The Animals stampede onto the DS (and the sales charts) in the week ending November 27th.

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

Animal Crossing has hit the DS in a big way. As reported earlier, the game's two day sales alone eclipsed 250k copies. By the end of the week, that number grew to over 325k (with many of those going to new DS owners, more on that later.) Online usage statistics from the Japanese will hopefully be made available soon, but it is clear the game has successfully struck a chord in the Japanese market and it will be interesting to see what kind of legs the title can continue to run with in the coming weeks.

Animal Crossing was not the lone new Nintendo platform release to leave its mark on the charts. Joining it were the latest versions of the Gamecube's ever-popular Naruto fighting game and Capcom's latest Rockman EXE title (also known as Megaman Battle Network.) Rockman in particular, like the version before it, debuted in two configurations and combined to sell more than 170k copies. DS, GCN and GBA: the three-pillar strategy is still looking viable. Sonic Rush, the hedgehog's latest turbo platformer, unfortuneately was not able to crack the Top 10 (it came in at 40). Meanwhile, erstwhile chart darling Brain Training fell out of the Top 10 due to the strength and number of the new releases...but expect to see its return in some form very soon. If not the original, the upcoming sequel will be sure to garner plenty of attention.

Weekly software numbers follow:

In hardware, DS sales doubled on the strength of Animal Crossing to sell over 130k units. This amounted to more new systems than all other hardware combined. With a very promising lineup of games scheduled for the rest of the month (including Mario Kart DS), expect the dual-screened portable to continue to rack up impressive figures for the coming month.

The week's console numbers follow: