Fox McCloud just made a flashy comeback. The brand-new Star Fox remake rocketed to the top of Japan’s physical sales chart in its first week, moving 41,680 physical copies, according to Famitsu. That number only covers boxed copies — Nintendo hasn’t shared digital sales yet — so the real total is almost certainly bigger.
A barrel roll to the top
Not only did the remake outsell other new releases, it also nudged past Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and helped the Switch 2 reclaim some mojo on the hardware charts. Nintendo reported 24,879 Switch 2 consoles sold alongside the game’s launch week buzz.
Japan’s game market has been a bit sluggish lately, partly thanks to a recent Switch 2 price hike that left many mid-tier titles scraping by on only a few hundred copies. For a remake to break through that haze so strongly says a lot about the franchise’s staying power — and about players’ appetite for seeing Fox do cool space dog stuff again.
How this stacks up to past Fox adventures
Putting this into perspective: Star Fox has enjoyed both stellar launches and painful flops over the years. For comparison, the classic Star Fox 64 sold roughly 75,595 copies in its first week in Japan back in 1997, while the Wii U-era experiment Star Fox Zero stumbled in 2016 with only about 25,000 copies — the weakest debut in the series for Japan.
There’s another fun stat: Star Fox 64 went on to move over 300,000 physical copies in the U.S. within five days back in the day. Obviously, gaming eras and distribution habits have changed a lot since then, so direct comparisons aren’t perfect — but those figures do help show how the series has fluctuated.
Final approach
Bottom line: this Switch 2 remake clearly outperforms the Wii U misstep and lands somewhere between that flop and the golden-era success of Star Fox 64. With digital sales left to be announced, Fox’s comeback could look even brighter. In short: Fox’s cockpit skills are intact, and fans are ready to ride shotgun.
