This Week In Sales: Tanooki Mario Spins A Tail Of Success

Period: The week of October 31st – November 6th (2011)

Top-seller: Super Mario 3D Land – 343,492

Nintendo 3DS sales: 145,271 | Total sales: 2,356,915

Last week saw the release of Super Mario 3D Land, the first major holiday game for the Nintendo 3DS. In its first week, Super Mario 3D Land sold 343,492 copies. That’s a higher first week number than both Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 on the Wii, which is an important point to note with regard to 3D Mario games.

3D Land is tasked not only with selling a lot more 3DSes (which it did), but also with helping bridge the gap between players (and sales) of 2D and 3D Mario titles. 2D Mario games typically tend to sell much more than the 3D ones, and this is a trend that, at least in Japan, Nintendo have been attempting to address. For reference, here are first week sales of the two Galaxy games:

Super Mario Galaxy (2007) – 250,585

Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010) – 339,901

Considering that the 3DS isn’t even past its first year and that 3D Land is already selling slightly better than Galaxy 2 (released in 2010, during the Wii’s prime), those are encouraging numbers. What remains to be seen is how much word of mouth and the holiday season affect sales of the game in the weeks to come.

Moving on, boasting some great sales for a western-developed game was Uncharted 3. That game took the #2 spot with nearly 125,000 copies sold in a week. It was closely followed by Battlefield 3, which sold 123,000 copies in the same week.

At #4, Final Fantasy Type-0 for PSP held strong with another 122,000 copies sold. Unfortunately, Slime Mori Mori Dragon Quest 3 didn’t have much to be proud of, selling less than 39,000 copies.

The top-20 chart for the week was as follows:

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