This Week In Sales: Dragon Quest Builders Builds Its Way To The Top

Period: The week of January 25th – January 31st (2016)

Top-seller: Dragon Quest Builders (PS Vita) – 178,016

Nintendo 3DS sales: 3,298

Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 558

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 4,978

New Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 22,593

PlayStation Vita sales: 45,114

Wii U sales: 8,931

PlayStation 4 sales: 32,557

Xbox One sales: 92

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week, Japan saw one of their biggest releases of the year with Dragon Quest Builders for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation Vita. Media Create has provided the latest update on sales data of video game software and hardware for the week of January 25th through January 31st, 2016.

Dragon Quest Builders released in Japan on January 28, and it sold a total of 372,539 copies in Japan for PlayStation Vita (178,016 copies,) PlayStation 4 (141,369 copies,) and PlayStation 3 (53,154 copes). It isn’t rare for any game with the Dragon Quest title attached to it to do well in Japan, but the top-selling platform for the title is PlayStation Vita, and it’s safe to assume that the success and likeness of Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Edition in Japan drove some of its sales.

It’s also interesting to see that PlayStation 4 sales were up by 8,116 units and the PlayStation Vita’s sales were impressively higher by 30,115 units compared to the week prior, and we can also assume that it’s largely due to the release of Dragon Quest’s block-make RPG.

While Dragon Quest Builders took 1st, 2nd, and 4th place with PS Vita, PS4, and PS3 respectively, Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash snuck in to take the 3rd spot with 55,331 copies sold in its opening week. The previous entry in the series, Mario Tennis Open, saw 101,645 copies sold in its debut week, but the game was released for the more popular 3DS system, so 55,331 units for a Wii U title on its first week isn’t bad at all, but pretty normal for a Super Mario title, which tend to do pretty well in Japan.

Dragon Quest Builders was definitely the highlight of the week, but there were several other releases. Uta no ☆ Prince-Sama: Music 3 sold through 51,289 copies on its debut week, shy of Music 2 which sold 68,415 copies on PSP back in 2013. Romance of the Three Kingdoms 13 sold 35,532 copies across PlayStation 4 (20,101 units) and PlayStation 3 (15,431,) much more than Romance of the Three Kingdoms 12 did for PS3 back in 2012 with 17,013 units sold in its first week.

TV Anime IdolM@ster: Cinderella Girls G4U! Pack Vol. 8 was another new release, and saw 15,720 copies sold on PS3. And finally, The Asterisk War: The Academy City on the Water made its debut on PlayStation Vita and sold through 12,436 copies last week.

The top-20 software sales chart for last week is as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.