This Week In Sales: Zelda: Ocarina Of Time 3D Is Nintendo 3DS’ Epona

Period: The week of Jun 13th – Jun 19th (2011)

Top-seller:The Little Battlers – 166,187

Nintendo 3DS sales: 40,649 | Total sales: 1,130,197

This week’s sales chart is an exciting one, and there’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump right in. Last week saw the release of two very high-profile games: The Little Battlers (PSP) from Level 5 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (3DS) from Nintendo. The former took the top spot in the sales chart, coming in at 166,187 units.

Level 5 included a do-it-yourself model of the AX-00 Achilles, a robot in the game, with every copy of The Little Battlers. For a new franchise, that’s a rather impressive first week number. We’ll see how The Little Battlers holds up in the weeks to come, but Level 5 already have grand plans for the franchise that include a manga, an anime and more plastic model toys.

Ocarina of Time 3D was extremely close behind The Little Battlers at 164,110 units, and the game gave the Nintendo 3DS system a significant sales boost, making it the top-selling hardware for the week.

For comparison, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks released on the Nintendo DS in 2009 — well after the system had established itself and amassed a large install base in Japan — and in its first week, Spirit Tracks sold 291,496 units. While that’s an admirable number, it was less than half of the game’s generous first shipment. This resulted in Spirit Tracks quickly being slashed in price due to an overabundance of copies in the market. To put it simply, supply outweighed demand.

The new lower price enabled Spirit Tracks to remained on the sales chart for a surprisingly long time, but clearly, Nintendo were keen to avoid a similar situation this time around, as Ocarina of Time 3D has reportedly received a relatively lower shipment in Japan. It should be interesting to see how the game holds up in the weeks ahead.

Now, we come to Steins;Gate, which saw not one, but three separate releases on the Xbox 360 this week. Steins;Gate: Hiyoku Renri no Darling is a different take on the game, with Play-Asia describing it as more of a “love comedy” than the grabbing sci-fi adventure it’s known to be. Hiyoku Renri no Darling sold 31,666 units.

Following it at 11,000 units was a Steins;Gate Double Pack, which contains both an Xbox 360 “Platinum Collection” re-release of the original Steins;Gate as well as Hiyoku Renri no Darling. Finally, the standalone Platinum Collection re-release of Steins;Gate was also released the same week.

That doesn’t mark the end for Steins;Gate though. This week, the game will be released on the PSP, and sometime this summer, 5pb will follow up with an iTunes release for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. That’s a lot of Steins;Gate.

Finally, the top-20 sales chart for the week is as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer, Media-Create and Geimin.net.