Japan Charts: Dragon Quest VIII still on top as DS launch dominates ranking

Square Enix' epic RPG title Dragon Quest VIII held onto its position at the top of the Japanese software charts this week, but the rest of the ranking was all about the Nintendo DS, with six DS titles in the top ten.

PS2 exclusive title Dragon Quest VIII sold around 476,000 units in its second week, bringing overall sales well over the quarter million mark, although after a stronger launch week, its sales have now dropped behind those of the previous title in the series - which sold over 1.1 million units in its second week.

After Dragon Quest, however, the rest of the top five is made up of Nintendo DS titles, led by Super Mario 64 DS at number two and Wario Ware: Touched! at number three, both of which are estimated to have managed around 60,000 unit sales.

In fact, the other nine titles in the top ten are exclusively for Nintendo systems - along with the six DS games, there's a GBA title at number six (Konami's Power Pro-kun Pocket 7), and two GameCube titles at numbers seven (Mario Party 6) and ten (Naruto 3).

The other DS titles which made it into the ranking were, in order of sales, Pokemon Dash, Dai Gassou! Band Brothers, Feel the Magic XY/XX (called "Kimi no Tame nare Shinai" in Japan), and Chokkan Hitofude.

In hardware terms, the DS' 470,000 tracked sales amounted to nearly 79 per cent of the market, shoving the PS2 back to 15.72 per cent market share (which still represents over 90,000 units sold by our reckoning) and the Game Boy Advance down to just under five per cent.

The huge boost to the size of the hardware market caused by the system launch also pushed the GameCube below one per cent market share for the first time, with the console dropping to 0.92 per cent.