This week in Japan: DS sales > Everything else put together

[Great Rumbler]

Courtesy of Media-Create, we have the most recent sales figures from Japan.

This week's sales, while not as strong overall as last week's surge where buyers snapped up a myriad of new releases, nevertheless were robust. As everyone and their babysitter had expected, Jump Super Stars (JSS) led the way with sales of over 200k. While PS2 soccer juggernaut World Soccer Winning Eleven remained strong, it was followed by 4 consecutive Nintendo platform titles (all previous releases.)

Somewhat surprisingly, and likely spurred on by the gravitational forces put in motion by JSS, DS cerebral favorites Gentle Brain Exercises and Brain Training staged a mighty comeback in the charts. Wow...special software indeed: whereas Exercises made a significant jump from last weeks sales, Training returned to the Top 10 from where it had been absent for the last two weeks.

Representing the GC was Pokemon XD in its second week of sales. Meanwhile, the GBA had its champion in the form of the popular beetle-battling game Mushiking. The full top 10 is below...have a look:

No. System Title Publisher
1 DS JUMP Super Stars 220,912 Nintendo
2 PS2 World Soccer Winning Eleven 9 102,048 Konami
3 DS Gentle Brain Exercises 46,973 Nintendo
4 GBA The King of Beetle Mushiking: Greatest Champion 36,309 Sega
5 GC Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness 34,108 Nintendo
6 PS2 Medal of Honor European Assault 33,361 EA
7 DS Brain Training 30,518 Nintendo
8 PS2 Mobile Suit Gundam - Girren's Greed "Blood of Zeon" 28,460 Bandai
9 PS2 Grandia III 27,378 Square Enix
10 PS2 Super Robot Wars Alpha 3 26,567 Banpresto

The fundamental order of the charts has not changed...but this week did indeed bring some shakeup as over 100k new DS' flew off the shelves, outselling all other platforms combined. Many of those new DS' likely sported the shiny new red color, but of course the main factor leading to the sales explosion was the release of JSS. Actually, most of the other consoles saw sales boosts as well, perhaps affected by the coming of Japan's Bon holiday...the good ol' GBA SP itself sold nearly 20k units. Nintendo Handhelds...indeed Japan still loves you.

Here are the figures in detail:

No. Console Week Sales Last Week Sales Year Sales
1 Nintendo DS 103,095 43,665 1,382,040
2 PlayStation 2 37,041 34,057 1,289,389
3 PlayStation Portable 25,100 20,571 1,126,231
4 Game Boy Advance SP 19,958 12,107 466,615
5 GameCube 3,799 4,445 144,385
6 Game Boy Advance 708 419 16,508
7 Xbox 202 228 9,584

So much for the PSP.

Cube-Europe

[Dark Jaguar]

While I understand the PS2 underselling at this point (it's been out for years now, I'm pretty sure almost everyone who wants one already has one now), the PSP underselling by that great a margin says something.

Jump Super Stars... I really didn't have any idea what the big deal about that game was, starring a number of... guys... I never even heard of. Then I found out it's based on the Super Smash Bros fighting engine and is probably even being made by HAL themselves. This leaves me wanting it, even if I have no idea who Monkey is.

[A Black Falcon]

Jump Super Stars, SSB-style game with a bunch of characters from the Jump manga (not a single manga, but a book that collects various serieses)... so it's going to be very popular in Japan because a lot of well-known (there) anime characters are in it. ... I wonder if it'll ever come out here...

[Great Rumbler]

It's also nice to see Gentle Brain Exercises and Brain Training still doing well.

[A Black Falcon]

More games we probably won't see...

[Great Rumbler]

We might see them eventually, but I won't hold my breath for it.