Japan Charts: Banpresto's Super Robot Wars scores another No.1
The latest instalment in Banpresto's long-running Super Robot Wars franchise, PS2 title Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, has gone in at number one in the Japanese charts - with first week sales of 470,000 units exceeding those of the last game in the series.
The latest instalment in Banpresto's long-running Super Robot Wars franchise, PS2 title Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, has gone in at number one in the Japanese charts - with first week sales of 470,000 units exceeding those of the last game in the series.
The Super Robot Wars franchise is one of the most popular strategy game series in Japan, and features robots and characters from a wide range of anime and manga ranging from series still running on TV now to those which date back as much as 30 years.
A number of other major new releases also flooded into the top ten this week, bringing overall sales of software to over 1.3 million units for the week - up massively on the previous week.
Sega's sports management title Let's Make Professional Baseball Teams! 3 was in at number two with sales of around 58,000 units, ahead of Aruze' PS2 RPG Shadow Hearts: From The New World, the third game in the Shadow Hearts series, which sold around 52,000 units.
Other new releaes included Genki's racing title Kaido: Touge no Densetsu, at number four in the chart, Tecmo adventure title Zero -Shisei no Koe- at five, and D3 Publisher's action game Simple 2000 Series Vol.81: The Earth Defense Forces 2.
The PS2 completely dominated the charts, with seven of the top ten titles being for Sony's home console, while two GBA games and one DS game made up the rest of the ranking - GBA titles Boktai 3 (No.7) and The King of Beetle Mushiking (No.10), and DS title Gentle Brain Exercises (No.9).
In hardware terms, however, the DS continued to lead the market by a major margin, with nearly 39 per cent market share this week - over double the sales of the PlayStation Portable, which had just over 17 per cent share. Looking at the year to date figures, the DS is now almost 155,000 units ahead of the PSP since January 1st, and of course already had a major lead at that point thanks to PSP hardware shortages last December.
The PS2 had 29 per cent market share, while at the other end of the market the Game Boy Advance had 11 per cent and the Cube had just three per cent share.