Did Ff16 Flop?

Agree with the OP.

Will add, kind of felt like "Is anyone else seeing Yoshi isn't this FF grandmaster WoW made him out to be?" Always felt Matsui was the better producer. You can see it with XIV, Yoshi has this weird A$$ affinity with unconventional FF elements. XIV does not even feel like a FF game tbh lol....Nor does XVI, imo of course.

Yoshi is very narrow minded, which isn't great for an MMO. XVII, imo, may be an MMO (Unless Yoshi is in charge...then it may be Elden Ring -esque or some $hit....).

IX, X, XI

XII, XIII, XIV

XV, XVI, XVII?

Yeah Naoki Yoshida has been terrible at making or being part of successful MMO's.

FFXI was seen as a massive departure from the norm of FF and "unconventional" back in the day too so...

XI isn't even FF... I mean, XII showed their improvements on how it can be played offline. XIII is what destroyed FF. XIV:ARR restored FF. XV destroyed FF again. You can go on but eh...

We are not asking them to make FF be like Baldur’s Gate, we are asking for FF to be like FF again.

People who want SE to make the next FF a turn based JRPG arent buying SEs other turn based JRPGs released in the last decade.

FF from 30 years ago yes.


Yup. The Octopath games were very good but sales have not been all that great.

Even Dragon Quest 11 which had massive sales in Japan to boost it, did a good few million less than what FFXV sold and DQXI was on Switch and 3DS too.

DQXI, 8 different flavors based on system availability and version: 6 mil sales
Octopath 1, 4 different flavors, 3 mil sales
Octopath 2, 6 different flavors, 1.5 mil sales

FFXV, 4 diff flavors, over 10 mil sales
FFXVI, still ps5 exclusive DMC ripoff, 4 mil sales
FF7R, 3 diff flavors, over 7 million sales.

Now why oh why does SE think moving to the DMC ripoff, or the action with ability pausing (whatever you want to call it), genre may be better for sales??

Edit:
I forgot the Bravely series, that over three games, two on 3DS and one for Switch+Windows, barely breached 3 mil sales combined.

I don't disagree with you, but remember that even the SoS devs didn't expect the game to sell as well as it did. They passed their first year sales goals in the first few days, or something wild like that. It's easy to point to Sea of Stars now and say "look, people wanted this!" but that wasn't obvious even to the devs themselves before release. They made a JRPG because they wanted to make a JRPG, and because a ~25 person studio likely doesn't have the time or budget to even consider making something like XVI.

SE as a company is too large to be focused on games anymore; The games are just a way to make money. That isn't throwing shade at Yoshida - I'm sure there are tons of talented and passionate people working at SE who would love to make a classic style FF JRPG, but unless upper management thinks they can make lottery jackpot money selling that kind of game, it's not going to get made.

why are you comparing lower budget pixel style games to AAA decades old franchises though?

I completely agree with this. Makes story modes for some games unplayable at my house. Wish it could be toggled, even bleep outs.

Maybe because sales indicates the number of people willing to PAY to play the game. This is literally the biggest indicator of demand. Theres a reason people also separate initial sales from total sales, since total sales will include all those copies sold at discounts.

The aforementioned Sea of Stars talk:
Someone will say that its in over 4 million players libraries, thats good, that shows demand for traditional turn based RPG. Of course, they'll neglect to mention that it that its bundled in the lowest tier of PS Plus and GamePass, and the game actually sold around 250k copies.
Dont get me wrong, 250k sales is great for an indie company. But of those over 4 million libraries its in, only 250k of them actually paid for the game. Its hard to *** demand of something that is literally free.

Final Fantasy XI – 2002 Developer Interview

"Tanaka: From the beginning, this is how I wanted Final Fantasy to be—something with a huge amount of freedom, and the ability for the player to choose how they want to play. RPGs are about empathising and identifying with your character, and as a game, FFXI embodies that idea to the fullest. You and your character really are one and the same.

Ishii: What’s “Final Fantasy” about FFXI? Well, it’s what we’ve been chasing with Final Fantasy from the very beginning. But while we knew what we wanted to do then, we couldn’t realize it. But now, as an online game, we’ve been able to fulfill that dream. Or maybe it’s precisely the long history of striving for that goal by our developers which lends this game that Final Fantasy feeling."

Sauce: https://shmuplations.com/ffxi/

The developers saying that didn't stop FF fans from turning their noses up at 11 and saying it shouldn't be a numbered game.

They made an online game because they were chasing money. It's no different from now. It's what businesses do, they have shareholders to appease.

Not quite that simple, since the high sale number games had 4x(if not more) the budget of the low sale number games you listed and have to make that up in sales. They also represent more risk, and a higher amount of resources tied up for the process. There is merit in lower budget titles that get less sales, as well.

Granted, nobody here has any reason to believe we know what SE should be releasing better than SE does. They are doing what they believe to be(and likely what is) in their best interest, even if it upsets people who want more older-styled games.

My quick 2 cents about FFXVI:

Overall I liked it, but my biggest gripe was it felt too much like FFXIV, including the empty world. Same cycle of do main story quest, open quest hub explosion on map, do quest hub, do main story quest, repeat. The world offered no real exploration, every area was tied either to a quest from the quest hub or a hunt. There were no secrets to be found. How do you have aa FF game without any secret areas or quests? No secret summons and no secret bosses (I don't count hunts). I think back to FFXII, that game had like 4 secret summons and multiple superbosses, in addition to hunt based superbosses. FFX had you figuring out how to make the ultimate weapons, the secret spheres in the temples, multiple secret summons, a secret dungeon with a superboss, (a super-superboss if you count international), and lets not even mentioned the amount of stuff you can do in X-2 separate from the story. I would say even FFXV had a more exciting world to explore than FFXVI, even with all that game's story problems.

