Japanese Sales Charts, Week Ending October 30

Sales have remained steady this week in Japan at 89 percent of the weekly average, lead by an unexpectedly strong start for Wanda to Kyozou (aka Shadow of the Colossus). The game sold 140,295 units, almost three quarters of the lifetime sales for the same team’s previous game, ICO. Stock levels were running low on the game in many stores, with a 78.49 percent sell-through rate suggesting a strong second week of sales is also likely. The second highest new entry was Western-developed GameCube title Totsugeki! Famicom Wars (aka Battalion Wars) which, although it sold only 25,568, is still an impressive result for a format which has failed to impress in terms of hardware sales all year in Japan. In fact, the game has done significantly better than Advance Wars: Dual Strike in Japan which sold only 11,930 on its debut in July. Although the Advance Wars name was removed from the game in the West, the Japanese equivalent of Famicon Wars was retained, leading to confusing signals as to the franchise’s popularity in Japan. Although none of the other games in the top ten sold in particularly significant numbers, they did all chart more than 20,000 sales each, an improvement on recent weeks. Also of note is the disappearance of Nou Ryoku Trainer Portable, Sega’s Brain Training-esque game for the PSP, from the top ten after just one week. This seems to suggest it does not have the staying power of its DS counterparts (although it has dropped to just number eleven), and certainly it has had nowhere near the equivalent effect on PSP hardware sales. The Nintendo DS continues to lead Japanese hardware sales, with a 39.62 percent market share and 46,826 unit sales. The PSP is in second place again, though, with a 23.56 percent market share and 27,837 units sold, followed by the PlayStation 2 with an 18.60 percent share and 21,976 sales. With no significant new software release sales, the Game Boy Advance family of consoles slipped even more significantly this week, to just 15.64 percent of the overall market (Game Boy Micro: 11,656, Game Boy Advance SP: 6,515, Game Boy Advance: 321). GameCube market share was at 2.48 percent and Xbox at 0.10 percent.

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