Japan charts: Cerberus drops to 7th

by Ross Miller { Feb 16th 2006 at 3:30PM }

In the latest figures to come out of Japan (yet to be translated into English, unfortunately), Square Enix's latest FFVII spinoff, Dirge of Cerberus has dropped from its initial top spot to 7th place. During the first week of launch (January 23-29), Cerberus scored an impressive 392,000 units in sales, but in the following week, ending February 5th, only managed around 45,000 in units sold.

Meanwhile, the Nintendo educational library continues its rise to power, with English Training DS and Brain Age 2, the former of which has sold nearly 350,000 units in the 2 weeks it has been available, claiming the top spot for last week. Coming in 2nd place (and 6th place the week prior), Brain Age 2 managed approximately 86,000 units in sales.

The top 10 titles for each week are still dominated by DS and Playstation 2 titles--in fact, not a single Xbox or Xbox 360 title broke into the top 50 in Japan for the week of January 30th - February 5th. Console sales also match software sales, with the 360 only pushing 2,194--58 more consoles than Nintendo GameCube, but about 23,000 less than top contenders PSP and DS. For the week ending January 29th, the DS claimed 60% of the market share, with the PSP trailing behind at 17%.

Also see:
Sales data for January 23 - January 29 (English)
Sales data for January 30 - February 5 (Japanese) (poor translation)

[Update: found a missing word, threw it up there to make the post look nice and...you know...comprehensible.]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

fawazr @ Feb 16th 2006 3:34PM

My mom really wants Brain Training. I don't know how she heard about it, but she asked me to get her a DS and Brain Training. She's always been attracted by small gaming devices, but this is a first time request for anything gaming related. Sadly, my mother has never heard of Cerberus. I, on the other hand, am awaiting a State-side release.

Jeff @ Feb 16th 2006 3:59PM

These are way old numbers. The latest ones for hardware:

http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=8272&page=22

You can find the software ones in Japanese if you dig around Famitsu and Dengeki.

Xbox 360 is down to 1,288 units sold last week. PSP is currently outselling the DS while everyone apparently waits for the DS Lite launch. Look for the DS Lite to do monster numbers in its first week. But there have obviously been major media events around the DS Lite during the last week, so everybody knows it's coming and is waiting for it.

As for the Brain Training series, yeah, my wife actually heard about this from her sister-in-law in Japan and they both want all these titles. And they're total non-gamers. So, that's the kind of people responsible for these sales numbers.

dsub @ Feb 16th 2006 4:32PM

I've read/watched some reviews and opinions on the game. It sounds like it sucks to be honest. In a 1up show from a couple weeks ago they got a japanese copy of the game, and there main complaints were that the control setup was terrible and had to be changed. The inversion of the Y axis is one of prefernce, but they said the X axis was inverted as well, as in left makes you go right, right makes you go left. Once cool thing was that a keyboard/mouse could be used, since The majority of the game can played like a first person shooter. They also said it was sometimes tough to use the mouse due to the drops in framerates from time to time, and the mouse sensitivity is directly tied into the framerate of the game. There is no way to link weapon/hand2hand attacks like in DMC/Ninja Gaiden. There is literally like a 1 second delay between shots fired with the guns, and the storyline seemed really one-dimensional, and time-line driven. As in go into level, kill guys, get keycard, open gate, move to next level, over and over again. They commented that the highlight of the game were the CG animations and cutscenes, that they claimed looked better than Advent Children. The end result of the opinions seemed to be that this was a poor attempt at square making an action/adventure game and they should stick to the RPG's.

I haven't played it, obviously, but those were the opinions of the reviewers that did. They did say at the end that square could possibly re-vamp the game before bringing it to america, but they said based on square's past, it's unlikely.

ReyBrujo @ Feb 16th 2006 4:39PM

Next Generation did a nice review of both Famitsu information and personal review about Kingdom Hearts II and Dirge. Check it at http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2256&Itemid=2

If you are a KH fan, be prepared for some slaps, like:

"I'm sorry, people: Kingdom Hearts is about businessmen choosing two things that are independently successful, and then putting them together, so that they are successful together."

As for Dirge, forcing Famitsu to delay scores didn't help.