Like most of your compatriots, you may not even have noticed that Square Enix has just launched a new Dragon Quest on Switch. Like Dragon Quest Treasures a year earlier, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Prince of Shadows washed up on the shores of indifference, evidenced by its absence in the top 40 (!) the week of its release in the United Kingdom.
In Japan, on the other hand, this cousin of Pokémon honors the rich history of its lineage with no less than 346,583 copies sold on the shelves, the best launch of the year for Square Enix ahead of the 336,027 sales of Final Fantasy 16 (on an installed base that is certainly difficult to compare to that of the Switch) and the 4th best launch of the year for all games combined.
Suffice to say that the work is done for the one called Dragon Quest Monsters 3 in the archipelago and which also does significantly better than the 143,650 sales of Dragon Quest Treasures, a spin off also co-developed by Tose. Note that this was the last notable release of the year in Japan and that the top 10 below should therefore closely resemble the one we will see throughout the month of December.
As a result, it is console sales that attract attention, particularly the Switch’s ability to withstand the ravages of time. With 79,055 consoles sold this week, the Nintendo machine still keeps the competition at bay, but we are quite far from the figures posted last year at the same time (152,184 sales). A very relative fatigue when you are sitting on a fleet of 31.4 million consoles. The PS5, for its part, fell below the 50,000 sales mark for the first time since the launch of the new models, but is having by far its best year in Japan with 2.4 million sales since January (i.e. half of the total which is of 4.8 million).