Kirby and the Forgotten Land puts Nintendo back on top | Japan Boxed Monthly Charts
James Batchelor
Editor-in-Chief
Wednesday 13th April 2022
Nintendo
At a glance:
Kirby and the Forgotten Land was the runaway hit of March 2022 in its home market of Japan, comfortably securing the top spot as the biggest-selling retail game of the month.
Famitsu's monthly physical sales charts show the pink puffball's latest Switch outing sold 380,000 units in its first two days. By comparison, the previous entry in the series -- March 2018's Kirby Star Allies -- managed 224,000 in three days.
Kirby's new adventure sold more than double the number of boxed copies as the next biggest-selling game of the month -- Pokémon Legends: Arceus at 125,851 units -- and the next highest new entry: Square Enix's Triangle Strategy at 117,800.
While it was a solid third month for Pokémon, technically Gran Turismo 7 was the second biggest seller of March 2022, shifting over 190,000 copies. However, Famitsu's charts list individual formats separately, placing the PS4 version at No.4 with over 100,000 units and PS5 at No.5 with 90,000.
The SKU split also affected Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, with the PS4 version debuting at No.10 with over 36,000 units sold, while PS5 was lower down at No.16 with over 21,000.
Both Stranger of Paradise and Gran Turismo are led by the PS4 versions due to the console's considerably larger installbase and ongoing stock shortages for PS5.
Other new entries in the Top 30 this month included Square Enix's Final Fantasy-themed racing game Chocobo GP at No.19, the latest .hack//GU game from Bandai Namco at No.21 and Bethesda's Ghostwire: Tokyo at No.27.
Switch accounted for 69.8% of all physical games sold in Japan last month, followed by PS4 at 19.8% and PS5 at 10.1%.
The success of Kirby, combined with
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