Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending March 19

The long awaited release of Final Fantasy XII has, as expected, debuted straight in at number one in the Japanese sales charts, with 1,764,266 units sold. The figure is more than the approximately 1.5 million sold in its first week by Final Fantasy X-2, and in-line with the 1.8 million first week sales of Final Fantasy X before that. This confirms the Final Fantasy series as the overall third best selling franchise in Japan, behind Dragon Quest and Pokémon. As might be expected, few publishers risked releasing a major new title at the same time as Final Fantasy XII, with the second highest new entry being rhythm action combo GuitarFreaks V & DrumMania V, with just 17,520 unit sold, followed by Nintendo DS mini-game collection Chou-Gekijou-Ban Keroro Gunsou with 15,650 sales. The rest of the chart is dominated by Nintendo DS releases, with Animal Crossing: Wild World notching up another 70,932 unit sales at number two. The success of the Nintendo DS software titles have clearly been helped by hardware sales of the format, with stock still limited but no longer entirely sold out. 136,557 Nintendo DS consoles were sold overall, with 104,452 DS Lite and 32,105 of the original model. The release of Final Fantasy XII helped PlayStation 2 sales to triple to 66,670 units, while other formats saw themselves squeezed out to a degree, with the PSP selling only 31,848 units, and the Game Boy Advance family of consoles 7,508. The GameCube could manage only 1,318 units sold, while the Xbox 360 came perilously close to dipping under 1,000 units, at 1,039.

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