This Week In Sales: Star Ocean 5, Meet Yo-kai Watch

Period: The week of March 21st – March 27th (2016)

Top-seller: Yo-kai Watch: Romance of the Three Kingdoms (3DS) – 269,516

Nintendo 3DS sales: 2,069

Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 342

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 5,376

New Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 22,020

PlayStation Vita sales: 17,153

Wii U sales: 3,541

PlayStation 4 sales: 30,081

PlayStation 3 sales: 1,537

Xbox One sales: 207

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week, Japan saw two major releases with Square Enix’s Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness along with Level-5’s Yo-kai Watch: Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Media Create provides us with sales data for video game software and hardware from the week of March 28 through April 3, 2016.

Yo-kai Watch: Romance of the Three Kingdom took the #1 spot of the week with 269,516 units sold. While those aren’t bad numbers, they’re actually the lowest from the Yo-kai Watch series for its first week minus the very first title (and Yo-kai Watch Dance: Just Dance Special Version which sold merely 7,060 copies).

Here are sales numbers we’ve seen from the force that is Yo-kai Watch in Japan:

• (2013) Yo-kai Watch—53,654
• (2014) Yo-kai Watch 2: Head/Founder—1,316,707
• (2014) Yo-kai Watch 2: Headliner—1,244,171
• (2015) Yo-kai Watch Busters—693,538

Looking at those numbers now, it’s pretty amazing how much it grew from the very first title back in 2013. Anyhow, as you can see, Yo-kai Watch: Romance of the Three Kingdoms sold much less than their more recent titles, but given its lesser-than-usual amount of marketing and the fact that it’s a strategy game that was being marketed towards a younger audience, it’s not too surprising.

Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness also did pretty well at 113,022 units sold in its debut, putting it at #2, but the series seems to have lost a touch of its driving force. Its predecessor, Star Ocean: The Last Hope sold 166,027 copies in its first week on the Xbox 360 in Japan back in 2009. A year later, it sold an additional 72,026 units for PlayStation 3 as Star Ocean: The Last Hope International. It’s also worth noting that when Star Ocean: The Last Hope released in Japan, it helped push the Xbox 360 sales with 25,334 units sold that week, pushing it past the PlayStation 3 (16,149) and Wii (16,973).

In #3 we have Dragon Quest Monsters Joker 3 with 98,634 copies sold in its second week, which is actually pretty impressive for any title on its second week. A good example of a regular performance on that would be Dark Souls III, which opened with 210,141 copies sold last week followed by 33,406 copies for its second week.

Meanwhile, Pokkén Tournament is hanging in there at #5 with 14,295 copies sold last week, and the usual suspects in Minecraft and Splatoon at #06 and #11, respectively with 10,657 and 8,120 units moved.

And finally, Koei Tecmo also released the latest of their horse-racing simulator game with Winning Post 8 2016, which sold 8,367 copies on PlayStation 4, 6,166 copies on PlayStation Vita, and 4,472 copies on PlayStation 3, for a combined total of 19,005 units across all three systems.

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

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.