Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending October 31st

Japanese sales have increased as the market enters the busy winter period, but are still only 79 percent of the weekly average. The improvement this week is due to a number of new releases, although all were relatively minor, save for the debut of Nintendo's GameCube title Mario Power Tennis. Nintendo’s latest franchise title sold a respectable 186,000 units, but all the other new releases sold through under 50,000, with role-playing games Stella Deus and Waga Ryuu o Miyo selling just 34,000 and 31,000, respectively. However, with these two games at least, demand has outstripped supply, with many stores running out of stock. Nonetheless, perhaps the most interesting new entry is Activision's True Crime: Streets of LA at number ten. Although its sales are not extraordinary, it is yet another success for Capcom (who also distributed Grand Theft Auto and The Getaway in Japan), in selling violently action-packed Western titles to the normally disinterested Japanese public. In hardware sales, the GameCube has had one of its best weeks all year, finally managing to get into double figures with a 10.78 percent market share. The Game Boy Advance was once again the market leader with a 54.73 percent share, followed by the PlayStation 2 at 33.81 percent (still suffering in anticipation of the release of the new hardware) and the Xbox at 0.47 percent.

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