Japanese Charts: Live A Live Sales Come To Life As This Week’s Best-Selling Game

The monster has been slain! In this week’s Japanese charts — shared by Gematsu and published in Famitsu — Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak has lost the top spot courtesy of a group of people all from different time periods.

Live A Live, Square Enix’s HD-2D remake of its 1994 cult classic, has stormed into first place on its debut with an impressive 71,137 units sold in the week of 18th to 24th July. That’s more than double the game’s next-closest competition, Nintendo Switch Sports — which has been doing extremely solid sales numbers since it entered the charts in April/May.

Monster Hunter Rise + Sunbreak has had to settle for fourth this week, though the top five are all extremely close together in sales — all selling between 21,000 and 25,000 units each. This week’s only other new entry is Koei Tecmo’s latest entry in the Nobunaga franchise, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth, which was released on both PS4 and Switch.

Outside of that big shake-up in the top five, the rest of the chart features our usual favourites. So let’s have a little look at this week’s top ten:

1. [NSW] Live A Live (Square Enix, 07/22/22) – 71,137 (New)
2. [NSW] Nintendo Switch Sports (Nintendo, 04/29/22) – 24,869 (598,527)
3. [PS4] Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth (Koei Tecmo, 07/21/22) – 23,425 (New)
4. [NSW] Monster Hunter Rise + Sunbreak Set (Capcom, 06/30/22) – 22,871 (200,263)
5. [NSW] Nobunaga’s Ambition: Rebirth (Koei Tecmo, 07/21/22) – 21,753 (New)
6. [NSW] Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (Nintendo, 04/28/17) – 11,976 (4,734,067)
7. [NSW] Kirby and the Forgotten Land (Nintendo, 03/25/22) – 9,746 (812,708)
8. [NSW] Minecraft (Microsoft, 06/21/18) – 9,542 (2,717,993)
9. [NSW] Ring Fit Adventure (Nintendo, 10/18/19) – 9,380 (3,221,140)
10. [NSW] Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo, 12/07/18) – 5,841 (4,930,600)

There’s a few changes in Japan’s hardware sales for the past week, too. The Switch Lite is back in third place after being taken over by the PlayStation 5 last week, which means we return to our usual Switch 1-2-3. That should be the 1-2 Switch sequel’s name, shouldn’t it? Though the classic model has just outsold the OLED model by nearly 2,000 units this week. The other noteworthy story is the Xbox Series X outselling the much smaller, digital-only Series S, to be the fifth best-selling console of the week. Not bad, Microsoft!

1. Switch – 30,182 (18,526,938)
2. Switch OLED Model – 28,715 (2,055,364)
3. Switch Lite – 10,477 (4,816,631)
4. PlayStation 5 – 9,804 (1,512,433)
5. Xbox Series X – 2,884 (127,800)
6. Xbox Series S – 2,128 (146,237)
7. PlayStation 5 Digital Edition – 1,390 (252,212)
8. New 2DS LL (including 2DS) – 125 (1,187,874)
9. PlayStation 4 – 11 (7,819,769)

< Last week’s charts

As always, you can share your thoughts on the latest Japanese charts with us in the comments.