This Week In Sales: Rune Factory 4 And Digimon World, Neck-And-Neck

Period: The week of July 16th – July 22nd (2012)

Top-seller: Kirby’s Dream Collection: Special Edition – 100,286

Nintendo 3DS sales: 44,399 | Total sales: 6,562,871

PlayStation Vita sales: 11,932 | Total sales: 843,856

<< Last week’s software sales chart

New games? Pfft, whatever. Kirby’s Dream Collection: Special Edition, which compiles the first six Kirby games on a single disc along with some bonus challenge stages, was last week’s best-selling title in Japan. It sold 100,286 copies in its first week. Behind it at the #2 spot was Pokémon Black/White 2.

Not too far behind Pokémon were two new releases that people have had their eyes on for a while—Rune Factory 4 and Digimon World Re:Digitize. Both games were neck-and-neck, selling close to the 86,000 mark.

For Rune Factory, that’s a huge, huge improvement in sales over its predecessors. Here’s a comparison of Rune Factory 4 with first-week and total lifetimes sales of the previous mainline Rune Factory games to put things in perspective:

(2006) Rune Factory – 42,210 | 110,828

(2008) Rune Factory 2 – 52,049 | 117,572

(2009) Rune Factory 3 – 41,279 | 94,567

(2012) Rune Factory 4 – 85,955

Rune Factory 4’s success can be attribute to smart design choices such as the ability to play as both male and female characters, an improved relationship system, and the character archetypes chosen for the game’s bachelors and bachelorettes. Personally, I was hoping Rune Factory 4 would be able to break the 100k mark at launch, but regardless, these sales are most certainly a big step forward for the series.

Moving on, for Digimon World Re:Digitize, here’s a comparison with some of the recent Digimon games on the Nintendo DS (first week | lifetime sales listed):

(2007) Digimon World Dawn/Dusk – 77,551 | 178,732

(2008) Digimon World Championship – 15167 | 41,929

(2010) Digimon Story: Lost Evolution – 34,409 | 89,665

(2011) Digimon Story: Super Xros Wars Red/Blue – 35,752 | 92,320

(2012) Digimon World Re:Digitize – 85,817

Keep in mind that the Digimon games listed above are of different genres, so direct comparisons aren’t quite possible. That having been said, Re:Digitize banks heavily on nostalgia (being an homage to the original Digimon World) and is a game with better production values than all of its recent predecessors, so it isn’t surprising to see it doing well.

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

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