Animal Crossing: New Leaf has laid down an ominous gauntlet in Japan, enjoying an absolute barnstorming first week on shelves.

The 3DS game is the first Animal Crossing title since City Folk in 2008, and the first handheld iteration since 2005's Wild World. New Leaf's first-week debut more than doubled the series' previous record, in the meantime becoming the fastest selling 3DS game in Japan to date.

Not only that, the game enjoyed its success in both physical and digital forms, seemingly due to a steady trickle of stock from Nintendo. A reported first shipment of 600k sold out within days, leading to download sales quickly topping 200k.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Media Create tracks either downloads or download cards, but the game didn't exactly need them to dominate the software chart. Here are the figures for the week of November 5th to 11th.

Rather predictably, Animal Crossing: New Leaf helped 3DS hardware numbers leap to their highest levels in some months, seeing it comfortably past the eight million mark, and outselling its rival Vita by a ratio of around 46:1. It looks like the next milestone for the system will be to pass the lifetime sales of PS3.