*Monster Hunter Stories 3* debuts at No. 2 with 54,900 copies sold in its first week!

Sometimes, when I look at a game's market performance, it feels like searching for a newly opened mountain road on a map. How wide the road is and how much traffic it gets can, in turn, tell you whether the area ahead is really worth players taking a detour to explore. The first-week results of Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twin Dragons of Fate carry a bit of that flavor.

According to Famitsu’s weekly Japanese hardware and software sales data published on March 19, covering the period from March 9 to March 15, 2026, Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twin Dragons of Fate was the most eye-catching new release of the week. It sold 37,718 copies on Switch 2 in its first week and 17,188 copies on PS5, for a combined physical total of 54,906 copies, directly landing it at No. 2 on the overall weekly sales chart.

That is a very solid result for a new release, because it was not driven by a single platform doing all the heavy lifting — it established itself on both platforms. Looking further down the chart from that angle, you will find it ranked No. 2 and No. 3 on the software chart respectively, behind only this week’s champion, Pokémon Pokopia. The latter sold 117,029 copies this week, bringing its cumulative total to 658,400, which means it is still cruising at a high altitude.

Even more interesting is the platform environment. Switch 2 hardware sales reached 96,950 units this week, bringing its cumulative total to 4,804,273 units and officially pushing it past 4.8 million. For a game that leans toward nurturing and collecting, and that more easily appeals to both handheld and console players, that install base is like a regional map that keeps expanding wider and wider: the cost of exploration keeps dropping, while the pool of potential users continues to grow.

By comparison, the PlayStation 5 family sold a combined 12,886 units this week. Although Monster Hunter Stories 3 also posted a first-week result of 17,188 copies on PS5, Switch 2 was clearly the main force. That distribution is not surprising — the series’ overall feel has always been more suited to portable play and long-term progression. If you look a little further, you will find that what games like this fear most is not a lack of content, but players not having enough time to really sink into them, and Switch 2 just happens to be a better fit for that slow-and-steady rhythm of clearing maps and building up a team.

Among the other new releases in the same week, the PS5 version of Fatal Frame: Crimson Butterfly Remake sold 12,115 copies in its first week, while the Switch 2 version sold 6,436 copies, for a combined total of about 18,551 copies — a fairly steady debut. But compared with Monster Hunter Stories 3, the gap in scale is still quite obvious. As for Resident Evil: Requiem on PS5, it sold 12,787 copies this week, bringing its cumulative total to 191,619, which puts it in the category of an established title continuing to benefit from long-tail sales.

If you ask me what these sales figures mean, my judgment is pretty straightforward: they show that Monster Hunter Stories 3 has, at the very least on the market side, secured a fairly strong start. It may not be the kind of monster-level blockbuster that blows the roof off at launch, but it is like a newly warmed-up open area that players have just started treading into — the entrance has already been proven passable, and people are still steadily heading in.

For players still on the fence, my suggestion is this: if you already like the Monster Hunter universe but prefer collecting, progression, map exploration, and team building, then this game is well worth keeping an eye on; if all you want is intense action hunting, its appeal may not be as immediate. But beyond the map itself, what will truly determine its staying power is whether follow-up word of mouth can turn that “first-week buzz” into a “long-term ecosystem.” Judging from its first-week sales, it has already set out on that road with a very impressive start.