168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16 has sold pretty well. Less than two weeks after launch, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix has confirmed the blockbuster RPG has already shipped three million copies. As a PS5 exclusive that has publicly acknowledged its desire to rebrand the series for a wider global audience, this is far from a bad start. However, a few voices on the 𒁏wind have fans worried about the future.
As a Japanese game, you’d expect a game like Final🐈 Fantasy 16 to do gangbusters in the territory. While it’s selling nicely, an 89 percent drop in its second week has parts of the fandom growing paranoid about the game’s success and the lack of PS5 availability, questioning if the numbers we’re being presented with are nothing but an overblown conspiracy theory. I think we should take a deep breath and consider the obvious - Final Fantasy has changed.
This is a current generation exclusive in a landscape where hardware has only just become widely available, so you’ve an added cost of entry to consider before you bother to factor in anything else. But it’s also more of a character action game than class🐻ic RPG, while it also draws from pronounced Western influences like Game of Thrones and The Witcher because Square Enix knows it must capitalise on these if it hopes to make an entry in the series that appeals to a global audience. I personally think this task is impossible, but that’s an article for another day. When you break it all down, of course it was going to struggle in Jap🌟an.
published a report that compared the first week’s sales of 336,027 copies to 37,763 in the second. Keep in mind, these are physical figures for a PS5 exclusive released years after Final Fantasy 15. Its predecessor may have sold more in the same window, but we now exist in a more digital landscape where the series’ perception has changed from one of scepticism into one far more optimistic thanks to the success of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Remake and 14’s constant slew of excellent expansions. The series is in a ⛎go♔od place, and 16 struggling physically in its homeland can hardly be considered a sign of the apocalypse. That being said, it’s an interesting sign when it comes to what the future might bring. It’s the inverse of where we were a decade ago.
During the PS3 and Xbox 360 era we saw publishers like Square Enix and Capcom trying so desperately to redefine their legacy properties for Western audiences. We saw edgy reboots of Bomberman, Bionic Commando, and Dark Void which all sold terribly and reviewed even worse. None of them were good, and it felt like these projects were spawned by Japanese companies’ fear to embrace their roots and what made them so beloved to begin with. We didn’t want muscular men and angst-ridden narratives, but when the market was filled with Gears of War and Call of Duty clones, perhaps this was the only route to success they viewed as attainable when the console market was otherwise so volatil🌱e.
The entire generation was spent floundering around without any semblance of identity. That soon changed, and now we’re going through a very similar ordeal. I’m not sure where the turning point was exactly, but it seemed games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nier: Automata and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Monster Hunter: World helped prove that Japanese properties didn’t need to change in order to pierce the global market, and successes came from unparalleled creativity and a willingness to appeal to fans without ever bowing to them. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil has done🥃 similar things, and it seems Final Fantas𒀰y 16 wants to land somewhere in the middle.
It has been described as a global Final Fantasy which needs to appeal to as many people as possible, and that includes both existing fans and curious newcomers. It achieves this rather well with its endless homages to previous entries while still offering a melodramatic narrative experience that falls squarely within the series’ threshold. I could recommend this game to a friend or family member without the baggage of past entries, even if the number at the end of the title suggests otherwise. However, this design philosophy could also hinder proceedings under the right circumstances. Fans are loyal, and that goes double for those in Japan, and perhaps there was an element of alienation with such a prestigious series deciding to adopt Western sensibilities over its own, with Square Enix shooting itself in the foot for the wrong reasons. Ironic, given Final Fantasy 16’s view on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:female characters and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:similar archetypes remain firmly in the past despit🌸e its eagerness to mo🌺ve forward.
Final Fantasy 16 is doing just fine, even if its Japanese sales indicate a changi🍃ng of the tide when it comes to the series shifting into the global juggernaut it clearly wants to be. Square Enix wanted it to be different, so we can’t expect sales everywhere to be the same as they were before. Video games are more expensive to make and take longer to produce these days, and we’re constantly seeing the market react in response to this development in ways that sales figures will never fully represent. People also buy digitally more often than they did seven years ago when Final Fantasy 15 was released, another factor these sales figures don’t take into account. This marginal decline in popularity in Japan is a minute part of the big picture, and months will need to pass before the dust settles and we see precisely how well this Westernised experiment has fared.
