This Week In Sales: It’s A Dragon Quest Week

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The week of March 1st – 7th, Dragon Quest IX made a return to the weekly top-ten chart in the form of an Ultimate Hits budget re-release. Considering the number of people that bought the original release, seeing the game sell another 40,000 units with the assistance of a lower price point is remarkable, and further proves that Square Enix’s implementation of weekly downloadable quests and social interaction helped offset second-hand sales. Last year, producer Ryutaro Ichimura stated that Dragon Quest IX experienced a 50% decrease in used sales, thanks to its online features.

 

Meanwhile, for a long-running series, there seemed to be relatively less interest for what Namco Bandai are calling the last .hack game. As a franchise, .hack has always been reliant on cross-promotion across a variety of media, so perhaps the fact that there is no TV anime pertaining to //Link played a role in its relatively lower sales compared to past games in the series. Of course, this is just speculation on our part. What the future holds for .hack remains to be seen.

 

The top-ten chart for the week of March 1st – 7th is as follows:

 

LW TW Title Tw sales Tot. sales Sys. Publisher
New 01. Pokémon Ranger: Tracks of Light 162,532 New Nintendo DS Nintendo
New 02. .hack//Link 60,487 New PSP Namco Bandai
New 03. Dragon Quest IX (Ultimate Hits) 40,797 New Nintendo DS Square Enix
04. 04. New Super Mario Bros. Wii 40,685 3,452,350 Wii Nintendo
02. 05. Kenka Bancho 4: The One Year War 36,515 108,019 PSP Spike
08. 06. Tomodachi Collection 35,208 2,917,199 Nintendo DS Nintendo
New 07. Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tendoku 32,964 New PS3 Koei
05. 09. God Eater 28,945 543,494 PSP Namco Bandai
09. 09. Wii Fit 25,926 1,720,218 Wii Nintendo
04. 10. Resident Evil 5: Alternate Edition 23,537 214,691 PS3 Capcom

 

Unfortunately, as of this post, numbers aren’t available for games outside of the top-ten from our usual source. However, while we’re on the subject of Dragon Quest, the week also saw the release of two other DQ budget re-releases on DS, neither of which performed as admirably as Dragon Quest IX and charted far lower on the list.

 

20. Dragon Quest V (Ultimate Hits)

30. Dragon Quest IV (Ultimate Hits)

 

Other new releases debuting outside of the top-ten were:

 

12. Armored Core: Last Raven Portable (PSP) – From Software

14. Keroro RPG: The Knight Warrior, and Legendary Pirate (DS) – Namco Bandai

25. Bioshock 2 (Xbox 360) – D3 Publisher

34. Bioshock 2 (PS3) – D3 Publisher

 

Meanwhile, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks continues to amaze by clinging onto the chart around the same position each week following its price drop. Star Ocean: The Last Hope International, too, seems to be demonstrating an ability to hold out longer than one would have expected.


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Author
Ishaan Sahdev
Ishaan specializes in game design/sales analysis. He's the former managing editor of Siliconera and wrote the book "The Legend of Zelda - A Complete Development History". He also used to moonlight as a professional manga editor. These days, his day job has nothing to do with games, but the two inform each other nonetheless.