This Week In Sales: A Dark Moon And A Brighter Darkness

Period: The week of March 18th – March 24th (2013)

Top-seller: Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon – 280,151

Nintendo 3DS sales: 35,629 | Total sales: 8,133,987

Nintendo 3DS XL sales: 40,924 | Total sales: 2,837,308

PlayStation Vita sales: 41,073 | Total sales: 1,435,089

Wii U sales: 11,398 | Total sales: 831,418

<< Last week’s software sales chart

(Note: Apologies for the sales column being a day late. GDC week has been busy.)

Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon was last week’s top-seller in Japan, with over 280,000 copies sold in it first week on shelves. Following close behind at #2 was One Piece: Pirate Warriors 2 on the PlayStation 3, at over 274,000 copies.

Both games—and hardware sales, to an extent—saw a boost owing to a public holiday last Wednesday. Additionally, last week’s new releases were released on Wednesday as opposed to the usual Thursday, which meant five days of sales were recorded as opposed to the usual four.

Also released last week was Disgaea Dimension 2: Brighter Darkness by Nippon Ichi Software. The game sold 55,443 copies in its first week, which is in line with some of the more recent Disgaea games. Here’s a look at first-week sales of Disgaea 3 and Disgaea 4 for comparison:

(2008) Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice – 54,596

(2011) Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten – 79,425

Finally, last week also saw the release of a slate of PlayStation Vita ports. One Piece Pirate Warriors 2, Atelier Meruru Plus and Dead or Alive 5 Plus were all released last week and, combined with the holiday, helped the system keep its weekly number up.

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

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