I wanted to replay FFXVI on the harder difficulties, but couldn't bring myself to do it yet because it would basically be the same thing as before. I think I'll wait until both DLCs are out and see what has changed. Maybe there be some secrets to find then.

Edit: The linear gear upgrade system was garbage and stats didn't really matter. Only accessories maybe had something mildly interesting that affected gameplay (this is a stretch). At least you had to fight some challenging fights for the strongest weapon. (This can be upgraded further in NG+, but like i mentioned I haven't done it yet, so maybe it gets more interesting)

I did not know that about gamepass+ etc, I just got it off steam during the winter sale, but that does make sense.

I still see it as part of a growing trend of

That's perfectly stated. They make things that are created without the focus being on games and instead as products. You can sell a bunch of generic ideas with shiny packaging as a product and it will be successful. I now understand why so many people try to get refunds on bad games.

I can't refute that some FF fans probably said that, but I never did. I'd consider XI more "FF" than XIII, XIII-2, XV, or XVI.

So sick of stagger meters and souls-like mechanics. I don't wanna play that ***, I wanna play FF.

/old man rant

Obviously FFXI has influences from FF3 but it's also heavily influenced by early western MMO's of the time. SE have had a lot of western influences in their games for decades, Rebirth is going to be an open world game, it's why FF is such a global franchise and not so Japanese-sales heavy. The next Dragon Quest sounds like it could be changing things up a bit too.

Monster Hunter is another franchise that has 'westernised' itself in search of more sales and for them it has worked very well.

Zelda has transitioned away from its traditional formula.

Pokémon is experimenting with open worlds and different gameplay.

This has nothing to do with how many people paid to play the game though.

The budget for the FF1-6 pixel remasters was probably dirt cheap for a multi-billion dollar company and they sold 3 million copies (I dont know if its the summed total of all 6 combined or of the set, I couldnt find that information). While I'm sure the ROI was high on that investment, I'd be willing to bet the current ROI of FFXI in 2023 was greater.

They people saying they want older-styled games are the same people who buy the games on sale months later or worse, pirate the games out of protest to SE not making another turned based FF.

I stumbled on that information when I was looking at its sales numbers.

The only thing I truly loathe is they said "there wont be any DLC, the game is complete out of the box", and then playing through the game it was painfully obvious they left a ginormous gaping hole in the story for DLC purposes.

Kinda yes and no. The Gaming industry is now operating like the Movie industry, bigger investment means bigger profit expectation which in turn means less risk can be taken.

Deadpool had a budget of $58 million, which is chump change for Hollywood. If it had failed to break ~$100M it would of just been attributed as a cult film and nobody would of cared. Avengers Age of Ultron by comparison had a $440~$500 million budget, if it didn't break $1 billion minimum someone was going to be called to the carpet to explain.

Bigger budget means more advertising which means more visibility and more people pushing the game to consumers. The (loose) rule of thumb is that advertising on high production titles is going to be half the costs of production.

Pokemon had barely changed their gameplay and still selling high numbers despiste horrible bugs etc. Not everything has to change just for the sake of change. Somehow this turns into "old man boomers want turn based only" when they are changing a lot more things than that. Most GenZ boppers don't give a ***about Final Fantasy, I don't see how/why they would be the target market. They should make the systems more like FF7R, I felt that was the best of both worlds.

Well the newer games are "Final Fantasy" in name only, technically they are derivatives of the Final Fantasy: Versus product line.

FF Versus XIII, this should look kinda familiar.



They just dropped the "Versus" and made them part of the mainline as a way of leveraging the popularity of the Final Fantasy brand.

The large team they created to make the game has been disbanded, there will be no spinoffs or dlc beyond what they were already working on.

There have been lots of articles talking about that.

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2023/12/final-fantasy-16-dev-team-disbands-making-sequels-or-spin-offs-unlikely

It's pretty standard nowadays for designs to fill content with potential DLC plugs, just incase someone wants to release some down the road.

How many times have you replayed a final fantasy its def not the nostalgia, We did not have a MODREN TURN BASED GAME Since Lost odyssey, I mean not those LOW BUDGET RPGS Big budget RPGS, Hell if you own a XBOX go play Lost odyssey its a Turn based XBOX game by Sekiguchi that is more enjoyable than 13 15 and 16 combined with 2008 Graphics and it has alot more endgame content than 13 15 and 16 combined,

Also for the Gay Scene IT IS OUT OF PLACE we did not have any BACKSTORY TO THAT POINT Why are they love what is going on?

This game was so ***' good man.

A good example of why big-budget turn-based games couldn't survive during the Xbox 360 vs PS3 console war was because Japanese people refused to buy Microsoft products. They realized they had lost the battle against the $2+ trillion company Microsoft. We are lucky to see more low-budget turn-based games with plenty of cute little anime girls anyway. Sakaguchi has stated he isn't interested in making a sequel to Lost Odyssey, Blue Dragon, or The Last Story after all three titles failed to meet sales expectations.

Is Baldur's Gate 3 low budget?

*** no