Granblue Fantasy: Versus' first week sales in Japan eclipse pretty much every other fighting game launch in the past decade

Smash Ultimate and Persona 4 Arena were the previous ones to sell even more

Posted by Dakota 'DarkHorse' Hills • February 12, 2020 at 12:25 p.m. PST • Comments: 52

Granblue Fantasy: Versus finally hit store shelves last week in Japan and Asia, and it appears as though every other game developer kinda got out of their way to give them the solo spotlight — for good reason.

Famitsu has released the physical games sales data for the week of February 3, and Granblue Fantasy: Versus handily takes the top spot overall while also simultaneously having one of the largest launches for a fighting game in Japan in the last decade.

Granblue managed to push 86,248 copies retail on PS4 this week in Japan, and though that might not seem like a whole lot compared to some other games, that puts it ahead of the likes of Tekken 7, Street Fighter 5, and pretty much every other traditional fighting game release since like 2012.

Cygames had previously announced that GBVS has managed to sell 150,000 units in Japan and Asia in its first day on the market, so it's interesting to see that half or more of those numbers came from digital purchases or outside of its home territory.

The last traditional fighting game we can find that eclipsed those numbers in week one was Persona 4 Arena back in 2012 which managed to sell over 128,000 copies on PS3 plus almost 10,000 more on Xbox 360.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate's record will probably remain untouched for a long time, however, as back in 2018, it over 1.2 million and still managed to chart at number 6 even for this past week.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of momentum Granblue can carry over to North America and Europe when it releases a month after the Asian market gets it — plus all of the importers — though it being one the main stage at EVO along with the Arc World Tour will probably help it a bit more.

We don't have all of them, but we've included a small chart of some of the bigger fighting game releases Japan has seen in the past decade below (in no particular order).

Sales data via: Gematsu, Media Create, Famitsu.