Kingdom Hearts 3D off to a slow start in Japan

Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, Square Enix's new 3DS release for its popular Disney-themed series, suffered sluggish initial sales after debuting in Japan last week. The game was the top-selling title of the week after moving 213,579 units, but that's far less than what other recent handheld entries for the series have sold: 2010's KH: Birth by Sleep (PSP) sold 445,962 copies, and 2009's KH: 358/2 Days (DS) sold 295,205 copies in their first weeks. Those titles, however, released to systems with much bigger userbases than the 3DS's current audience. KH3D released with a special edition 3DS bundle that, along with the previous week's Monster Hunter Tri-G and Super Mario 3D Land system bundles, helped boost the handheld's sales to 121,921 -- that's nearly three times what the 3DS was selling at this point last year. PS Vita system sales grew slightly to 12,105 for the week, possibly helped by the release of Konami's New King Story and Pro Baseball Spirits 2012, after it was stuck around the 10,000 mark for a month. To put that in perspective, that's 10 percent of the 3DS's numbers, and still less than the 18,356 units the seven-year-old PSP sold last week. While the PS Vita version of Pro Baseball Spirits sold 17,264 copies, the PSP edition sold 60,141 and the PlayStation 3 release sold 90,433. Konami also put out its Silent Hill HD Edition for PS3 last week, but the re-release only moved 7,971 units. A number of Nintendo-published handheld games dominated the top ten software sales chart last week, including Kid Icarus: Uprising (47,179 copies, a 64 percent drop off from its debut last week), Pokemon Conquest (30,535), Super Mario 3D Land (24,936), and Mario Kart 7 (19,653). Other portable games populated the top ten like Sega's Black Panther 2: Yakuza Ashura Chapter for PSP, and Capcom's Monster Hunter Tri-G for 3DS. Full software and hardware sales charts for the March 26 to April 1 period in Japan, provided by Media Create and translated by NeoGAF, are available here.