The first day sales from Japanese blogger sinobi are now in and it appears that Square Enix's Dragon Quest V port on the Nintendo DS has started even stronger than its predecessor. Dragon Quest IV managed to sell around 1.2 million copies in total after starting with 350,000 sales on its first day and a limited first shipment.
This time round, though, Square Enix was prepared for the demand and it is definitely a good job it has done so, since from initial Famitsu figures the remake of Dragon Quest V from the SNES (and PlayStation 2) has sold through a staggering 420,000 units on Day One alone. This equates to 60% of the initial shipment, so chances are high for close to the full 700,000 being sold through in the full week and the million mark is likely to be crossed very quickly thanks to the extra stock waiting in the wings. Many thought DQV would not do quite as well as DQIV purely because of the shorter space of time that has passed since the PS2 remake and this DS version when compared to the lengthier time span between the PSone edition of DQIV and its DS iteration. Clearly the Dragon Quest user-base on DS has proved that assumption wrong!
The question remains, though, whether or not the PlayStation 2 version's total can be eclipsed, just as DQIV DS managed to slip ahead of the PSone's sales.