Botherer

Reviews: Japanese DS Round-Up

by John Walker on Feb.01, 2008, under Reviews

A new occasional column I’m doing for Eurogamer has its first entry posted. It’s a round-up of Japanese DS games that aren’t seeing releases in the West.

It begins like this:


The Nintendo DS is a phenomenon almost beyond our understanding. Sales in the UK are stunning, with the device proving appeal across all of gaming’s traditional boundaries. But it as nothing when compared to its success in Japan. It’s frankly bewildering.

The DS has now outsold the PS2 in lifetime sales. In Japan alone, 20,954,157 units have been sold. Pluck a random week in January and you find 103,000 were sold compared to 34,000 PS3s or 5,500 Xbox 360s. That means one in every six people in Japan own a DS, with up to 300,000 more going out on a weekly basis.

And the software is as crazy. Nintendo dominates Japanese software charts in a way that’s frankly embarrassing for everyone else. To take the same week, it saw the Wii and DS occupying 16 of the top 20 software sales, the DS claiming 9 of those spots. This was no anomaly. Week after week the top 10 is almost exclusively Nintendo. It’s another world.

2 Comments for this entry

  • Iain "DDude" Dawson
    February 1st, 2008 on 14:41

    Forgive me – I am reading this at college and haven’t been able to read the article due to some crazy surf-control system. I will read it as soon as I get home. I do first however want to express my first thought:

    Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!

  • pharoahe_monch
    February 2nd, 2008 on 07:36

    what’s up with these “videogame” reviews? all we yearn to read from you are those “tv series” reviews!