Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending January 29

An unseasonally busy week of new releases in Japan has shown a massive increase in unit sales on the previous week, with a total 25 percent above the weekly average. The top four titles all sold over 100,000 units – a feat not normally achieved except in the run up to the New Year. Despite this, sales of 392,169 units for Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII were below some expectations, although the spin-off from the classic PSone title did manage to beat off competition from a new Touch Generations title from Nintendo. Even more so than the Brain Training games, Nintendo's DS title Eigo Duke clearly fits the description of being a non-game, since it is primarily an interactive tool for learning the English language. Despite this, it managed an impressive opening weekend of 242,443 unit sales, and looks likely to repeat the long term success of the other Touch Generations titles. The latest in Capcom’s successful Onimusha series also performed well on its debut, with 226,334 unit sales, while the third of Nintendo’s Brain Training games recording 110,539 sales in its fifth week on the market. Of the other new entries this week, action strategy Ar-Toneliko saw a creditable 54,289 sales, while the Treasure-developed Bleach DS recorded just 35,977 sales – although this was in part due to stock issues. The Nintendo DS itself still continues to suffer from stock problems, although the situation is clearly improved on previous weeks, with the console accounting for 60.20 percent of all hardware sales with 106,081 units sold. The PSP was in second place with a 17.40 percent market share and 30,657 sales, followed by the PlayStation 2 at 13.95 percent and 24,580 sales. The Game Boy Advance family charted in fourth place with a 5.54 percent market share, followed by the GameCube at 1.72 percent. With not a single software title in the top fifty, the Xbox 360 was reduced to a mere 1.12 percent share of the market, and just 1,976 unit sales.

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