Big in Japan Oct. 5-11: Pokemon HeartGold, SoulSilver

Nintendo's Pokemon franchise is big pretty much everywhere, but the latest sales charts serve as a reminder that Pikachu and company are clearly still Big in Japan. For the week of October 5-11, Japanese tracking firm Media-Create's top 10 software sales chart has the latest Pokemon titles, DS counterparts HeartGold and SoulSilver, combining to sell 188,625 copies, more than any other title in that span.

The kid-focused role-playing game usurped a fellow Nintendo title to claim the sales throne, pushing the previous week's champ--Wii Fit Plus--down to the second spot with 152,587 sold. Nintendo also scored chart positions with its latest evergreen titles, the DS Tomodachi Collection (fifth place) and Wii Sports Resort (seventh).

Nintendo took up 40 percent of the top 10 just with its own published titles, a measure matched by its third-party publishers. Atlus' latest DS RPG, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, was a strong third place, selling 97,221 copies. Meanwhile, Level Five's Inazuma Eleven 2 continued its strong performance from the previous week, with the Fire and Blizzard variants of the game combining for fourth place, and Konami's Love Plus and Square Enix's Dragon Quest IX rounded out the list in the ninth and 10th spots, respectively.

Only two games unrelated to Nintendo and its systems appeared on the top 10 for the week, both of them for Sony's PSP. The handheld edition of Gran Turismo sped into sixth place, while Namco's Robotech game Macross Ultimate Frontier landed in eighth.

On the hardware side, numbers were down slightly across the board, but the order of systems remained the same. The DSi topped all comers with more than 50,000 sold, while the PSP notched a little over 40,000 and the PS3 and Wii fought over third place with less than 31,000 each.

JAPAN GAME SALES WEEK OF OCTOBER 5-11, 2009

Software:
Rank / Title / Publisher / Platform / Unit sales
1) Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver / Nintendo / DS / 188,625
2) Wii Fit Plus / Nintendo / Wii / 152,587
3) Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey / Atlus / DS / 97,221
4) Inazuma Eleven 2: Kyoui no Shinryokusha Fire and Blizzard / Level Five / DS / 95,515
5) Tomodachi Collection / Nintendo / DS / 62,772
6) Gran Turismo / SCE / PSP / 39,948
7) Wii Sports Resort / Nintendo / Wii / 24,130
8) Macross Ultimate Frontier / Namco / PSP / 18,804
9) Love Plus / Konami / DS / 18,777
10) Dragon Quest IX / Square Enix / DS / 15,961

Hardware:
DSi - 50,144
PSP - 40,100
PS3 - 30,896
Wii - 30,741
DS Lite - 5,454
Xbox 360 - 3,326
PS2 - 2,133