This Week In Sales: Yo-kai Watch 3, Trails in the Sky the 3rd Evolution, And Uppers Make Debuts

Period: The week of July 11th – July 17th (2016)

Top-seller: Yo-kai Watch: Sushi/Tempura – 632,135 (3DS)

Nintendo 3DS sales: 653

Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 106

New Nintendo 3DS sales: 3,665

New Nintendo 3DS LL sales: 23,382

PlayStation Vita sales: 10,991

Wii U sales: 7,601

PlayStation 4 sales: 20,395

PlayStation 3 sales: 1,045

Xbox One sales: 63

<< Last week’s software sales chart

<< How to read and understand sales

Last week, Japan saw one of the more anticipated titles of the year with the release of Yo-kai Watch 3 from Level-5, along debuts for The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd Evolution, and Kenichiro Takaki’s PS Vita brawler Uppers. Here are the weekly video games sales data for software and hardware that sold in the week of July 11 through July 17, 2016.

At #1 is Yo-kai Watch 3 which released in Sushi and Tempura versions on July 16. It sold 632,135 copies on its debut to take the top spot, which comes as no surprise for a main Yo-kai Watch game. There are many ways to look at its sales figures, so let’s break it down.

According to Media Create, Yo-kai Watch 3 sold through 63.08% of its shipped copies in Japan between Sushi and Tempura versions. While those aren’t terrible numbers in terms of sales, they’re a major drop from the previous main-numbered title in Yo-kai Watch 2 Head/Founder editions that sold 1,316,707 copies in its July 2014 debut, and managed to sell through 92.16% of its shipped copies. It’s also noted that Yo-kai Watch 3 failed to surpass the spinoff title in Yo-kai Watch Busters which sold 693,538 copies in its debut with a sell-through rate of 73.60%.

To give you a better idea on how the series has performed thus far, check out the list below:

• (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
• (2016) Yo-kai Watch: Sangokushi—269,516

Other than its distant-cousin that is Yo-kai Watch Dance (which only sold 7,060 copies in its debut), the Yo-kai Watch series has done exceptionally well in the past. The first game may have only sold over 50k copies in its debut, but that was before its popularity skyrocketed and helped the sequel reach record numbers for Level-5 the following year.

So you might be wondering what happened to Yo-kai Watch 3’s sales performance. The first thing we might want to keep in mind is that when the first Yo-kai Watch released, there wasn’t any other title from the series for the rest of that year. The next year Level-5 released two versions for Yo-kai Watch 2, which followed by its third version in Headliner which also saw an impressive 1.2 million on its own. It’s starting from here that we started seeing much more from the series, with Yo-kai Watch Busters in July 2015 followed by Yo-kai Watch Dance: Just Dance Special Version in December. Fast-forward just four months for Yo-kai Watch: Sangokushi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) released. And three months after that, we have Yo-kai Watch 3: Sushi and Tempura versions. Now that’s a lot of Yo-kai to go around for everyone.

While the market may have been oversaturated with yo-kai for the past year, which likely played a role in the not-so-great numbers for the third installment, do keep in mind that the game released in Japan on July 16, which gives it just about a day of sales that was tracked by Media Create’s weekly sales data that covered the sales that went on between July 11 and July 17, 2016. Nonetheless, those debut numbers still look bad for what should’ve been a third smash hit for Level-5. Perhaps CEO Akihiro Hino saw it coming and that’s why he mentioned that there will be a pause in Yo-kai Watch in 2016 so they can focus on plenty of new starts for 2017. In any case, next week’s sales numbers will be key to see how Yo-kai Watch 3 performs after a full week of sales.

Next up on the list is The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd Evolution by Falcom, which finished at #2 with 10,485 copies sold for PlayStation Vita on its debut. The previous title’s HD remake on PS Vita, Trails in the Sky SC Evolution, sold 15,202 copies in its debut, so that’s a bit of a drop there as well.

And finally, the third new title is Uppers, Marvelous’ brawler by Senran Kagura producer Kenichiro Takaki. The game had originally been delayed after not having as many pre-orders as the developers had hoped for, but its 6,931 units sold in its debut is far from impressive for Takaki’s latest project, but it was enough to place it at #7 this week in sales.

On the hardware side of things, most of it remained the same, but the New 3DS LL sold 136.68% of last week, which isn’t exactly as impressive from what we saw in the previous titles, but when you think about it, most Yo-kai Watch fans in Japan probably already have 3DSes from all the other titles we’ve seen thus far. Media Create added that the extra New 3DS sales likely come from the NFC and toy features for the game that likely helped in hardware sales with trade-ins of older 3DS consoles.

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

Sales data acquired from 4Gamer and Media Create.