I've removed about 30 seconds from the video, as an eagle-eyed viewer pointed out I made a mistake and mislabeled the sales of Final Fantasy XIII as 11 million (total FFXIII trilogy sales). The solo sales for Final Fanatsy XIII as of the last update were 7 million. There was a section discussing the XIII trilogy cut from the video to shorten it, and I ended up forgetting to adjust the sales numbers in the final edit. I didn't want to leave this mistake in the video and mislead people, so I cut it out entirely.
Its because while yes they transitioned to real time combat and i loved the idea of, but they gave literally every enemy hyper armor so it feels like you are swinging at a wall every fight
I think it boils down to 3 factors: 1. The quality of the games has just not been up to snuff with previous entries since the PS2 era. The characters and stories have grown less memorable and the writing is simply not as tight as it once was. 2. The games haven't grown up with their audiences. I'm in my 40s and have been playing these games since my teens. I absolutely felt a shift in my perception of FF games once it moved from 5th to 6th generation consoles and started taking advantage of the technology of the PS2 and later. Aspects of the writing and direction that worked well during the 2D era and on PS1 just didn't once you moved into the era of cinematic gaming with fully voiced characters. And while the series has slowly improved in that regard, people my age, who lost touch with the series around the time of XII/XIII just haven't felt convinced enough by the new entries to come back. I also can't speak for everyone, but I'm also no longer interested in games that rely on heavy naked exposition for storytelling. My preference these days is for FromSoft-style less-is-more writing. I'm also a big fan of Baldur's Gate 3 and Larian's style of writing, but I just get the sense that Final Fantasy games are still trying to cater to an audience a generation or two younger, which doesn't have the same emotional connection to past entries. 3. I think people are just sick of a lot of the business decisions Square-Enix has been making in the past decade. It goes beyond console exclusivity. I think the fact that they were all in on NFTs in games until everyone realized that NFTs were a big scam, and their use of AI-generated content has left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
My man, i wish i could shake your hand. It's simply just this. Final Fantasy is disconnected from it's old audience and can't really crawl it's way into the new one. It's a franchise that wants everything and ends up getting nothing. Like many others.
Imma be honest , that number in front of the title does not do it favor. If someone doesn't know about how FF works , they'd think there are 16 games they need to play. The franchise struggles to pull in new fans , older fans will slowly but surely either grow too old to give a shit , or not feel the need to play every new entry , because for them its the knowledge that these games AREN'T connected that might nudge them towards just skipping a title "for now". The decrease in quality (i still like 15 and 16 but come on), shift from setting trends to following them , lack of iconic and unique imagery and world building the way ff6 to even 13 had , and specially lack of multiplatform launches are just the dressing on top. I fucking love the ff7 remake , but it just highlights how square seemingly can't come up with another banger setting like 7 anymore, even though they did it until the recent decade, even versus 13 had a unique setting
As much as I love FFXV and all of it's multimedia content, I think that's a huge reason as to why the series started seeing a relevancy decline. Now don't get me wrong, the game sold incredibly well and depending on the source it's often listed as the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th best selling entry in the series but it's also one that burnt a lot of people out. The thing is, if you're as invested as I was in the FFXV multimedia, then its story is awesome but regardless of that the storytelling itself is an absolute trainwreck. The game was rushed out the door to meet deadlines and it clearly shows. Even at launch, to get a better understanding of what's going on you had to watch an anime miniseries and a feature length film. But all that still wasnt enough to fill in the story gaps, so they released 4 character centric DLC expansions episodes, an anime OVA, a multiplayer expansion, and bonus content from the Royal Edition of the game . Even then, there's no linear way to approach all this content so to get it correct as far as chronological order you'd have to be hopping back and forth between the game and those individual pieces of media. With that in mind, when the multiplayer expansion failed to get a decent playerbase, all that sunken money meant that future character DLC expansions had to be cancelled and instead be released as a book. The message from consumers was clear: "this is overwhelming to keep track of and I'm ready to call it quits." It's sad because I personally think a lot of this content is excellent at fleshing out the story and characters of FFXV but it also arguably should have been a part of the base game in the first place. And if they had delayed its launch by about 6 months to a year, that couldve definitely been the case. The idea of Final Fantasy as an anthology series means that anyone can jump in on any particular game and not be lost, so when XV said that you have to jump through hoops to get the best experience possible I think that left a bad taste in people's mouths and made them lose trust in the series. Tl;dr-FFXV's multimedia content helped flesh out the story and lore of the game but made for a convoluted experience that caused fans to abandon ship.
