Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending August 7th

Overall sales have increased again in Japan this week, up 17 percent on last week and almost twice the weekly average. Not only that but three of the top ten titles recorded sales of over 100,000, making this late summer period one of the busiest so far this year in Japan. Konami’s PlayStation 2 version of World Soccer Winning Eleven 9 (which will form the basis of Pro Evolution Soccer 5 in Europe) easily dominated the other titles, with 573,847 units sold. This is marginally down on the approximately 697,000 first week sales of its immediate predecessor, although analysts are still predicting that the latest iteration will achieve total sales of over one million in Japan. The next highest-ranking game, with 121,935 sales, was GameArts' critically acclaimed PS2 role-playing game Grandia III, now one of Square Enix’s key RPG franchises after Dragon Quest. The third highest ranking game was Pokemon XD, which has received a somewhat frostier critical reception but nevertheless managed to achieve 103,080 sales. This includes copies of the game bundled with new GameCube consoles, with hardware sales for the format rising by around a third, to 4,445 units. Banpresto’s role-playing title Summon Night EX Thesis also performed extremely well, with a total of 95,487 units sold. In hardware sales, the Nintendo DS continued to lead the pack, with sales of 43,665 for a 37.81 percent market share. This was followed by the PlayStation 2 with 34,057 and a 29.49 percent share of the market, and the PSP with 20,571 sales and a 17.81 percent share. Next was the Game Boy Advance at 10.84 percent, the GameCube at 3.85 percent and the Xbox at 0.20 percent.

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