Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake already best-selling game in Japan for 2024 after just one week

Image credit: Square Enix

Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake has become the top-selling game in Japan for 2024, despite only releasing a week ago.

According to estimated figures shared by Famitsu, the Switch version is the top-selling game of the past week with 641,195 copies sold, while the PS5 version is in second place with 180,575 copies sold. That’s a combined total of 821,770 and doesn’t even include Steam or Xbox Series X/S sales.

Between both versions, Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake sold ten times the rest of the top ten combined.

DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D Remake – Launch Trailer

Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake – Launch TrailerWatch on YouTube
It’s a staggering achievement for a series that has traditionally proven incredibly popular in Japan. As IGN investigated a few years ago, developers of the series created their own law to only release Dragon Quest games at the weekend to stop children skipping school in the week to buy the games.

What’s more, as Noisy Pixel reports, these huge sales mean Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake is Square Enix’s most successful Japanese launch since – guess what? – the last game in the series, Dragon Quest 11, in 2017.

It’s also the biggest game launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom last year, according to Famitsu estimates.

Worldwide sales of Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake are currently unknown, though Japan was always likely to have the highest sales.

Over on Steam, the game has an all-time concurrent peak player count of 45,357, making it the most popular Dragon Quest on the platform by quite some margin. Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age peaked at 11,793.

Could this work for any other Square Enix games? Earlier this week, Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake producer Masaaki Hayasaka said he would love to see Final Fantasy 6 recreated in the same style, though admitted there are no “concrete plans”.

While Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake recreates the third game in the series, it is chronologically the first so makes a great starting point for newcomers.