Yes. Because technology caught up. We arent pushing graphic fidelity anymore. We are in the age of pushing ideas again, because every game can be graphicaly amazing eith the widespread tools available to devs.
Sony is a sinking ship and SE still wants to cooperate with them. This is quite mind boggling to me. And I'm afraid I can't agree with you on the creative part. One painstaking problem with JRPG is the extreme anime/JRPG tropes plaguing the game design/narrative. People still play rpg this days needs either deeper more immersive experience or very unique stylized experience. And I think final fantasy is falling to deliver neither. Players just won't care about your world building or lore if your story arc is just predicable anime/JRPG tropes.
It already did. Because it peaked highly and made us expect that. Most of the games where above average and some where milestones. All of a sudden everybody wants milestones all the time. Ff7 to ff8 is the example.
After the first 2 dudes it's been trash in almost every metric although 12 surprised me but after x-2 and 11 even shit would taste amazing then 13 was like 3 steps back the story was alright but exploration and battle was 3/10 then it literally got worse ever since in every category besides graphics I bet most the talent they have now couldn't even make a good on ps2 or an earlier game system that anyone would play today
I would say it lost its prestige in the XIII days, And XIII did not grew the franchise at all, yes it was the biggest launch at the time ( normal considering how video game sales exploded in the 2000s ) but it has still yet to outsell X or VII and right now what is happening is that FF IP is losing remaining popularity which has been stagnant since over 20 years now. ( while overall the popularity of story heavy rpgs has actually grown larger ) Blaming being console exclusive does address a little bit of the issues, but even if Remake and XVI had released on all possible platfrom at launch, the sales would not have been greatly different, XV sold 5 million first day, with both xbox and ps4 but it took it almost 6 years to sell another 5 million, when God of war and Horizon zero dawn have both outsold XV by over twice the copies sold in the same timeframe ( both games selling half of what XV did at launch but outselling the lanuch sales by a staggering 3 to 1 in less time and still only on ps4, this is before their PC release. My point is that their new multiplatform apporach is not gonna make much difference, instead of 3 million launch is gonna 5 million and lifetime 10 million at most when the competition is selling 3 times as fast and longer too. I personally believe the reason is twofold 1 FF has not innovated or felt unique enough in a long while, compare XV, remake, rebirth and XVI to Witcher 3, God of War, Elden Ring and most recently Baldurs gate 3 from a technical standpoint and the FF games are a tier below. 2 the storytelling of current FF single player games, its also a tier below the games ive mentioned, even its best executed story which is arguably the VII remake games are marred by a apporach of having your cake and eat it too, trying to be both faithful but also new, ( I personally find XVI to be my favorite out of all these recent FF games by far, but that game has so many issues with its story execution ) Valhalla made 1 billion in microtransaction, there is no sales data, so is not a good metric to compare to unit sales.
For the first reason, can’t you provide any examples as to how ff is less unique than those games? Secondly, the story is not a tier below.Devs can be faithful to the story while making relatively smaller additions/changes, because they don’t want to make the exact same thing again.There’s no proof for this either. XV and XIII didn’t sell well because they were a broken mess.VII rebirth didn’t sell well because some people fell off from remake->rebirth and people keep whining about the story changes plus some other reasons.Aside from that Rebirth is arguably even better than elden ring let alone the other games.And yes, it has an innovative system very different from most games.
