This Week In Sales: Xenoblade Chronicles 3D Isn’t Really Feeling It

Period: The week of March 30th  – April 5th (2015)

Top-seller: The 3rd Super Robot Taisen Z: Tengoku Hen (PSV) – 121,219

Nintendo 3DS sales: 1,893 | Tot. sales: : 9,827,885

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 2,256 | Tot. sales: 6,895,060

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 8,242 | Tot. sales: 521,109

New Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 22,183 | Tot. sales: 1,250,481

PlayStation Vita sales: 21,584 | Tot. sales: 3,684,062

Vita TV sales: 672 | Tot. sales: 160,146

Wii U sales: 7,486 | Tot. sales: 2,269,615

PlayStation 4 sales: 26,738 | Tot. sales: 1,375,839

Xbox One sales: 902 | Tot. sales: 50,009

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

For what is considered one of the best RPGs of the last 10 years, Xenoblade Chronicles has always found itself fighting an uphill battle for one reason or another. When the game was originally released in Japan back in 2010, it was during a period when the Wii software market had begun drying up and wasn’t very receptive toward an unproven RPG brand. Then, when it was released in North America two years later, it was made available exclusively through GameStop and Nintendo’s online store, which limited its reach in that territory as well.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, which was released last week, finds itself in a similar position. Released exclusively for the New Nintendo 3DS—which has sold less than 1.8 million units in Japan thus far—the game is unable to reach the audience of 16 million that Nintendo have built up with their older 3DS models. And so, Xenoblade Chronicles 3D debuted with opening week sales of just 56,932 copies.

For reference, the original version of Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii sold 82,952 copies at launch. While that figure is far from impressive, the game continued to move units through word-of-mouth and went on to sell close to 200,000 copies in Japan by the end of 2013. Additionally, it was confirmed in a recent Iwata Asks interview that Xenoblade Chronicles ended up selling more in the West than it did in Japan, so it’s safe to assume that the game ended up doing “okay” globally, despite its uphill climb.

Whether Xenoblade Chronicles 3D will manage to do the same remains to be seen. In Japan, the game certainly stands a chance of continuing to sell alongside the New 3DS as word-of-mouth spreads and more and more people seek out a game to play on their New 3DSes. For now, though, it has another uphill climb ahead of it yet again.

In other news, Bandai Namco released The 3rd Super Robot Taisen Z: Tengoku Hen, selling 230,419 copies of that game, demonstrating once again how much of a boon their hold on the anime market can be. Time and again, Namco’s anime licenses have managed to pull in respectable numbers while other publishers struggle to make any headway on consoles.

And with that, the top-20 software sales chart for last week is as follows:

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.