Nintendo 3DS

See How Animal Crossing’s Debut Stacks Up Against 3DS’ Other Best-Sellers

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Last week saw the release of Animal Crossing: New Leaf in Japan, where the game debuted with 603,064 copies sold in its first week on shelves. Note that that number doesn’t include digital sales, which accounted for an additional 200,000 copies sold.   That makes Animal Crossing: New Leaf the highest-debuting Nintendo 3DS game so far. Here’s a look at how the other contenders so far stack up, with first week sales provided for each:   Super Mario 3D Land – 343,492 New Super Mario Bros. 2 – 407,503 Mario Kart 7 – 423,619 Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry’s Wonderland 3D – 513,183 Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate – 521,959   The next major Nintendo 3DS releases are Dragon Quest VII: Warriors of Eden in February and Monster Hunter 4 in March. The latter will almost certainly post the highest debut for a Nintendo 3DS game when it launches. However, Dragon Quest VII, too, has a chance of debuting higher at retail than Animal Crossing. Here’s a look at the first week sales for the Dragon Quest remakes on Nintendo DS:   (20070 Dragon Quest IV – 597,301 (2008) Dragon Quest V – 643,764 (2010) Dragon Quest VI – 906,458   Of course, whether or not Dragon Quest VII will be able to beat Animal Crossing’s combined sales across retail and digital (about 800,000) in its first week remains to be seen.

Ishaan Sahdev
About The Author
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.