Japan Charts: Dragon Warrior remake dominates for a second week

Square Enix' latest instalment in the Dragon Warrior franchise, a PS2 remake of the SNES classic Dragon Warrior V, has held the top spot in the Japanese chart for a second week and continues to sell strongly, passing 1.3 million units overall.

Around 224,000 units of the game were sold in its second week at retail, putting it well ahead of every other title in the chart - although in a week when only six new games entered the top 100 ranking, with only two of them in the top 10, there wasn't much jockeying for position anyway.

Koei has the top ranked new release in the chart, with Nobunga's Ambition: Tenka Sousei selling around 32,000 units to reach number three - yet another game set in Japan's feudal past rolling out from the publisher which has made the samurai genre its own with franchises such as Dynasty Warriors.

Further down the ranking, Sony has the only other new entry of the week, with Dokodemo Issho: Toro and the Shooting Star, the latest in a series of titles to star the unusual cat-like character Toro, which became Sony's mascot in Japan after appearing in a number of games on the PocketStation device.

Elsewhere it's all familiar faces the top ten - with anime franchises Dragon Ball Z and Full Metal Alchemist appearing along with long-running series such as Dynasty Warriors, Pokemon and Super Mario Bros (with the super budget priced Famicom Mini version of the latter keeping it in the charts for yet another week).

Unsurprisingly, then, the whole market dropped off significantly during the week, and in fact game sales were back underneath 1 million units (just over 850,000 in fact) thanks to the lack of new titles on retail shelves.

In hardware terms, Dragon Warrior continues to do the business for the PS2, which once again had more than half of the market share - almost 52 per cent, in fact - and is properly outstripping the GBA (which has just over 41 per cent share) for the first time this year. The Cube meanwhile languishes on just over six per cent market share, and desperately needs some new software releases to help it pick up its fortunes once more after what was largely a good winter and early spring period for the Nintendo console.

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