Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending December 25

In the week ending on Christmas Day in Japan (which is not much of a religious holiday there but every bit as much of a consumer bonanza) the release of Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts II, fortuitously timed to garner maximum sales, was propelled to over 725,000 copies by the triple forces of the holidays, the Disney franchise, and the Final Fantasy cameos in the game. DS software remains as strong as the hardware, as Oideyo Doubutsu no Mori (Animal Crossing: Wild World elsewhere) stays in second place with 416,000 sold this week alone, and already over 1 million in total. In addition, Mario Kart DS stays in third with 302,000 sold this week, indicating unflagging interest in Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connection venture overseas. Other DS titles still active in the top 10 were Pokémon Fushigi no Dungeon: Ao no Kyuujotai (at #5, one notch over the GBA edition of the same game, Akai no Kyuujotai), Tamagotchi no Puchi Puchi Omisetchi (at #7, the only non-first party title on a Nintendo system to crack the top 10), and Brain Training for Adults (at #10, still selling strongly at just under 100,000 units this week and over 1 million for its lifetime, just ahead of the release of a new Brain Training game next month). Console systems represented a smaller share of the pie: other than the chart-topping Kingdom Hearts II, only Naruto: Narultimate Hero 3 and Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence managed to break into the top 10 in their first week of sales. Mario Party 7, released early in November, was the third console game to see a place on the charts as it resurged back for the holiday season. Though the results for the entire year aren't quite in yet, Nintendo's DS seems to be the big winner in terms of hardware sales for 2005. The system sold around 598,000 units in Japan last week alone, bringing its year-to-date total up to 3.7 million and its life-to-date number up to 5.2 million. This means that the DS is beating the PSP almost 3 to 1 in that territory, with the PSP racking up 161,000 sales for the week and almost 2.1 million in its liftime. By comparison, even the PlayStation 2 only sold 97,000 for the week and 1.8 million for the year, though the system has had a much longer lifespan and an overall greater install base of 11.3 million Japanese units. On the other end of the spectrum, the Xbox 360 is off to a much more sluggish start in Japan than it was in the U.S. Analysts estimate that as many as 800,000 360s have been sold in the U.S., while Media Create indicates that since the console's December 10 launch in Japan, the next-gen system has moved only 58,000 systems, 5,600 of which were sold in the week ending December 25.

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