Dragon Quest Monsters 3DS sells over 500K out the gate in Japan

Square Enix's Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry's Wonderland 3D (pictured), a remake of a 1998 Game Boy Color title, sold over half a million copies after debuting in Japan last week and helped double 3DS sales. The game is the first from Square Enix's typically huge-selling franchise to appear on 3DS (not counting the Slime MoriMori Dragon Quest 3 spin-off), and one of the fastest-selling third-party titles for the handheld. Square Enix's last Dragon Quest Monsters title, Joker 2 for the original DS, sold 623,000 copies in its first week when it released in 2010, but that was to a much larger install base for Nintendo's older portable. Level-5's new 3DS game Guild01 performed poorly in comparison, moving just under 15,000 units. The game featured an all-star cast of Japanese game directors, including Goichi Suda (No More Heroes) and Yasumi Matsuno (Final Fantasy Tactics). 3DS hardware sales jumped from 55,212 in the previous week to 101,075 units. It had double the sales of all other consoles in Japan combined. PS Vita sales grew slightly from 6,675 to 7,551, possibly in anticipation of the imminent release for Atlus' Persona 4 Golden, the first noteworthy title released for the system in what seems like months. Capcom's Dragon's Dogma, the top-selling game two weeks ago and one of the fastest-selling titles in Japan for a new IP in the last decade, sold almost 90,000 more copies last week across PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It could reach 500,000 sales by next week. Next week's noteworthy Japanese releases include Sony's Tokyo Jungle for PS3, and Sega's Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown for Xbox 360 and PS3 (download only). Full software and hardware sales charts for the May 28 to June 3 period in Japan, provided by Media Create and translated on the NeoGAF forums, are available here.