Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending January 30th

The Japanese software market has again managed to avoid falling in to the stupor of other charts around the world, with six new entries in the top ten and total sales of 1,200,741 – 116.59 percent of the weekly average. The biggest winner was Banpresto’s giant robot sim Another Century's Episode with 180,885 sales, although with 90 percent of the game’s stock sold out within the first week, a larger initial shipment could have seen the title perform even better. With Square Enix’s new role-playing game Radiata Stories, from the creators of Star Ocean, clocking in 174,281 sales, the best Capcom’s Biohazard 4 (aka Resident Evil 4) could manage was a new entry at number three with 142,025 sales. This will be very disappointing for Capcom, considering the universal praise the game has received and the previous popularity of the series in Japan. The game’s slower-selling performance is curious, and it seems unfair to blame it purely on the size of the GameCube user base – since Nintendo titles regularly hit the number one spot in Japan, and even third party titles such as Tomy’s Naruto series have performed well. The only reasonable conclusion is that most consumers interested in Resident Evil do not own, and do not wish to own, a GameCube – no matter how good the game is. Elsewhere in the chart, Nintendo DS game Catch! Touch! Yoshi! (aka Yoshi Touch & Go) has also made a relatively weak debut with 63,733 units sold. This does, however, make for three DS titles in the top ten, with no PSP titles at all. In hardware terms, the relative successes of the PSP and Nintendo DS are reversed, with Sony’s new portable selling 74,405 units for a 37.77 percent market share. This is followed by the PlayStation 2 at 29.79 percent, the Nintendo DS at 21.95 percent, the Game Boy Advance at 6.08 percent, the GameCube at 4.17 percent, and the XBox at 0.24 percent.

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