@@AsadKhan-ic9qi Those people whining as you say are mostly the reason Remake and Rebirth sales are falling, you can argue the storytelling choices are valid, and even If I agreed with that it would not matter because that does not change the fact, a very big portion of the players do not like it. About how the storytelling in modern FF is below the games I mentioned. in the worst case is incomplete like in XV ( even Royal edition ) in the middle there is XVI which has numerous moments and scenes that on their own are kinda harmles but there are so many over the course of the game that brings the whole experience down. Like Kupka capturing Jill of screen and Clive for some reason not being able to rescue her fast enough but Torgal can, why Joshua kept away from his brother even before absorbing Ultima, why Clive with just 1 more Eikon out of 5 he had was suddenly able to beat Barnabas when he previously could not even make him work for it and Ultima not being memorable as a villain ( I disagree with this one, but again that is what most people did not enjoy and I can certainly see how tired of a trope Ultima is even if he is well done ) Is a death by a thousand cuts so to speak, coupled with a very barebones rpg experience ( not even the no playable party thing, but the whole gearing, and exploration is an afterthought at best, it makes sense why it has overall not resonated with many). In the best case scenario like Remake and Rebirth they just could not either make the game a sequel to Advent Children or a regular remake like the Resident evil games, no they just had to kinda do both at once, or maybe not, since they can totally backtract whichever they happen to dislike with the final game. The point is, like many many other Jrpgs, they are making an already kinda convolute story with FF7, ( FF7 was still tame for Jrpg standards and I bet one of the reasons it resonated with so many besides the obvious gameplay and graphics at the time was due to the story being easier to follow than say Chrono cross or Xenogears ) much more convoluted, and in the process alienating both newcomers and old fans. And modern FF games are less unique than those games I mentioned in the sense that, Witcher 3 and God of war have almost inmaculate storytelling, Elden ring has the more impressive, and rewarding open world exploration, yes better than Rebirth as well, and BG3 showed you can still make a turn based combat and have your game be one of the best selling rpgs ever made.
@@fanmovie357 I was saying this from a more objective perspective.There is nothing pointing towards the ffviir story being objectively worse than others(something you seem to know) and even for me, while not having ever played ffvii it was very easy to follow so this just seems to be a case of people exaggerating narrative complexity. I would not say modern FF games are less unique because the world and gameplay systems of ffviir are more unique then all those games you mentioned.
@@AsadKhan-ic9qi I can objectively say FFVII remake story is lesser than God of war and Witcher 3 due to it being a lot more convoluted than it needs to be, the subjectivity is whether being that convoluted is a flaw or not, to me it is, to you is not. And now you get to explain why Remake/Rebirth gameplay systems and world are unique, compared to the best rpgs made in the past 10 years.
@@fanmovie357 1st off, the materia system.There's pretty much nothing like it in other games.You can change the gameplay style of your characters like turning cloud into the best healer in the game (ik that's not that unique in and of itself, but the way you do it is unique since you can switch abilities like you can't in any other game.) Secondly the fact that each and every weapon is viable and offers a different playstyle as well for each character(e.g. twin stinger has the best mp hence is the best weapon for turning cloud into a healer and mythril rod has best damage so it's the most useful for turning aerith into more of a damage dealer).It's not like the last few weapons in the game are good, by endgame. Thirdly the combat.Which game can you point out that has a combat system like these remakes?You can at base level do basic attacks but all abilities, items and spells are locked behind atb which you have to be aggressive to get.You can get more and more atb by using atb boost and refocus but that means sacrificing valuable materia slots which you could use for other valuable materia as well.So you can use materia to get abilities and attacks that the game doesn't allow otherwise, or get spells that allow to to exploit all kinds of weaknesses, or drastically boost your stats.The limited number of slots means each character will always have a glaring weakness however you can customize their strengths and weaknesses on a level unlike in other rpgs. Moreover I'm surprised I have to explain why FFVII has arguably a more interesting world than even elden ring.Consider midgar, a city built 300m aboveground to harvest the planet's lifeblood to vastly enhance living conditions except for healthcare and at the cost of the lives of