Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending January 1

With the Japanese holiday season continuing beyond the only partially relevant Christmas week, the new weekly charts show an almost total domination by Nintendo and the DS console. Only two titles in the top ten are not for the Nintendo DS, with all but one of the DS titles being published directly by Nintendo. The third title in the extremely successful Brain Training series has entered straight in at number one with 414,556 unit sales, and is followed by continued strong sales for Animal Crossing, at number two with 205,119 units sold and Mario Kart DS, at number three with 168,680 units sold. The top seven titles all reported sales of over 100,000 units, although Kingdom Hearts II’s drop to number four in the charts was more precipitous than expected. The second highest new entry was Square Enix’s Sci-Fi strategy sequel Front Mission 5 at number six with 146,209 units sold, followed by Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time at number seven with 132,726 units sold. Also of note is the delayed release of Dead or Alive 4 at number thirteen in the charts, with less than 61,000 units sold. A significant proportion of these sales went to existing Xbox 360 owners, with hardware sales only doubling to 12,300 units. This suggests the title may only appeal to a relative hardcore of users, with the various Mistwalker role-playing games now looking like the only obvious chance for Microsoft to gain real ground in Japan. The immensely strong software sales for the Nintendo DS have actually worked against it in terms of hardware, with stock of the console reported to be very low. It is not clear when exactly these shortages began, but sales figures were well down on last week to a still impressive 390,181 units. PSP sales were also down to 110,741, with the PlayStation 2 at 78,646 units sold. The Game Boy Advance family of consoles recorded 27,679 unit sales in total, with the GameCube at 12,579. This meant that the Xbox 360 was once again relegated to sixth place, ahead of only the original Xbox at 121 units sold.

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