We’re calling it: Animal Crossing: Wild World is a hit with the Japanese. A pretty bold claim, we know, but with five million copies under its belt in Japan alone, we’re feeling pretty confident.

Japanese sales tracker Media Create revealed that the Nintendo DS game is the second title for the platform to move past five million. The other is, probably unsurprisingly, New Super Mario Bros. which actually made it past the five million mark much faster. It took Animal Crossing for the DS a little over three years to do it.

In terms of revenue, if every copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World was sold at the suggested retail price of 4,800 yen, the company would have sold 24 billion yen worth of the game. That equals a lot.

Media Create Weekly Ranking [via NeoGAF]

When you come upon Baabara, the town’s resident sheep, you’re greeted with a racial epithet. The word is used repeatedly in your conversation with the sheep.

“I almost forgot about you, N—-a” “So got any juicy gossip for me, N—-a?” “Just thinking about it gets me all excited, N—-a.”

The word, written with a tilda over the N and an accent over the A, apparently popped up in the game because the person who was playing it, most likely a Nintendo employee, customised the greeting of the critter to include the word. One of the draws of the original DS title was that the text speech of the game’s inhabitants can be customised.

The sheep was first discovered by MTV’s Stephen Totilo, who reported on it over on Multiplayer. I was able to track the sheep down on the version sent me by Nintendo and verified that she’s just as mouthy in my version.

It appears that Nintendo copied the save for the game to multiple copies of Wild Word and then sent it out to game writers. The copy came with a letter explaining that content had been unlocked so writers could check out how moving stuff from the DS Animal Crossing title to the recently released Wii version worked.

We’ve contacted Nintendo for comment and will update when they reply.

Nintendo Plays a Game for Me, Includes Slur [Multiplayer]