the people too poor to live in such an expensive place.Then there's the lore about the planet and the lifestream, the gi tribe and the two most powerful materia. Then there's cosmo canyon, the gold saucer and other stuff which hopefully I don't have to explain, and let's not even mention Junon. What other game has locales this imaginative, in a genre and setting(sci-fantasy)this sparsely explored, compared to the incredibly mundane medieval settings and genre?I'm sorry but I've had enough of old crumbling, imposing victorian structures where you go to fight some ungodly creature, beast witches, giants and warlocks, ancient kings or corrupted knights and princes(basically just dnd or classic medieval enemies again), whereas in FFVII you fight ungodly creatures, sewer creatures, ghosts, mutated scrapyard creatures, human experiments, chimeras, robots and mechs, cave and mineral creatures, animals, soldiers, hand to hand combatants and yes, aliens.Plus whatever else you can think of. And now you get to explain how ffviir's story is so convoluted
I think it has more to do with us than FF. When I was young my imagination filled in the gaps more. But as you get older and the games get more detailed, less is left to the imagination and so, less fulfilling. Same with story telling, you begin to be less and less surprised by certain “plot twists” because you’ve absorbed so much already. This is also why they stop making games for the original fans and instead shoot for younger audiences, they are easier to wow.. My children when they were younger rather play with the box than the toy in it-then the toy rather than the box- then the tablet rather than toys.. It’s sort of a natural progression. NOT ALWAYS, but definitely a factor.
I feel FF games have become more and more generic starting from 10. The series have lost it essence. If SE changed the title of FF13 to ABCD and deleted some superficial signs like Shiva or chocobos, I wouldn’t have known it was a FF game.
no sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu? bad writting ? fanbase getting older ? no turn based? put all that back again = profit ? squareenix should hurry up nobuo and sakaguchi arent getting any younger!! ☹
@@AsadKhan-ic9qi it's not exactly a core reason but part of final fantasy's identity is rooted in turn-based. identity is kinda important and final fantasy's has been kinda blurry for a while. if it's gonna be action based, it needs to express its identity through that and frankly i don't see it.
I got into ff because of Dissida 012 when I was 11 the only final fantasy game I have completed. Currently playing ff remake and all I have to say is I wouldn't have played any of those games if they were turn based. Ff just needs to lock in on there writing and cut the exclusivity with playstation and they're golden @@AsadKhan-ic9qi
All they have to do is dump their exclusivity, move to real time combat as the main games while having spinoff turn based final fantasy games. You expand the potential audience while having goodwill with the turn based fans which will give them more motivation to try out the realtime games.
i'm personally really optimistic about the next mainline. i had a few issues with XVI and Rebirth but they were still so good, i'm sure if they listen to the player feedback of both games and continue on the line of what XVI was they can make an amazing game. and i feel even *more* confident since they intend on making it multiplatform now: surely a release on switch 2 will impact development positively. at this point they can either go AAA again or go back to ATB pixel art games like yoshi-p suggested, any direction is fine as long as they aply feedback from XVI and Rebirth
I like Final Fantasy, but I won't buy inferior hardware (PS5) just to be able to play it. I just bought Intergrade and I like it, but if I had known it was a trilogy and the second part would come out on PC at an unknown time, if at all, I wouldn't have bought it.
I think what caused the decline for FF is the lack of backfeed of Square Enix itself. The change of era and the change of platforms and conventions put them in a rough spot. And as someone said in this company, there's too much pride inside this company. For instance, they were so ambitious with FNC but they executed it poorly. They wanted in made engine, showing off their technical dominance, but made struggling the development of 3 whole games ( versus 13, 14, 13 itself). In result : versus 13 was scrapped, 14 launch was a mess and had versus 13 team focus on 14 then, 13 was a good result but it took a lot of risks so it became hard for some to enjoy it though it's a great game but divide people, own pov in the end. Then 15 had to take on some of ideas of versus 13 but losing its core and soul in the process that it became a good game but not what expected at all so a lot of disappointment. They've made too many mistakes during the ps3-ps4 era and that's the company's fault. They wanted to be so ambitious but they forgot that they were in denial and needed to get back feed and thinking more seriously how to get things done correctly.
