The week ending September 24th, right ahead of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl's debut, proved relatively calm... perhaps like a calm before a storm. The monsters are coming.

Courtesy of Media-Create, we have the most recent sales figures from Japan.

Software sales were relatively quiet as the PS2's Everyone's Tennis again led the pack. It should be pointed out however that Square-Enix's Final Fantasy III would likely have much higher figures if not for a frustrating limitation: there aren't enough DS cards being manufactured to satisfy the surging demand of publishers. Since its release, the RPG has steadily sold out of its weekly allotment...and it looks to cast a bitter eye toward the new Pokemon as the major culprit for the shortage in storage.

Nintendo has likely been quietly squirreling away DS cards in preparation for the mammoth demand upon that game's release (and we are talking all regions here, a difficult task to be sure). If rumblings from the first several days of the new Diamond/Pearl era ring true, their actions were still not enough to feed Japan's need for the little monsters.

In hardware sales, the sales distribution did not differ much from recent months. Most notable is what to expect next week...when the official results from the launch of Pokemon Diamond/Pearl come in. Expect big numbers. Very big numbers.

The weekly software numbers follow:

The week's console numbers follow: