By and large, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has been doing incredibly well in its opening week. It’s already the best-selling Warriors game to date and has charted among the best-selling games in multiple countries. So far, however, it hasn't been able to claim the top spot on any of these sales charts, thanks to stiff competition from new AAA and next-gen games, but in Japan it came close to taking it, only to be beaten out by a surprising title.
A few days after reports of Age of Calamity’s impressive sales in the UK came out, Famitsu followed suit with the Japanese sales figures for the week of November 16-22. According to the numbers, the game has also performed well there, having sold an estimated 173,215 physical copies and beating out other popular Nintendo titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Ring Fit Adventure to debut in second place.
173,000+ copies would normally be enough to easily secure the #1 spot, but this time Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity ended up being completely outsold by another Switch newcomer: Momotaro Dentetsu: Showa, Heisei, Reiwa mo Teiban!. This is the latest entry in Konami’s longrunning board game-style series, where players try to become president of a railroad company by acquiring properties across Japan, and it crushed the sales competition this week with 345,697 copies sold.
While this might be surprising news for gamers outside Japan, fans of Momotaro Dentetsu have really been looking forward to the series’ debut on the Switch. In fact, the game has ranked among the most anticipated Switch titles in Japan for months, meaning the hype for Showa, Heisei, Reiwa mo Teiban! was building up well before Age of Calamity’s surprise reveal in September.
If it makes any Zelda fans feel better, though, according to the aforementioned rankings, the upcoming sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is still the most anticipated Switch title of all by a sizable margin. So in the unlikely event that a new Momotaro Dentetsu game ends up going up against the series’ next mainline entry, chances are the sales numbers will be more in Nintendo’s favor.
Aside from Hyrule Warriors and Momotaro Dentetsu, this week saw the Japanese sales charts almost completely taken over by Switch games, with the PS4 version of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War being the only non-Switch title in the top ten. It goes to show how Nintendo’s popularity has grown in Asian markets lately, and odds are continuing sales of Age of Calamity and, eventually, Breath of the Wild 2 will serve to push that growth even further.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is available for the Switch.