Yeah it’s peaked and it’s never turning back the clock. People just don’t care about Final Fantasy anymore. Square had thrown everything at the wall for over 20 years now and all they get are diminishing returns.
@@FloripesTavares You're correct. There were several minutes of dialogue cut from this video to shorten the length. When I was patching everything together in the editing process, I accidentally left the cumulative total for the series in there by mistake thus reading it as 11 mil instead of 7 mil. My mistake.
@@Radical_Dreamers That is what largely prompted this video. I couldn't believe how it came and went seemingly unnoticed by the larger gaming audience.
I also think that the issue with XVI was because it only saw PS5, which, in the current year of its lifecycle hasn't gotten close the amount of PS4's sold.
Im still playing original ff7 on steam. 7remake was a insult in story perspective. Both rebirth and 16 exclusive to playstation(I dont have one). Idk its looks pretty understandable why ff going down for me. Edit: I didnt buy ff7r after seeing that changes. And probably i am not only one. At least others could be choosed to dont buy rebirth after those.
@@Yggdrasill-X I believe something messed up during the rendering process. The audio was better in my editing program. After upload, I listened to it on my phone and it sounded different. Not sure what happened.
i'd say u got a little late to the party bro, FF lost its prestige somewhere around the early 2000's lol, last good ff i remember is 9, oh and 12 too for sure, everything else they've been doin is crap. EDIT: 7REMAKE is cool
Rebirth was a pretty lame FF7 theme park to me. Square has been chasing trends since 13 flopped and they got cold feet. I didn’t like 13 but having played it again just last year my mind changed. But yeah, FF isn’t what it used to be.
this video seemed cool at first but about half and I can't see your point, you gotta get to the point and not just talk numbers because I was interested, not bothered by your voice or anything, could have gotten subscribed as well, but after 8 minutes of numbers and "I'm sing numbers as a tool to my point" which never came, I gave up. Sorry
The design and music has become too childish and 'anime.' the characters feel weak and cheesy. Everything plaguing them boils down to simple artistic decisions that they are bombing daily. I would STILL have bought FFXVI by now, but it is not on steam. They are doing this to themselves
It seems that the prestige of Final Fantasy is diminishing, as many games are drawing inspiration from the series. However, it was recently mentioned in an interview that even Marvel is taking cues from Final Fantasy elements. This suggests that the decline might be more about the rising popularity of other brands. Nonetheless, this situation could change. ruclips.net/user/postUgkxQIm_dmJ6eZ9PRcNs0-VcyCzz3wv4Bb81?si=3DHsts9F7C_XRU2O
Nah, ffxiv, ffxvi, ffviremake and rebirth are pushing the bounties of what is possible in a video game, same as the series always did, if there was a moment FF was not prestige it would be ff12-13
![[#2024MAMA] G-DRAGON - 무제(Untitled, 2014)+POWER+HOME SWEET HOME+뱅뱅뱅+FANTASTIC BABY | Mnet 241123 방송](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ox29z5Nf1Uk/mqdefault.jpg)
I've removed about 30 seconds from the video, as an eagle-eyed viewer pointed out I made a mistake and mislabeled the sales of Final Fantasy XIII as 11 million (total FFXIII trilogy sales). The solo sales for Final Fanatsy XIII as of the last update were 7 million. There was a section discussing the XIII trilogy cut from the video to shorten it, and I ended up forgetting to adjust the sales numbers in the final edit. I didn't want to leave this mistake in the video and mislead people, so I cut it out entirely.
Its because while yes they transitioned to real time combat and i loved the idea of, but they gave literally every enemy hyper armor so it feels like you are swinging at a wall every fight
I think it boils down to 3 factors:
1. The quality of the games has just not been up to snuff with previous entries since the PS2 era. The characters and stories have grown less memorable and the writing is simply not as tight as it once was.
