brand-new release, there was no way anyone was ever going to just stumble upon anything interesting. Moreover, results were either alphanumerically or by gojuuon, depending on region, so hundreds of games were condemned to obscurity for the sin of having a title that didn't place them within the first couple dozen pages of search results.
Naturally, a few intl publishers eventually identified this issue and started titling their games to position them favourably—"101 __", "A ___", that sort of thing—but due to the broader nature of the publishers operating in the intl DSiWare market (genuine indies or fire-and-forget mobile publishers who didn't seem to care if their ports sold or not), it wasn't an especially prevalent phenomenon. In Japan, things were very different: the DSi Shop had an absolute glut of games that were conspicuously titled to appear at the top of each category/listing, from publishers of all sizes, and it's something the core audience picked up on very quickly, too.
At the peak of the DSi Shop's life, Netlab scanned the available library and confirmed that ~20% of the catalogue had titles beginning with あ, and that the percentage of titles that began further down the gojuuon were extremely small. It clearly wasn't coincidental, either, as many of these games could not have been less obvious about what they were doing: the SIMPLE Series was given the DSi-specific "@SIMPLE" rebrand, for example, and there were a ton of games with a random ああ or 愛 shoehorned onto the front of their title for the sake of visibility.
Like I said, this practice wasn't limited to shovelware devs or whatever, either—in fact, upon the recent closure of the 3DS eShop, Arika's VP Ichiro Mihara recently confessed that the title of their Nintendo-published DSiWare danmaku game あぁ無情 刹那 (Aa Mujou Setsuna; released globally as Metal Torrent) was specifically chosen by Nintendo's own producer to ensure that it'd appear at the top of the 500-yen store category. Even Nintendo had to exploit workarounds for Nintendo's bullshit!
(Now that I'm thinking about it again, Nintendo of Europe, whose loc decisions traditionally showed more conformity with Japanese titles than Nintendo of America's, also attempted to game the store listings with localised titles like the extremely boring "3D BATTLE TANK" for X-Scape Returns, or "A Little Bit Of... ___" for the "Chotto/Express" series of truncated digital versions of retail games.)
To this day, any attempted ordered list of Japanese game titles is frontloaded with DSiWare junk... I might be wrong, but I believe Hudson/Konami's DSiWare Shooting Watch replica app あぁあの懐かしのシュウォッチ (Aaa no Natsukashi no Shooting Watch) is still at the very front of such lists, and I can't imagine it'll be dislodged any time soon.
