Pokemon Leads DS Resurgence In Japanese Charts

Although the question of a Christmas number one has little meaning in Japan, where the main gift giving period occurs later than in the West, the market has nevertheless behaved in a similar manner with older mass market titles reasserting themselves at the top of the charts. The week is unusual in that although only one title sold above 100,000 units the sales for the rest of the top ten were remarkably even, with multiple games sharing the expanded business of the week. The top sellers were the two Nintendo DS Pokemon games, with the dual SKU title now having sold around 3.5 million copies in Japan alone. Nintendo’s latest Kirby game (to be known in the West as Kirby Squeak Squad) also saw a resurgence in sales, along with New Super Mario Bros. and Sega’s Oshare Majo Love and Berry aimed at young girls. Interestingly this is the only week all year when a Touch! Generations title has not be in the Japanese top ten. The highest new entry of the week was a DS entry in ChunSoft’s core Mystery Dungeon series, one of the few games in the franchise which does not use a cross company license from Nintendo or Square Enix. The latest in the Wild Arms role-playing series also performed well at number eight, as did Pokemon Battle Revolution – the first major new release since the launch of the Wii and its first online title. Western gamers though may be surprised to find that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has charted only at number thirty-three, while the only other Wii titles outside the top ten are Wii Play at number twelve, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves at number thirty-six and anime license Bleach Wii at number fifty. However, the software to hardware sales ratios still remain largely the same as during the launch week, with Nintendo again only managing to ship around another 100,000 consoles this week. Stock has been similarly limited for the PlayStation 3, which has only two titles in the top fifty: Motor Storm at number thirty-five and Ridge Racer 7 at number forty-nine. As is by now commonplace, the Nintendo DS was the best selling hardware of the week by a considerable margin, with a total of 319,866 unit sales. The Wii was next at 108,237 units, followed by the PlayStation 3 at 70,942, the PSP at 48,962 and the PlayStation 2 at 37,730 units. The Xbox 360 saw half the hardware sales of last week with 17,168 units, its would-be Japanese killer app Blue Dragon falling a precipitous forty-two places from its top ten debut. The Game Boy Advance family of consoles sold 3,400 units and the GameCube 1,152.

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