2. The games haven't grown up with their audiences. I'm in my 40s and have been playing these games since my teens. I absolutely felt a shift in my perception of FF games once it moved from 5th to 6th generation consoles and started taking advantage of the technology of the PS2 and later. Aspects of the writing and direction that worked well during the 2D era and on PS1 just didn't once you moved into the era of cinematic gaming with fully voiced characters. And while the series has slowly improved in that regard, people my age, who lost touch with the series around the time of XII/XIII just haven't felt convinced enough by the new entries to come back.
I also can't speak for everyone, but I'm also no longer interested in games that rely on heavy naked exposition for storytelling. My preference these days is for FromSoft-style less-is-more writing. I'm also a big fan of Baldur's Gate 3 and Larian's style of writing, but I just get the sense that Final Fantasy games are still trying to cater to an audience a generation or two younger, which doesn't have the same emotional connection to past entries.
3. I think people are just sick of a lot of the business decisions Square-Enix has been making in the past decade. It goes beyond console exclusivity. I think the fact that they were all in on NFTs in games until everyone realized that NFTs were a big scam, and their use of AI-generated content has left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.
My man, i wish i could shake your hand. It's simply just this. Final Fantasy is disconnected from it's old audience and can't really crawl it's way into the new one. It's a franchise that wants everything and ends up getting nothing. Like many others.
The exclusivty is baffling honestly. They could have sold so much more and reached other players just making it for everyone.
Imma be honest , that number in front of the title does not do it favor. If someone doesn't know about how FF works , they'd think there are 16 games they need to play. The franchise struggles to pull in new fans , older fans will slowly but surely either grow too old to give a shit , or not feel the need to play every new entry , because for them its the knowledge that these games AREN'T connected that might nudge them towards just skipping a title "for now".
The decrease in quality (i still like 15 and 16 but come on), shift from setting trends to following them , lack of iconic and unique imagery and world building the way ff6 to even 13 had , and specially lack of multiplatform launches are just the dressing on top.
I fucking love the ff7 remake , but it just highlights how square seemingly can't come up with another banger setting like 7 anymore, even though they did it until the recent decade, even versus 13 had a unique setting
They should go back to the roots. Make a roundbased Battle System. Cut the edginess.
If they, 1. Make FF17 with more of a free gameplay (not just too many cutscenes and hand holding) 2. Remake FF6 , they could make a comeback
As much as I love FFXV and all of it's multimedia content, I think that's a huge reason as to why the series started seeing a relevancy decline. Now don't get me wrong, the game sold incredibly well and depending on the source it's often listed as the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th best selling entry in the series but it's also one that burnt a lot of people out.
The thing is, if you're as invested as I was in the FFXV multimedia, then its story is awesome but regardless of that the storytelling itself is an absolute trainwreck. The game was rushed out the door to meet deadlines and it clearly shows. Even at launch, to get a better understanding of what's going on you had to watch an anime miniseries and a feature length film.
But all that still wasnt enough to fill in the story gaps, so they released 4 character centric DLC expansions episodes, an anime OVA, a multiplayer expansion, and bonus content from the Royal Edition of the game . Even then, there's no linear way to approach all this content so to get it correct as far as chronological order you'd have to be hopping back and forth between the game and those individual pieces of media.
With that in mind, when the multiplayer expansion failed to get a decent playerbase, all that sunken money meant that future character DLC expansions had to be cancelled and instead be released as a book. The message from consumers was clear: "this is overwhelming to keep track of and I'm ready to call it quits."
It's sad because I personally think a lot of this content is excellent at fleshing out the story and characters of FFXV but it also arguably should have been a part of the base game in the first place. And if they had delayed its launch by about 6 months to a year, that couldve definitely been the case.
The idea of Final Fantasy as an anthology series means that anyone can jump in on any particular game and not be lost, so when XV said that you have to jump through hoops to get the best experience possible I think that left a bad taste in people's mouths and made them lose trust in the series.
Tl;dr-FFXV's multimedia content helped flesh out the story and lore of the game but made for a convoluted experience that caused fans to abandon ship.
