Pikmin 4 defends No.1 spot from Armored Core 6 | Japan Monthly Charts

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

Pikmin 4 was the best-selling game at Japanese retail for the second month in a row, fending off the only new release to chart in the Top 30: FromSoftware’s Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon.

According to the latest data from Famitsu, Nintendo’s garden critter adventure shifted 235,000 copies in August, bringing the game’s lifetime sales to 753,000.

This means the game has smashed the franchise’s previous physical sales record – previously held by 2020’s Pikmin 3 Deluxe for Switch with 660,000 – in just two months.

Meanwhile, Armored Core 6 had to settle for No.2 – although it was released late in the month, landing on shelves on August 25 (two days before Famitsu stopped collecting data for August).

Unlike Pikmin, Armored Core failed to outperform its predecessor. Armored Core 5, released in 2012, sold 194,000 copies after a similar late-month launch, while this year’s revival sold 163,000. However, it’s worth noting this only factors in boxed sales; with the digital market growing dramatically in the last ten years, it’s almost certain FromSoftware’s latest sold more copies overall.

Elsewhere in the charts, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe rose from No.5 to No.3 thanks to a month-on-month sales increase. The 57,000 copies shifted in August bring its total sales in Japan to just shy of 5.5 million (and, again, this doesn’t include digital).

In total, 1.25 million boxed games were sold in Japan last month, down 27% from 1.7 million the month before.

Hardware also saw total sales slip, down 20% to 530,000 units.

Nintendo Switch was once again the best-selling console, shifting 334,000 units across all three of its models – 258,000 of which were the OLED version. However, Nintendo’s console sold 18% fewer units than it managed the previous month.

PlayStation 5 sold 181,000 units, marking a 25% month-on-month decline. By contrast, Xbox doubled the combined sales of the two Series models compared to last month, although this still amounted to just over 10,000 units.

Here are Japan’s Top 10 best-selling physical games from July 31 to August 27, 2023, courtesy of Famitsu:

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox