Japan Charts: Koei's latest Dynasty Warriors revision goes top

Samurai action was at the top of the Japanese charts again this week, as Koei's Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires continued the success of the popular series with a number one debut and the market as a whole pushed past a million units once more.

Koei has had a good couple of months in Japan - its previous title, Sengoku Musou (which is being released as Samurai Warrior in Europe by EA this June) also went straight in at number one last month.

Much of the rest of the chart was dominated by sequels, with From Software's latest Armoured Core title, Nexus, in at number two just ahead of Sega's Sakura Wars Story: Mysterious Paris - a side-story in the popular Sakura Wars universe which should keep fans of the series happy until the launch of Sakura Wars 5 later this year.

Nintendo's GameCube version of Legend of Zelda: Four Swords came in at number five, while other updates to existing franchises were Popolo Crois: Adventure to Wake the Moon (Popolo Crois: Tsuki no Okite no Boken, another title in the mystifyingly popular saccharine-sweet series starring a very small prince) and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Ace Pilot (the less mystifyingly popular Gundam series, starring giant robots).

It wasn't all franchise updates this week though - and the Japanese game buying public demonstrated their love of extremely weird things by propelling Namco's frankly bizarre Katamari Damashii (Bundle of Souls), which sees the player steering an increasingly unwieldy bundle of "stuff" around a set of bonkers levels, to number six.

In hardware terms, it's all back to normal after last week's minor surges for the GameCube and Xbox, with the PS2 and GBA taking first and second honours with around 46 per cent market share each (the PS2 a tiny fraction in front this week), while the Cube drops back to seven per cent and the Xbox is back underneath one per cent.

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