Pokemon Legends: Z-A Has Officially Beaten Arceus

Pokemon Legends: Z-A has eclipsed its predecessor, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, in Japan's opening week sales numbers. While the sales figures for Pokemon Legends: Z-A are divided between two different Nintendo consoles, the combined figures have managed to edge out Arceus' opening-week sales by a narrow margin.

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Launched on October 16, the second game in the Legends series has received a mixed response that doesn't seem to have adversely affected its sales. While professional critics have given it an 82 percent approval rating on OpenCritic, post-launch review-bombing of Pokemon Legends: Z-A has driven down its user score to 40 percent, with negative reactions frequently citing a perceived laziness in game design.

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By Lucas Simons

Pokemon Legends: Z-A Beats Arceus in Opening-Week Sales

According to Japanese sales figures released by Famitsu for the week of October 13-19, Pokemon Legends: Z-A's two console-specific versions held the top two spots on the sales chart for their debut week, with a combined sales total that exceeds 1.485 million. These numbers are divided between the Nintendo Switch version, which racked up more 872,000 in sales, and the Nintendo Switch 2 version, for which nearly 613,000 sales were recorded. Combined, those figures beat the opening week sales numbers that Pokemon Legends: Arceus posted following its release in January 2022 by about 60,000 units. At the time of Arceus' launch, that was a significant figure, as only Animal Crossing: New Horizons had achieved more success on Nintendo Switch during its first week on the market.

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Those sales figures not only serve as a tribute to the popularity of the Pokemon Legends games but as a very positive financial sign for Game Freak and Nintendo. Developed with a reported budget of around two billion yen, or about $13 million, one mid-October estimate predicted that Pokemon Legends: Z-A only needed to sell 200,000 copies to break even. Having already met that goal more than sevenfold in Japan alone, according to Famitsu's figures, it can be estimated that the latest Legends title has already generated more than $96.5 million in net earnings tied to that region. Even more impressive is that Pokemon Legends: Z-A was released during the middle of Famitsu's recorded sales week, so those numbers actually only reflect four days of sales in addition to any pre-orders.

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Among the other high-ranking games on the list, Mario Kart World's sales continue to trickle in despite it trailing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in July. The sales figures put it in third place for the week, with weekly sales of close to 56,000 units and all-time Japanese sales in excess of 1.9 million. Rounding out the top five are PlayStation 5 exclusive Ghost of Yotei, which recorded close to 19,000 in new sales, and Nintendo's bundled Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2 on Switch, for which more than 11,000 new units were sold.

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