The Japanese market continues to experience some weakness in sales, with figures up just 27 percent from last week and still only 60 percent of the weekly average. Sales have been helped somewhat, though, by a large number of new entries - with smaller titles taking advantage of the lull to perform well above their usual expectations. Success’ Metal Saga, a follow-up to role-playing game Metal Max, went straight into number one with very creditable sales of 63,219 units. Spike’s role-playing styled beat ‘em-up Kenka Banchou also did well with 39,195 sales, as did Banpresto’s soccer management title Soccer Life 2. Capcom’s long awaited Killer 7, though, has done poorly, with the PlayStation 2 version entering at only number eight, with just 11,253 sales, and the GameCube version only getting to number sixteen. It was still a good week for the Nintendo DS, however, which again dominated hardware sales with a 34.93 percent market share and 32,765 units sold. The PlayStation 2 was next with sales of 27,741 and a market share of 29.57 percent. The PSP was in third with 21,476 sales and a 22.89 percent market share – although again the format failed to place any titles in the top ten, with the highest ranked being last week’s new entry Eiyuu Densetsu Gagharv Trilogy: Shiroki Majo at number nineteen. Next in market share was the Game Boy Advance with a 9.74 percent slice of sales, followed by the GameCube at 2.73 percent and the Xbox at 0.14 percent.

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