DS Completes Clean Sweep In Japanese Top Ten

The Nintendo DS’s domination of the Japanese sales charts has reached new heights, with every single one of the top ten titles being exclusively for the format. Seven of these are published directly by Nintendo, but the biggest selling title of the week by far is Square Enix’s Final Fantasy III. The 3D remake of the original NES/Famicom game sold over half a million units in its first week, accounting for over 90 percent of the initial shipment. So successful has the game been that it appears to have cannibalized sales from other titles, with New Super Mario Bros. well down on its usual weekly sales, and English Training, the tenth ranked title, selling less than 20,000 units. The only other new entry is Marvelous’ new role-playing game spin-off from the Harvest Moon series at number three, with a solid debut of 42,210 units. Meanwhile, Mario Basket 3 on 3 (known as Mario Hoops 3 on 3in the West) has shown unexpected longevity for a relatively niche sport in Japan. Hardware sales have also been unremarkable, given the high sales of Final Fantasy III and long queues to obtain it at many stores, with the Nintendo DS selling 163,684 consoles and no sign of the rumored stockpiled units. PSP sales, which usually benefit from increased shop traffic regardless of software sales, were down by over 10,000 to 29,945 units. The PlayStation 2 registered 21,829 unit sales, the Game Boy Advance family of consoles 4,552, the Xbox 360 just 1,197 and the GameCube 837.

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