Japan Charts: Winning Eleven 7 goes in at number one

The release of some of the biggest games of the summer so far in Japan has seen the market recover from a months-long slump at last, with Konami's Winning Eleven 7 and Square Enix' Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle leading the charts.

Winning Eleven 7 managed sales of over 640,000 in its first week on sale, a significant proportion of the 1.75 million units sold in total by the top 100 games in Japan during the week.

Square Enix' Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle on the GameCube also did well, coming in at number two in the chart with strong sales despite a mixed critical reaction to the title among Japanese consumer magazines. The game charted ahead of Banpresto's PS2 RPG, Summon Night 3, and another Banpresto title, the GBA edition of massively popular strategy franchise Super Robot Battle D, which took third and fourth place respectively.

Football isn't the only sport which is doing the business for Konami at the moment, though, with the company's Jikkyo Power Pro Baseball 10 also continuing to sell well and holding on in the top ten at number seven.

Elsewhere, Nintendo's Pokemon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire on the GBA charts at number five, and the company also has two other entries in the top ten - Mario Advance 4 at number nine, and Kirby Air Ride on the Cube at number ten.

Last week's number one, Bandai's anime series tie-in title Mobile Suit Gundam SEED on the PS2, slips back to number eight after a strong start in the charts.

In terms of hardware, it's a good week for the Gamecube, with a jump to 18 per cent of the market share prompted no doubt by the release of Crystal Chronicle. Game Boy Advance continues to rule the roost however, with 45.1 per cent of the market (33.9 per cent of that being GBA SP), while the PS2 holds 35.24 per cent.

In terms of the smaller players, the Xbox has fallen behind the PSone again - PSone has 0.61 per cent, and Xbox is languishing on 0.44 per cent, just one tenth of one per cent ahead of the SwanCrystal handheld. While there seems to be no imminent danger of Japanese retail dropping the Xbox outright, as some UK retailers have done with the GameCube, it's reported that many major outlets there are now devoting less shelf space to Xbox products than to software and hardware for the long-dead Dreamcast.

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