Yes. Because technology caught up. We arent pushing graphic fidelity anymore. We are in the age of pushing ideas again, because every game can be graphicaly amazing eith the widespread tools available to devs.
Sony is a sinking ship and SE still wants to cooperate with them. This is quite mind boggling to me.
And I'm afraid I can't agree with you on the creative part. One painstaking problem with JRPG is the extreme anime/JRPG tropes plaguing the game design/narrative. People still play rpg this days needs either deeper more immersive experience or very unique stylized experience. And I think final fantasy is falling to deliver neither.
Players just won't care about your world building or lore if your story arc is just predicable anime/JRPG tropes.
It already did. Because it peaked highly and made us expect that. Most of the games where above average and some where milestones. All of a sudden everybody wants milestones all the time. Ff7 to ff8 is the example.
I think youre mistaking ff7 ff8 ff9 is peak final fantasy.. after the formula is gone
I think u mean ffxii, ffxiii and ffvii
@@DGGVerse25troll?
@@lopezzelo2502 Fake ff fans wouldn't get it
After the first 2 dudes it's been trash in almost every metric although 12 surprised me but after x-2 and 11 even shit would taste amazing then 13 was like 3 steps back the story was alright but exploration and battle was 3/10 then it literally got worse ever since in every category besides graphics I bet most the talent they have now couldn't even make a good on ps2 or an earlier game system that anyone would play today
I would say it lost its prestige in the XIII days, And XIII did not grew the franchise at all, yes it was the biggest launch at the time ( normal considering how video game sales exploded in the 2000s ) but it has still yet to outsell X or VII and right now what is happening is that FF IP is losing remaining popularity which has been stagnant since over 20 years now. ( while overall the popularity of story heavy rpgs has actually grown larger )
Blaming being console exclusive does address a little bit of the issues, but even if Remake and XVI had released on all possible platfrom at launch, the sales would not have been greatly different, XV sold 5 million first day, with both xbox and ps4 but it took it almost 6 years to sell another 5 million, when God of war and Horizon zero dawn have both outsold XV by over twice the copies sold in the same timeframe ( both games selling half of what XV did at launch but outselling the lanuch sales by a staggering 3 to 1 in less time and still only on ps4, this is before their PC release.
My point is that their new multiplatform apporach is not gonna make much difference, instead of 3 million launch is gonna 5 million and lifetime 10 million at most when the competition is selling 3 times as fast and longer too.
I personally believe the reason is twofold
1 FF has not innovated or felt unique enough in a long while, compare XV, remake, rebirth and XVI to Witcher 3, God of War, Elden Ring and most recently Baldurs gate 3 from a technical standpoint and the FF games are a tier below.
2 the storytelling of current FF single player games, its also a tier below the games ive mentioned, even its best executed story which is arguably the VII remake games are marred by a apporach of having your cake and eat it too, trying to be both faithful but also new, ( I personally find XVI to be my favorite out of all these recent FF games by far, but that game has so many issues with its story execution )
Valhalla made 1 billion in microtransaction, there is no sales data, so is not a good metric to compare to unit sales.
For the first reason, can’t you provide any examples as to how ff is less unique than those games?
Secondly, the story is not a tier below.Devs can be faithful to the story while making relatively smaller additions/changes, because they don’t want to make the exact same thing again.There’s no proof for this either.
XV and XIII didn’t sell well because they were a broken mess.VII rebirth didn’t sell well because some people fell off from remake->rebirth and people keep whining about the story changes plus some other reasons.Aside from that Rebirth is arguably even better than elden ring let alone the other games.And yes, it has an innovative system very different from most games.
@@AsadKhan-ic9qi Those people whining as you say are mostly the reason Remake and Rebirth sales are falling, you can argue the storytelling choices are valid, and even If I agreed with that it would not matter because that does not change the fact, a very big portion of the players do not like it.
About how the storytelling in modern FF is below the games I mentioned.
in the worst case is incomplete like in XV ( even Royal edition )
in the middle there is XVI which has numerous moments and scenes that on their own are kinda harmles but there are so many over the course of the game that brings the whole experience down.
