The Japan charts are coming alive this week thanks to the launch of three notable games. Honor to the champion with a Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe which takes full advantage of the Switch effect and the excellent sales of Kirby and the Forgotten World. With close to 190,000 sales without even including downloads, the platform game supplants the 144,000 sales of the game released on Wii and appears to be a new success for Nintendo. However, Kirby and the Forgotten World remains by far the biggest departure from the license with its 380,000 copies.
Generally considered a better game than its predecessor, Octopath Traveler II doesn’t seem to be doing as well numbers-wise. If we can grant it more than 70,000 sales counting the off-screen PS4 version, this kickoff remains quite far from the first opus which achieved 110,000 sales on a single platform, no doubt helped by the breath of fresh air from HD. -2D. It remains to be hoped for Square Enix that the game will achieve good download sales, without forgetting the contribution of the PC.
Finally, with more than 67,000 sales to its credit, Like a Dragon: Ishin is far from the 157,000 sales of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, but nothing dishonorable for this spin-off set in the 1860s, which obviously does not enjoy a new game status in Japan. The original version had also made a nice start at 220,000 sales on PS4 and PS3 in 2014.
On the console sales side, the party continues for the PS5 with stocks still in good shape, as well as public demand. The 3 million are now within reach for Sony’s console, which can even dream of temporarily overtaking the Switch with regard to sales in 2023. On the other hand, the Xbox Series finds the joys of solitude after a few weeks of rebound reflected above all the desire to buy the console before its price increase in the archipelago. Note that Famitsu did not provide any data regarding the launch of the PlayStation VR2, knowing that its predecessor had started with 46,262 sales in Japan for the week of its launch in 2016.