Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending December 4 2

Japan continues to enjoy healthy sales for the time of year, with sales still 55 percent above the weekly average, down only 17 percent on last week’s more significant raft of new releases. The charts are dominated by titles running on Nintendo hardware, with only two games (albeit both within the top three) on anything other than Nintendo formats. Of those, Capcom has also had an extremely good week with the PS2 release of Biohazard 4 (aka Resident Evil 4), finding particular initial success. The game recorded first week sales of 242,878, already beating the lifetime total of approximately 220,000 units for the earlier GameCube version. Capcom also had a surprising level of success with its PSP iteration of Monster Hunter, which sold 113,640 unit, with an stock sell-through rate of 80 percent and a high attachment rate to new hardware. The series is much more popular in Japan than in the West, but this level of success on the PSP was unexpected, with the game performing much better than previous PSP hopefuls such as Word Soccer Winning Eleven 9. Elsewhere in the top ten, Oide yo Doubutsu no Mori (aka Animal Crossing: Wild World) recorded one of the best second week totals so far this year, with 130,355 units sold. Other new Nintendo DS releases performed slightly disappointingly, though, with Square Enix’s new Dragon Quest spin-off recording only 45,810 sales and what will be known in the West as Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors 2 registering just 35,675 sales. Thanks to the popularity of Monster Hunter, the PSP has had its best week of hardware sales since February in Japan, with a highly impressive 92,121 units sold for a 28.53 percent share of the market. However, even this has been dwarfed by the Nintendo DS, which beat even last week’s results, despite the relative underperformance of new titles, for a total of 176,958 unit sales. Once again, it outsold every other format combined for a 54.81 percent market share. The PlayStation 2 sold 32,042 consoles this week for a 9.92 percent market share, followed by the Game Boy Advance family with a 4.68 percent share (Game Boy Micro: 7,911, Game Boy Advance SP: 6,797, Game Boy Advance: 386), the GameCube with 2.01 percent and the Xbox with 0.05 percent.

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