Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending November 20

In an interesting week in Japanese sales, the market has begun to ramp up in terms of releases, and as a result, a number of high profile software titles have debuted, as well as the new “Giga Pack” for the PSP, resulting in sales 32 percent above the weekly average. The new PSP bundle sells for ¥29,800 ($250), and includes the console, a 1GB memory stick, stand and various other accessories. The pack is intended only to be sold this winter, but has proven extremely successful, with hardware sales almost doubling. The news has not been all good for Sony, though, as the PSP has still not managed to outsell the Nintendo DS - although it has come the closest since Nintendo’s portable pulled ahead in weekly sales during the spring. Even more worrying for Sony is that, despite the large increase in console sales there is still not a single PSP game in the top ten, with the highest ranking title being Sega’s ,Brain Training game at number twelve. This is one of only six PSP titles in the top fifty, with language translation program Talkman meeting with relatively little success at number fourteen. The number one selling game of the week was a new Gundam Seed title from Bandai, with a highly impressive 298,364 unit sold. This is significantly better than Generation of C.E., the last Gundam Seed title for the PS2, which managed only 118,343 units when it was released in August. So strong was the sales of Gundam Seed that it even managed to keep Nintendo’s Pokémon franchise at bay, with the two versions of spin-off title Mysterious Dungeon (developed by Chunsoft and based on their existing franchise of the same name, which has already seen crossovers with various Square Enix properties) selling a combined 236,454 units. As usual, the two games are virtually identical, to encourage trading of characters, but this is the first time that Nintendo has made one version for the Nintendo DS and the other for the Game Boy Advance. Interestingly, the Nintendo DS version sold the best, with 123,556 sales versus 112,898. As noted, the Nintendo DS remained the best selling console in Japan this week with a 39.04 percent market share and 65,341 unit sales. This was closely followed by the PSP at 35.19 percent and 58,898 unit sales. The PlayStation 2 could manage only a 12.61 percent market share and 21,102 sales, followed by the Game Boy Advance family of consoles at 9.69 percent (Game Boy Micro: 9,140, Game Boy Advance SP: 6,822, Game Boy Advance: 249). The GameCube had a 3.38 percent market share, and the Xbox 0.08 percent.

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