PSP and Monster Hunter leading in Japan

Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G has gobbled up competition during the first half of 2008 in Japan.

The Capcom PSP outing managed to sell a massive 2.3 million copies in six months, according to Famitsu figures (translated by helpful NeoGAF readers).

That put it streets ahead of the following Wii trio: Super Smash Bros. Brawl with 1.6 million, Mario Kart Wii with 1.5 million and Wii Fit with 1.4 million. The latter takes its lifetime total to 2.2 million.

Those four were by far the stand out successes of 2008. Pokemon Ranger Battonage (DS) and Metal Gear Solid 4 were almost neck-and-neck at the helm of the chasing pack with sales of 576,467 and 576,437, respectively.

Old timer Wii Sports took seven and broke 3 million lifetime sales, as did Mario Kart DS, which finished the first half of 2008 at nine.

The others in the top 10 were Mario Party DS at eight with over 1.5 million lifetime sales, and Wii Play at 10 with 2.4 million lifetime sales.

In the entire top 100, 42 games appeared on DS, 19 on Wii, 17 on PSP, 11 on PS2, 10 on PS3 and just one on Xbox 360 - karaoke game Idolmaster at 87.

But despite having just 17 best-sellers, the PSP topped the hardware charts with 1.97 million units sold. Close behind were the predictable Nintendo duo Wii and DS, with 1.72 million and 1.59 million units sold, respectively.

They were comfortably ahead of the PS3 that sold 548,273 consoles and finally managed to step out of the shadow cast by PS2, which managed to sell 257,702 consoles.

Xbox 360 sold just 80,290 units in the entire six months.

The most successful publisher in the region was Nintendo with 28 top 40 games and over 10 million sales. Namco Bandai came close with 22 games in the chart, but commanded just shy of 4 million sales.

Capcom almost met that with 3.7 million sales from just five best-sellers (one of those was Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G), and Konami must have felt hard done by with nine favourites but only 2.5 million sales.

SEGA was the next highest with five popular titles and 1.3 million sales.

Weekly Japanese figures are expected tomorrow.