Sega’s Love and Berry Tops Busy Japanese Game Charts

After a quiet couple of weeks, the Japanese sales charts have suddenly become a hive of activity, with numerous new entries and a hugely successful debut for Sega’s Oshare Majo: Love and Berry for Nintendo DS (to be known as Love and Berry: Dress Up and Dance in the West). Despite Sega offering surprisingly little support for the Nintendo DS to this point, the collectible card game and arcade game tie-in sold over 400,000 units in its first week, with gameplay somewhat similar to Mushiking: King of the Beetles, but aimed at young girls. The second highest new entry of the week was Jump Ultimate Stars, the sequel to Nintendo’s Jump Super Stars. Despite featuring almost every character from the iconic Shonen Jump manga the original 2D beat ‘em-up was a mild disappointment in sales, and this sequel, at just over 150,000 for the first week, looks to be destined for similarly moderate success. The third title of the week (not including Pokemon Diamond/Pearl) to chart over 100,000 unit sales is the latest iteration of the Winning Eleven soccer series from Konami, in this case an updated version of the Japanese original featuring content from the European version of Pro Evolution Soccer 6. Perhaps the most notable new entry of the week though is Tecmo’s Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 at number eight, which is the first Xbox 360 ever to chart in the Japanese top ten – and with a highly creditable unit sales figure of around 45,000 as well. The game came in just ahead of role-playing game Jeanne D'Arc on PSP, proving that, despite relatively low hardware sales both formats can still generate significant software sales with the right games. In hardware sales the Nintendo DS was still number one by a considerable margin, with 201,590 unit sales. Sony managed to sell an additional 32,662 PlayStation 3 consoles, as well as 30,815 of the PSP and 26,263 of the PlayStation 2. Boosted by the release of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 the Xbox 360 rose to 7,007 unit sales – although the relatively minor increase suggests that a majority of the game’s sales went to existing owners. The Game Boy Advance family of consoles sold 2,526 units and the GameCube 576.

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