Like every Friday, Media Create published its top-50 weekly ranking  and full analysis today, following the top-20 released on Wednesday, and giving a bird-eye view on last week's performance of the Japanese market.

The sales data firm focuses on Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, that ranked first for the week, mentioning that the 218,168 copies sold represent 60.50% of the initial shipment, and are lower than the 357,000 copies sold by Yakuza 5 on PS3 (with a 65.8% sell-through). The new game also did not reach the debut results of Yakuza 0, that sold-through 236,000 copies on PS4 and PS3, representing 67.68% and 66.22% of the initial shipment respectively. According to Media Create, the result for the new game is "slightly unsatisfactory" compared to its predecessors.

While the firm mentions that this might be partly influenced by the release of large PS4 titles just before Yakuza 6,  despite the fact that PS4 sales have more than doubled since Yakuza 0, the total decreased, so the loss of PS3 users is a major factor.

On the positive side, we learn that software sales for the beginning of the holiday shopping season (counting the last two weeks of November and the first two of December), software sales in Japan have grown by 19.69% year-on-year, while hardware sales are up by 2.58% (which is quite relevant considering the demise of the Wii U, that performed solidly in the same period last year).

It's worth mentioning that Media Create does not count digital sales, but limits its analysis to brick and mortar stores. That said, Yakuza 6 didn't manage to dethrone Final Fantasy XV on the Japanese PlayStation Store, and we'll have to wait for Famitsu to release digital sales numbers next week to know more.

The Yakuza series does target a mature player base, and it's very possible that many Japanese players belonging to that age range might still own a PS3 as their primary gaming platform.

Having played Yakuza 6 quite extensively, I can say that it's definitely a great game. Unfortunately those who want to play it in English will have  to wait until early 2018 to get a taste of this game.Yet, we’ll get Yakuza 0 on January January 24th, 2017, and Yakuza Kiwami (the full remake of the original Yakuza) next summer.

If you want to see what the game looks like, you can check out the first 80 minutes, and 80 more featuring fighting, dining, exploring kamurocho and minigames.

We also have a video of the included port of Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, and two videos of the sexy but hilarious “live chat” minigame.