Splatoon Raiders Dominates Japan's July Switch 2 Sales Charts
Splatoon Raiders didn’t just win Japan’s Switch 2 eShop in July — it won by a margin that makes the rest of the top 10 look like a different genre showcase. Nippon Ichi Software’s Village in the Shade claimed second despite shipping at the very end of the month, Digimon Story: Time Stranger swallowed three chart slots across its edition splits, and Granblue Fantasy: Relink — Endless Ragnarok carved out two more. That’s a digital chart led by new releases and RPGs, and for Nintendo’s portable hardware, that’s a meaningful shift.
The Switch 1 eShop list tells the other half of the story. Rhythm Heaven Groove — whose icons just landed on Switch Online — leads a chart still anchored by Splatoon 3, Minecraft, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons — evergreen staples from a console winding down but not fading out. Read together, the two lists show a platform transition in real time: new hardware pulling big new games digitally while the old system’s audience keeps buying the same comfort food. Handheld players should pay attention to both halves.
Splatoon Raiders Ends Japan’s Physical-First Habit
Japan’s eShop has historically trailed the rest of the world in digital adoption — physical retail, used game stores, and the resale market run deep there. A marquee multiplayer title like Splatoon Raiders — whose 475K Japan debut proved Switch 2 momentum — topping the digital chart in its debut month is therefore not a given. It signals that Switch 2 owners are treating the new console as an always-online, always-installed machine.
For handheld players, that’s the right call. A live-service shooter with regular updates benefits from living on internal storage — one tap from the home screen, resuming from sleep mid-commute, no cartridge swap, no carrying a physical library. Splatoon 3’s continued presence at #7 on the Switch 1 chart shows the franchise’s older fans haven’t fully migrated yet. The ones who have moved to Switch 2 are spending big and digitally.
JRPGs Run This Chart, and Portability Is Why
Look past Splatoon Raiders and the top 20 is essentially a JRPG reading list. Village in the Shade’s second-place finish is the quiet shocker — a Nippon Ichi title landing that high with only a handful of sales days, purely on digital momentum. Digimon Story: Time Stranger claiming three separate slots proves premium edition tiering works on portables, while Granblue Fantasy: Relink, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, Persona 3 Reload, and Final Fantasy X/X-2 round out the field.
None of this should surprise anyone who plays on a train. JRPGs are the perfect handheld genre — long sessions, grind-able loops, suspend-and-resume-friendly pacing. But the digital angle matters as much as the portability. Japan’s used-game market kept RPG launch sales artificially low for decades because every physical copy could be resold. On Switch 2, when the only copy is the one installed on your console, those sales finally flow back to developers.
Two Libraries, One Storage Budget: The Cross-Gen Squeeze
The clearest takeaway for handheld owners is that cross-gen is double-edged. Digimon Story: Time Stranger, Village in the Shade, and Culdcept Begins appear on both eShop charts, which means more players are maintaining libraries across Switch 1 and Switch 2 — sometimes buying games twice or paying for Switch 2 Edition upgrades like Trails in the Sky and Kyoto Xanadu. Every one of those purchases is also a storage decision.
Switch 2’s 256GB base storage fills quickly when the top sellers are multiplayer live-service games with patches, and a high-capacity Switch 2 microSD card is becoming less of an accessory and more of a requirement. The Switch 1 chart, meanwhile, is essentially the all-time greatest hits list — Minecraft, Smash, Animal Crossing — which is good news for anyone keeping the old console in rotation. But it also means the storage math now spans two devices. July’s chart reads as a clear warning: Japan has gone digital, and your SD card is the wall you’ll hit first.