Dragon's Dogma enjoys strong debut for a new IP in Japan

Capcom's Dragon's Dogma was the top-selling game in Japan last week, selling just over 300,000 copies of its PlayStation 3 version during its first several days on sale (the Xbox 360 edition sold a tenth of that). The game's debut sales are especially impressive considering it's an original property. Only a handful of new IPs in the last decade, such as Onimusha and Devil May Cry, have sold more than 330,000 copies during their first week on sale in Japan. Those mentioned games, both of which are Capcom releases, spawned a number of sequels and created some of the publisher's biggest franchises. The Onimusha series alone has sold around 8 million total copies, while the Devil May Cry series has sold over 10 million copies. Dragon's Dogma likely helped bump PlayStation 3 hardware sales up a couple thousand to 14,771 units, and even Xbox 360 experienced a boost -- it more than tripled week-to-week sales to a somewhat less pitiful 3,069 systems. PS Vita's sales grew slightly to 6,675 units, not far off from its record-low of 6,340. Sony's struggling system has suffered a drought of compelling software, but a single PS Vita title finally managed to break Japan's top 20 retail software sales chart after several weeks of the handheld having no presence there. Sega's Samurai & Dragons sold 6,072 copies. The seven-year-old PSP continues to outperform its successor and moved 10,617 systems, which is around the same as the previous week. It benefited from several new releases like Broccoli's Ah! My Prince's Song: Debut and Idea Factory's Jyuzaengi. Nintendo 3DS sales grew by almost 10,000 to 55,212 on the strength of Mario Tennis Open's debut (the second best-selling game last week with 101,645 copies pushed), and evergreen titles like Fire Emblem: Awakening, Super Mario 3D Land, and Monster Hunter 3G. Next week's notable releases include Square Enix's Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry's Wonderland 3D for 3DS, Level-5's Guild01 for 3DS, and Arc System Works' BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend for PSP. Full software and hardware sales charts for the May 21 to 27 period in Japan, provided by Media Create and translated on the NeoGAF forums, are available here.