Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth leads surge of new hits | Japan Monthly Charts

15.04.2024 - 11:31 / gamesindustry.biz / Square Enix

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Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was the biggest-selling game at Japanese retail in March, shifting 310,596 units and leading a slew of new releases that took over the Top Five in the boxed games charts.

Famitsu's latest data, shared with GamesIndustry.biz, shows that the second part of Square Enix's Final Fantasy 7 remake saw the second biggest launch month ever in terms of physical sales for a PS5 game in Japan. It was beaten only by Final Fantasy 16, which sold 336,000 units in June.

Rebirth also sold almost triple the number of copies managed by the next best-selling game of the month: Nintendo's Princess Peach: Showtime, which debuted with 105,000 copies sold after two weeks. That's more than double the 49,000 that Super Princess Peach for the Nintendo DS sold at launch 19 years ago.

Technically, Atlus' Unicorn Overload was the second best-selling game of March, with a combined 111,000 boxed units sold. The Switch version placed at No.5 with 62,000 copies sold, with the PS5 edition at No.9 with 34,220 units and the PS4 game at No.22 (14,566 units).

PlayStation 5 exclusive Rise of the Ronin took third place with 85,000 copies sold, followed by Capcom's Dragon's Dogma 2 at 78,000. This is the first time all of the top five best-selling titles have been new releases since October 2021.

Nintendo remained the biggest selling publisher with around 9.7 games sold, accounting for 44.3% of all sales last month. Final Fantasy 7's success secured second place for Square Enix with just shy of two million games sold (8.8% of total).

However, Square Enix beat Nintendo when it came to revenue, generating ¥3.1 billion ($20.1 million) at retail in March compared to the Switch firm's ¥2.9 billion ($18.8 million). Square Enix accounted for exactly 25% of the month's retail revenues, meaning ¥1 out of every ¥4 was spent on its games, and ended Nintendo's eight-month streak at the top.

The launch of Unicorn Overlord put Atlus at No.3, making the publisher the only other company to generate more than ¥1 billion (¥1.1 billion / $7.1 million, to be precise) at retail this month.

Rise of the Ronin lifted Sony Interactive Entertainment from No.8 to No.4 in the publisher revenue rankings. Dragon's Dogma propelled Capcom from No.11 to No.5.

Switch remained the biggest selling format in terms of boxed games with over one million units sold, accounting for 57.6% of the month's sales. PS5 was second at 653,000 boxed games shifted, accounting for 35.7%.

Switch also dominated hardware sales, with its three models selling a combined 289,673 units. PS5's two models sold a combined 162,281 units, led by the disc drive version. Both saw a month-on-month increase, in Switch's