Dragon Quest Builders Vita goes bonkers in Japan

Based on the success of Minecraft, Dragon Quest Builders dominates the Media Create Japanese chart, across the PlayStation formats. Despite Square Enix showing, naturally enough, most of the coverage and adverts around the shiny PS4 version, the Vita dominates with sales approaching 180K. Not bad for three days worth of sales.

No. 1 DQB Vita: 178,016
No. 2 DQB PS4: 141,369
No. 4 DQB PS3: 53,154

That's a total of 372,539, which makes me think that recent talk of a multiplayer sequel is very much going to happen. Hopefully a western version will now also be a priority for Square Enix.

According to Famitsu's figures it sold between 80-100% of shipped units, so there could be less than the usual massive drop next week, although things will certainly slide a bit, unless there's an almost Pokemon buzz for the game.

Elsewhere, in at No.5 was Brocolli's Music 3 game selling 50K. Bandai's The Asterisk War sold only 12K at No. 14, Minecraft itself sold another 10K Vita boxed copies to keep on rolling. Bringing up the rear at No. 20 was Bandai's Gundam Extreme Vs Force which sold another 7,500 for total sales of 138K.

In related Bandai sales news, One Piece Pirate Warriors 3 has now sold a million across all formats (all PlayStations and PC). No breakdown, outside of regions with Japan taking 380K copies, Europe 320K, rest of Asia 200K and North America lagging with 100K.

On the hardware front, the Metal Slime model (one day it will be mine) that graces the top of this blog helped Vita units shoot up to over 45,100, breaking the traditional new year slump. Hopefully a few more weeks of that will set the handheld up for a very good year.

I still wonder why Square, Bandai and Temco don't force Sony to release a successor, or band together to buy the Vita brand, like Sony sold Vaio, and produce a true HD model.

Those sales put the Vita top of the week's hardware pile, outselling all 3DS formats for once (even with the launch of a new Mario Tennis game that sold 50K at No. 3), and 150% sales of the PS4.

Releases go quiet again for a few weeks, but then we have Attack of Titan on 18 February and Gundam Breaker 3 in early March. I suspect the intensive nature of Titan might see the PS4 version prove more popular.

Generally though, it looks like the Vita isn't going anywhere but up in Japan for 2016.