This Week In Sales: At Last… Drakengard 3

Period: The week of December 16th – December 22nd (2013)

Top-seller: Puzzle & Dragons Z – 256,373

Nintendo 3DS sales: 68,522 | Total sales: 9,174,198

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 164,078 | Total sales: 5,286,019

PlayStation Vita sales: 50,087 | Total sales: 2,198,002

Vita TV sales: 5,504 | 70,213

Wii U sales: 109,113 | Total sales: 1,452,252

<< Last week’s software sales chart

Last week, Square Enix released Drakengard 3 for the PlayStation 3 in Japan, and the game sold 114,024 copies in its first week on store shelves.

Now, Media-Create, the Japanese sales tracking firm whose data we use for this column, doesn’t have any publicly listed data on the sales of the original Drakengard and Drakengard 2. However, we do know that 2010’s Nier—a spiritual successor to the series—sold 71,554 copies in its first week. Nier was released on both Xbox 360 and PS3, so that’s a combined figure for both versions.

By that measure, Drakengard 3 has done relatively well, although it would have been nice to see the game debut a little higher, given that new (or resurrected, in this case) properties out of Square Enix on non-phone platforms are a rare occurrence nowadays. Perhaps Square could have built up a little more excitement for the series by doing HD remakes of the first two Drakengard games first, and then closing the event out with Drakengard 3’s release.

Meanwhile, the #1 selling game last week was, once again, Puzzle & Dragons Z for the Nintendo 3DS. Total sales of the game are now at 800,000 copies. As of December 20th, Gung Ho had shipped 1 million copies of the game to stores, so that leaves 200,000 copies out in the wild. The game has already met Gung Ho’s expectations.

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

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