Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending July 31stJapanese Sales Charts, Week Ending July 31st

The Japanese games market has seen sales rocket as a result of a large number of new releases, with sales up 77 percent from last week, and currently at 175 percent of the weekly average. Unlike the Western world, the summertime is traditionally a strong sales period in Japan, so analysts that had been concerned that the upturn in sales was yet to appear have been mollified - though the strong showing is particularly bolstered by one title. Thus, the latest in Banpresto's popular Super Robot Wars strategy RPG series for PlayStation 2 topped the charts, with 470,003 units sold. The series, which brings together a range of otherwise disparate anime and manga licenses, can usually expect to enter straight in at number one, and this particular iteration has even been marginally more popular compared to sales of 385,000 for the last entry in the franchise. The next highest entry was Sega’s latest baseball simulation with 58,230 sales, followed by a new entry in the popular Shadow Hearts role-playing series with 51,829 sales, then racing title Kaido: Touge no Densetsu. The latest entry in Tecmo’s Fatal Frame (aka Project Zero) franchise managed 38,617 sales, with all the rest of the top ten also registering sales above 30,000. Despite the large number of new PlayStation 2 releases, the Nintendo DS’s dominance of the hardware market continued largely unabated, with 44,518 unit sales and a 38.82 percent market share. This was followed by the PlayStation 2 with 33,705 sales and a 29.39 percent market share, then the PSP with 20,031 sales and a 17.47 percent share. The Game Boy Advance followed with a 11.41 percent share, then the GameCube at 2.74 percent and the Xbox at 0.17 percent.

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