Japan Charts: New Cube and GBA titles lead market recovery

A slew of new GameCube and Game Boy Advance titles led a major recovery for the Japanese software market last week, as Nintendo's Cube RPG Paper Mario went in at number one and four GBA titles entered the top ten.

A strong performance for Nintendo's platforms in the first week of the Japanese summer holiday saw almost a rise of almost a quarter of a million units in software units sold on its consoles, compared with a decline of about 100,000 on Sony's systems.

Paper Mario, the critically acclaimed sequel to the N64 role-playing title of the same name, sold through 159,000 units in its opening weekend, and is expected to see sales grow over the coming weeks.

It was followed at number two by From Software's Tenchu: Kurenai on the PS2, which sold 76,000 units. The franchise, formerly owned by Activision, was sold to From Software only a few weeks ago.

GBA titles made up the rest of the new chart entries; Konami's Boktai 2 Solar Boy Django was at number four with 38,000 sales, while Tomy's Naruto RPG title (based on the enormously popular anime series) was at number five.

Two more titles based on popular anime series complete the new GBA titles in the ranking, with Bandai's Fullmetal Alchemist: Sonata of Memories, based on the popular Square Enix property, at number seven, while Banpresto's Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku II International scraped in at number ten.

Once again the PS2 was the best selling console in Japan last week, with over 46 per cent market share compared to around 42 per cent for the Game Boy Advance, but the GameCube also saw sales surge to take about 11 per cent market share in a week when all the major consoles experienced a major sales increase.