The short-term cyclical churn that is the Japanese games market has taken a turn for the better this week, with sales up 156 percent from last week and 17 percent above the weekly average.
The number one selling game was Square Enix’s remake of its SNES hit
Romancing SaGa, with an impressive 216,904 units sold (compared to 858,000 for the original), with 95 percent of stock sold out.
However, the larger news is the enormous effect that the new different-colored versions of the Nintendo DS and the release of
Nintendogs have had on the market. 96,191 Nintendo DS were sold during the week, for a massive 52.86 percent share of the market. This is more than every other format combined, including the PSP's with 33,004 sales. This means the PlayStation 2 could manage only a 18.18 percent market share, the PSP 18.14 percent, the Game Boy Advance 6.18 percent, the GameCube 4.58 percent and the Xbox 0.06 percent.
Thanks to strong advertising and an already infamous 40/40 score in the influential Famitsu magazine,
Nintendogs was the best selling Nintendo DS game of the week, with the three versions (all of which are functionally identical except for different breeds of dog – in a similar variegation to
Pokémon titles) selling a combined 180,974 units. This makes the game the fastest selling Nintendo DS title yet, and the likely more mainstream appeal for
Nintendogs suggests the game will likely to continue to be a significant seller for many weeks to come.
Tomy’s third placed title
Naruto title sold 84,195 units, proving again that the Naruto anime license is well suited to a Nintendo audience, following its emergence as the most successful third-party series on the GameCube.
With the Nintendo DS also outselling the PSP in three of the previous four weeks it seems that the next-generation portable battle is evolving along very different lines than many analysts predicted, in Japan at least. Sony has now shipped (as opposed to sold) a total of 2.97 million PSP consoles worldwide (with a European launch not scheduled until September), whereas Nintendo yesterday announced that global sales had eclipsed 5 million (not the 3 million erroneously reported by Nintendo of Europe earlier in the week).
| TW | LW | Title | Publisher | Format | Release Date |
| 1 | NE | Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song | Square Enix | PS2 | 2005.04.21 |
| 2 | NE | Fire Emblem: Souen no Kiseki | Nintendo | GC | 2005.04.20 |
| 3 | NE | Naruto: Saikyou Ninja Daikesshuu 3 | Tomy | DS | 2005.04.21 |
| 4 | NE | Nintendogs: Shiba and Friends | Nintendo | DS | 2005.04.21 |
| 5 | NE | Nintendogs: Dachshund and Friends | Nintendo | DS | 2005.04.21 |
| 6 | NE | Nintendogs: Chihuahua and Friends | Nintendo | DS | 2005.04.21 |
| 7 | NE | Baseball Live 2005 | Namco | PS2 | 2005.04.21 |
| 8 | NE | Rockman Zero 4 | Capcom | GBA | 2005.04.21 |
| 9 | 2 | Kidou Senshi Gundam: One Year War | Bandai | PS2 | 2005.04.07 |
| 10 | NE | Shutokou Battle | Genki | PSP | 2005.04.21 |
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