This Week In Sales: A Week For Everyone With Dragon Quest Monsters, Nioh, And Neptunia

Period: The week of February 6th –  February 12th (2017)

Top-seller: Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 Professional – 122,051 (3DS)

Nintendo 2DS –  5,226 (Last week – 5,593)

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 1,435 (1,617)

New Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 19,126 (18,891)

Wii U sales: 543 (778)

PlayStation 4 sales: 22,22 (26,879)

PlayStation 4 Pro: 6,693 (9,508)

PlayStation 3 sales: 473 (548)

PlayStation Vita sales: 8,479 (9,626)

Xbox One sales: 112 (111)

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week in Japan, we saw three big releases in Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 Professional for 3DS, as well as Nioh and Four Goddesses Online: Cyber Dimension Neptune on PlayStation 4. Here’s the latest from Japanese sales tracker, Media Create, with a look at software and hardware sales from the week of February 6 through February 12, 2017.

It comes as no surprise to see something with the Dragon Quest label take #1, and this time it goes to Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 Professional with a whopping 122,051 in its debut for Nintendo 3DS. But how does it stack with the rest of the series, you ask?

• (2006) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker – 593,994 (DS)
• (2010) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 – 623,643 (DS)
• (2011) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2 Professional – 163,008 (DS)
• (2016) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 – 368,665 (3DS)
• (2017) Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 Professional – 122,051 (3DS)

As you can see, the two Professional editions released a year after their base titles with much lower sales, but we can’t blame them for not being Monster Hunter with their G versions. While it still makes for an impressive debut, the dwindling numbers show that Square Enix has made the right decision to call it quits for the Joker series. Looking back at other Dragon Quest Monsters titles in recent years, Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry’s Wonderland 3D sold 513,183 copies on 3DS in its 2012 debut and Dragon Quest Monsters 2’s 3DS remake debuted at 443,656 units in 2014.
At #2 we have Nioh with 75,477 copies sold on PS4 for its debut, which isn’t bad at all considering that it’s the first title for the IP. It may not be the 210,141 that Dark Souls III saw in its debut last year, but Nioh managed to put up a respectable figure, nonetheless. On a side note, I think it’s pretty fun to see that Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 and Dark Souls III released on the same day in Japan last year.

And finally, the last new title of the week is Four Goddesses Online: Cyber Dimension Neptune, which debuted at #3 with 42,508 copies sold. Idea Factory announced last week that the game had shipped out 50,000 copies in Japan, so that means the game sold through 85% of its initial shipment. Not bad at all for a Compile Heart title. As we previously mentioned, Neptunia games never really had high sales figures, for example, Neptunia VII debuted with 22,609 units on its PS4 debut in April 2015. In other words, this is overall good news for Compile Heart and the Neptunia series.

We didn’t see any notable changes in the hardware front with sales starting to cool down a bit with overall lower numbers across the board. Not even the power of Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 Professional was able to help boost some 3DS sales. With the Nintendo Switch’s release right around the corner, I’d imagine that a lot of people are holding back or going with a wait and see approach when it comes to buying new hardware.

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

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.