It’s been a little more than two months since Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity launched for the Nintendo Switch. The video game community seemed to be caught off guard when the game was announced, as the Hyrule Warriors series, and by extension, all of Koei Tecmo’s Musou titles, are hack and clash strategy games with RPG elements. While the genre has its dedicated fan base, it generally hasn’t seen any serious numbers in terms of sales or units shipped, until now. Koei Tecmo’s end of year financial earnings reveals that Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has shipped approximately 3.5 million copies, which makes it the best-selling Musou game of all time.

Koei Tecmo’s financial report for Q3 FY2020 is up:
A big increase in sales & profit compared to last year, mostly thanks to Hyrule Warriors AoC getting past 3.5M shipments mark by December 2020

Also at same time: Atelier Ryza 2 & RTK14 expansion sold 220k & 100k in Japan & Asia pic.twitter.com/YPfs04oddK

— 黒凧 BlackKite (@bk2128) January 25, 2021

Considering that the game has only been available for a short time, this is an astounding achievement. To put these numbers in perspective, the previous entry, Hyrule Warriors, sold roughly 1 million units for the ill-fated Wii U in the first few months of being available. Going back even further, Koei Tecmo’s last title to put up numbers such as this was Dynasty Warriors 4 in 2003 for the PlayStation 2, which sold around 2.2 million lifetime units. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has now outsold both by a wide margin, and it’s only been out for a mere two months.

While the game itself is a blast to play through for any Musou fan, it’s very clear that the huge selling point is due to the fact that it’s a tie-in game for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is now considered to be one of the greatest games of all time. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity acts as a prequel to Breath of the Wild, setting the stage for the events that would eventually take place with Link and all of the other champions in their battle with Ganon.

The rest of the report mentions that Koei Tecmo enjoyed a record financial quarter, reaching approximately $105 million. This was of course largely due to Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, but other factors also contributed to these statistics. Their other big franchise, Romance of the Three Kingdoms 14, sold roughly 100,000 units in the same time frame. Yes, there are 14 installments in this series. The company also enjoyed some sales from Team Ninja’s Nioh 2, in which they are the studio’s main publisher in their native Japan.

As we already mentioned, this financial report has the statistics for the end of December 2020. As we now approach February 2021, we imagine that the sales numbers for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity has gone up exponentially since then, especially whenever Nintendo drops more information about the sequel for Breath of the Wild, which was first announced at E3 2019. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity is available now exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.