A clean sweep for Sony consoles and PS3 games in Japan. Well, nearly…

It’s been a while since we last took a slightly puzzled look at the Japanese games market. But much has changed since we last visited, not least of which an apparent end to Nintendo’s stranglehold of the software charts - Wii and DS games now only account for four of the top ten games versus six for Sony platforms. Who knew!

It’s a similar picture for hardware sales, with Sony machines taking two of the top three positions. Meanwhile the Wii is almost, er, doing a bit of an Xbox. See what we mean:

Playstation Portable - 46,463
Nintendo DS - 39,135
Playstation 3 - 28,014
Wii - 17,941
Xbox 360 - 8,878
Playstation 2 - 4,844

Onto those games, and the top two places belong to the Playstation 3. Sony has three out of the four new entries on the top ten too (in bold). Moreover, though, this week’s chart is significant simply because it contains games we’ve actually flipping heard of! Here we go then:

1. Warriors Orochi Z (PS3) - 112,283
2. Resident Evil 5 (PS3) - 61,483
3. Rittai Picross 3D (DS) - 38,056
4. Mario & Luigi RPG 3 (DS) - 37,907
5. Dynasty Warriors: Strike force (PSP) - 33,255
6. New Control Play! Pikmin 2 (Wii) - 28,706
7. Yakuza 3 (PS3) - 23,815
8. 7th Dragon (DS) - 22,341
9. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G (PSP) - 16,209
10. Resistance: Retribution (PSP) - 15,651