Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending July 3rd

The Japanese software market has seen a very solid week of sales, with figures above the weekly average for the first time in several months. Bandai’s latest Gundam game for PlayStation 2 topped the charts with 85,989 sales, a figure that could have been much higher if not for many stores running out of stock. Around 97 percent of all available copies of the game were sold, with stores under-ordering after the relatively disappointing sales of Mobile Suit Gundam: The One Year War in April. Nintendo’s follow-up to DS Training For Adults: Work Your Brain also performed extremely well at its budget price, with 72,656 units of the 'brain training' software sold. Gentle Brain Exercises, erroneously described as a version of the earlier game for children by some sources, provides a very different range of mental exercises to the first and represents yet another success for Nintendo and its range of so-called “non-games”. Yoshiki Okamoto’s Genji for PlayStation 2 performed only a little below expectation with 70,082 sales, and elsewhere in the chart, Kagero II: Dark Illusion is actually the fourth iteration of Tecmo's action/puzzle series that began on the PSone and also enjoyed healthy sales of 61,949. Sega’s The King of Beetle Mushiking is also still performing well, with 58,751 sales. Despite the increase in software sales, hardware figures were largely identical to previous weeks, with the Nintendo DS leading the pack with a 34.20 percent market share and 35,083 sales. This was followed by the PlayStation 2 with a 29.24 percent market share and 29,992 sales and the PSP with a 21.35 percent share and 21,901 unit sales. The Game Boy Advance gained 12.49 percent of the market, with the GameCube at 2.54 percent and the Xbox at 0.18 percent.

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