Blue Dragon Debuts In Busy Japanese Chart

In another busy week of sales in Japan, two new titles have debuted with over 250,000 unit sales, while the Wii and Xbox 360 have both experienced unexpected software and hardware results. The best selling game of the week was Namco Bandai’s latest Mobile Suit Gundam title on the PS2, with one of the largest debuts of the year so far, at 337,000 units. The more surprising second place title was Sega’s sequel to what is known in the West as Yakuza, which debuted with 274,000 units sold. The original game sold only 134,521 in its first week, before quickly disappearing from the charts. Unusually for the Japanese market, the game appears to have become more popular following its re-release at a budget price, even re-entering the top ten for two weeks. The success of the sequel suggests that the franchise will be a significant one for Sega in the future. Perhaps the most notable new entry in the top ten though is Mistwalker’s Blue Dragon at number four. Only the second Xbox 360 game ever to appear in the top ten, it sold almost twice the number of units as Tecmo’s Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, making it to around 80,000 sales. Although the overall sales figures are still well below what the title might have been expected to sell on a system with a larger installed userbase, unlike Dead or Alive the game seems to have sold to a significant number of new users. Hardware sales jumped to 35,343 for the week, many of which were bundled with copies of the game. Another notable feature of this week is the relatively poor performance of Wii software, compared to the launch last week, with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess down to number seventeen with less than 37,000 units sold. However, with hardware shipments falling well short of expectations for the second week, at only around 100,000 units, the software to hardware sale ratios are in fact largely unchanged. The clear leader in hardware sales for the week was again the Nintendo DS, with a colossal 309,797 units sold – despite the lack of any new significant releases, but likely helped by the recent news of Dragon Quest IX. The Wii was next with 85,439 units sold, followed by the PlayStation 3 at 50,171 units. In its best performance since it’s launch week last year the Xbox 360 became the fourth best selling console of the week at 35,343, followed by the PlayStation 2 at 30,460 units and the PSP at 28,830. The Game Boy Advance family of consoles sold 3,468 units and the GameCube 569.

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