Japan Chart: Winning Eleven 9 notches up half a million in first week

Konami's popular Winning Eleven series of football games has scored another success in the Far East, with the latest version - World Soccer Winning Eleven 9 - selling through around 574,000 units in its first week at retail.

The PS2 title - which will form the basis for the next Pro Evolution Soccer game in Europe - went straight in at number one in the ranking, leading a selection of strong new releases which helped to drive the market to sales of over 1.5 million units in total - its strongest point in several months.

Winning Eleven 9's sales are still not up to the standards of its predecessor, Winning Eleven 8, which sold just short of 700,000 units in its first week on sale; however, market watchers Media Create still expect the title's overall lifetime sales to be in line with the previous game in the series, which ended up selling over a million units.

Further down the ranking, Square Enix' new PS2 RPG title Grandia III came in at number two, followed by two more new RPGs at three and four - Cube title Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness and PS2 title Summon Night EX Thesis: Wings' Dawn.

Three more new titles entered the ranking this week, two of them PS2 games - From Software's Armored Core: Last Raven at number six and SCE's anime-licensed title Bleach: Selected Soul at number seven, following on from the successful Bleach title which appeared on the PSP earlier this year, Bleach: Beat The Soul.

The final new release was a DS title, with Konami's Power Pocket Koushien scraping into the ranking at number ten - joining Nintendo's own Gentle Brain Exercises (at number eight this week) to make for two DS titles in the ranking.

In hardware terms, though, the DS is still by far the best selling console in Japan, with just shy of 38 per cent market share this week - compared with just under 18 per cent for the PlayStation Portable, and 29.5 per cent for the PS2.