The Japan Preview: 11/6/11 Edition (Marioland, Uncharted 3, BF3)
by Jacob Mazel, posted on 06 November 2011 / 5,726 Views
In the West, major software starts to flow regularly in the two months ending November 15-20, for the run up to Christmas. Japan has a later seasonal peak than the West, but major software is released throughout the period from November 1 to January 15 or so. Japan is thus now just starting to enter its biggest selling season, and sure enough software sales were quite strong for the week even with Final Fantasy Type-0 following the typical RPG week one to week two demand collapse.
1) Super Mario 3D Land (3DS) - 304,000
2) Uncharted 3 (PS3) - 105,000
3) Battlefield 3 (PS3) - 102,000
4) Final Fantasy Type-0 (PSP) - 86,000
5) World Soccer Winning Eleven 2012 (PSP) - 52,000
6) Kirby's Return to Dreamland (Wii) - 49,000
7) Slime MoriMori Dragon Quest 3: Taikaizoku to Shippo Dan (3DS) - 40,000
8) Just Dance Wii (Wii) - 19,000
9) World Soccer Winning Eleven 2012 (PS2) - 14,000
10) Battlefield 3 (X360) - 13,000
11) World Soccer Winning Eleven 2012 (PS3) - 12,000
12) Rhythm Heaven Wii (Wii) - 11,000
13) Gekijouban Macross F: Sayonara no Tsubasa (PS3) - 10,000
15) Dead Island (PS3) - 9,000
15) Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Impact (PSP) - 9,000
In addition to the games above, Wii Sports Resort (Wii), Go Vacation (Wii), The Idolmaster 2 (PS3), AKB1/48 (PSP), and Winning Eleven 2012 (Wii) should appear in the final top 20 data as well.
3DS and PS3 each had strong weeks for new software. Super Mario 3D Land is to date the strongest opening for a 3DS game in Japan, as few 3DS games have opened to even 100,000 units so far given the base remains under 2.5m in Japan. With an opening of 300,000, the trajectory for Super Mario 3D Land should be rather similar to Super Mario Galaxy 1-2 on Wii which both sold about 1m units in Japan. 3DS should see a nice hardware bump for the week, as this is the first Mario game on the system.
For PS3, Uncharted 3 marks the second time the series has grown in Japan in week one, which is a good sign. Uncharted 2 opened to only about 50,000 units in Japan, the third game doubled that. Battlefield 3 has also pulled in "major western shooter" numbers in Japan and should eventually leg out 300,000 units or more lifetime in the country as major shooting titles tend to sell 1-3,000 units in Japan for a while before completely stopping to sell.
There is not much remarkable about the rest of the data, Type-0 dropped to about 20% of what it did week one and should get to about 50% past what it did in its first week lifetime. Kirby, Just Dance, and Rhythm Heaven are holding pretty well for Wii and should each shoot up the charts from late November to early January when Wii hardware jumps. The Dragon Quest Slime game on DS opened to similar numbers as the 3DS game and still eventually reached 300,000+ in Japan, and so it will be interesting to see where the new Slime game ends up lifetime.
Looking ahead, Final Fantasy XIII-2, set for launch December 15, 2011, has 160,000 preorders as November 6, 2011 (up 20,000 from last week), while Final Fantasy XIII had 600,000 preorders through November 8, 2009 (up 70,000 from November 1, 2009) ahead of its December 17, 2009 launch. At the moment, Final Fantasy XIII-2 looks like it will have a much smaller opening than the first game did (1.5m) - but there is still time for that to correct even with preorder acceleration still slow at the moment.
Monster Hunter Portable 3G for the 3DS now has 235,000 preorders (up 40,000 from last week) ahead of its December 10 launch which bodes well for at least a 550,000 unit opening week, with 600,000-700,000 looking more and more likely. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Wii has 65,000 preorders and should get to 90,000-100,000 preorders before launch, which should lead to a 150,000 - 250,000 launch week in Japan. The big mover in the last week though has been Mario Kart 7 on 3DS, which has about 75,000 preorders now. Over the next few weeks Fortune Street, Michael Jackson, and a bunch of Vita games should begin to see strong preorder levels too. At the moment, most Vita games have under 10,000 preorders although Hot Shots Golf 6 has about 15,000 which should lead to a 30,000+ opening week at a bare minimum. We'll have more on potential Vita launch game figures as better data becomes available.
Contact VGChartz at jmazel@vgchartz.com
