Japan Charts: Namco's Tales of Legendia debuts at number one

The latest title in Namco's hugely successful Tales of... series of RPGs has gone straight in at number one in the Japanese charts, with PS2 title Tales of Legendia selling some 242,000 units in its first weekend at retail.

However, the PS2 exclusive title failed to match up to the first week sales of Tales on Symphonia on the PS2, which racked up 265,000 units last September despite following on from a successful GameCube SKU some months earlier.

Only three other new releases made it into the top ten this week, with Bandai's latest Gundam title - Mobile Suit Gundam SEED DESTINY: Generation of C.E., which is based on the very latest Gundam TV series - being the next highest ranked, in at number two with about 118,000 sales.

Further down the ranking, Koei's horse racing game Winning Post 7 came in at number six, while Konami's DS title Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow propped up the bottom of the chart, coming in at number ten.

Another Bandai anime-licensed title, PS2 action game Naruto: Uzumaki Ninden, which is based on the hugely popular series Naruto, continued to sell strongly this week and took the number three spot in the chart.

It was a good week overall for the DS, with four games in the top ten - led by DS Training for Adults and Gentle Brain Exercises, which were at numbers four and seven respectively, and followed up by JUMP Super Stars (which brings together a number of characters from hugely popular weekly manga compilation Shonen Jump) at number eight.

In hardware terms, the Nintendo DS had some 48 per cent market share - representing sales of over 57,000 units and bringing the console's year to date sales in Japan sailing past the 1.5 million mark.

The PS2 had just short of 23 per cent share, while the PSP lagged behind once again with just 17 per cent market share - representing just over 20,000 units sold. Nintendo also sold nearly 12,000 units of the Game Boy Advance hardware during the week.