Pokémon Hits the Charts, HARD

The week is unusual in that although only one title sold above 100,000 units the sales for the rest of the top ten were remarkably even, with multiple games sharing the expanded business of the week. The top sellers were the two Nintendo DS Pokémon games, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, with the dual SKU title now having sold around 3.5 million copies in Japan alone.

The highest new entry of the week was a DS entry in ChunSoft’s core Mystery Dungeon series, one of the few games in the franchise which does not use a cross company license from Nintendo or Square Enix. The latest in the Wild Arms role-playing series also performed well at number eight, as did Pokémon Battle Revolution – the first major new release since the launch of the Wii and its first online title.

Western gamers though may be surprised to find that The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has charted only at number thirty-three, while the only other Wii titles outside the top ten are Wii Play at number twelve, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves at number thirty-six and anime license Bleach Wii at number fifty.

As is by now commonplace, the Nintendo DS was the best selling hardware of the week by a considerable margin, with a total of 319,866 unit sales. The Wii was next at 108,237 units, followed by the PlayStation 3 at 70,942, the PSP at 48,962 and the PlayStation 2 at 37,730 units.

TW	LW	Title	Publisher	Format	Weekly Sales
1	3	Pokémon Diamond	Nintendo	DS	123,573
2	5	Pokémon Pearl	Nintendo	DS	97,409
3	7	Hoshi no Kirby: Sanjou! Dorocche Dan	Nintendo	DS	92,173
4	NE	Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren DS	Sega	DS	88,242
5	12	New Super Mario Bros.	Nintendo	DS	77,761
6	11	Oshare Majo Love and Berry	Sega	DS	72,841
7	9	Jump Ultimate Stars	Nintendo	DS	71,339
8	NE	Wild Arms: The Vth Vanguard	Sony	PS2	70,476
9	6	Wii Sports	Nintendo	Wii	69,923
10	NE	Pokémon Battle Revolution	Nintendo	Wii	67,607