Like Kupka capturing Jill of screen and Clive for some reason not being able to rescue her fast enough but Torgal can, why Joshua kept away from his brother even before absorbing Ultima, why Clive with just 1 more Eikon out of 5 he had was suddenly able to beat Barnabas when he previously could not even make him work for it and Ultima not being memorable as a villain ( I disagree with this one, but again that is what most people did not enjoy and I can certainly see how tired of a trope Ultima is even if he is well done )
Is a death by a thousand cuts so to speak, coupled with a very barebones rpg experience ( not even the no playable party thing, but the whole gearing, and exploration is an afterthought at best, it makes sense why it has overall not resonated with many).
In the best case scenario like Remake and Rebirth they just could not either make the game a sequel to Advent Children or a regular remake like the Resident evil games, no they just had to kinda do both at once, or maybe not, since they can totally backtract whichever they happen to dislike with the final game. The point is, like many many other Jrpgs, they are making an already kinda convolute story with FF7, ( FF7 was still tame for Jrpg standards and I bet one of the reasons it resonated with so many besides the obvious gameplay and graphics at the time was due to the story being easier to follow than say Chrono cross or Xenogears ) much more convoluted, and in the process alienating both newcomers and old fans.
And modern FF games are less unique than those games I mentioned in the sense that, Witcher 3 and God of war have almost inmaculate storytelling, Elden ring has the more impressive, and rewarding open world exploration, yes better than Rebirth as well, and BG3 showed you can still make a turn based combat and have your game be one of the best selling rpgs ever made.
@@fanmovie357 I was saying this from a more objective perspective.There is nothing pointing towards the ffviir story being objectively worse than others(something you seem to know) and even for me, while not having ever played ffvii it was very easy to follow so this just seems to be a case of people exaggerating narrative complexity.
I would not say modern FF games are less unique because the world and gameplay systems of ffviir are more unique then all those games you mentioned.
@@AsadKhan-ic9qi I can objectively say FFVII remake story is lesser than God of war and Witcher 3 due to it being a lot more convoluted than it needs to be, the subjectivity is whether being that convoluted is a flaw or not, to me it is, to you is not.
And now you get to explain why Remake/Rebirth gameplay systems and world are unique, compared to the best rpgs made in the past 10 years.
@@fanmovie357 1st off, the materia system.There's pretty much nothing like it in other games.You can change the gameplay style of your characters like turning cloud into the best healer in the game (ik that's not that unique in and of itself, but the way you do it is unique since you can switch abilities like you can't in any other game.)
Secondly the fact that each and every weapon is viable and offers a different playstyle as well for each character(e.g. twin stinger has the best mp hence is the best weapon for turning cloud into a healer and mythril rod has best damage so it's the most useful for turning aerith into more of a damage dealer).It's not like the last few weapons in the game are good, by endgame.
Thirdly the combat.Which game can you point out that has a combat system like these remakes?You can at base level do basic attacks but all abilities, items and spells are locked behind atb which you have to be aggressive to get.You can get more and more atb by using atb boost and refocus but that means sacrificing valuable materia slots which you could use for other valuable materia as well.So you can use materia to get abilities and attacks that the game doesn't allow otherwise, or get spells that allow to to exploit all kinds of weaknesses, or drastically boost your stats.The limited number of slots means each character will always have a glaring weakness however you can customize their strengths and weaknesses on a level unlike in other rpgs.
Moreover I'm surprised I have to explain why FFVII has arguably a more interesting world than even elden ring.Consider midgar, a city built 300m aboveground to harvest the planet's lifeblood to vastly enhance living conditions except for healthcare and at the cost of the lives of the people too poor to live in such an expensive place.Then there's the lore about the planet and the lifestream, the gi tribe and the two most powerful materia. Then there's cosmo canyon, the gold saucer and other stuff which hopefully I don't have to explain, and let's not even mention Junon. What other game has locales this imaginative, in a genre and setting(sci-fantasy)this sparsely explored, compared to the incredibly mundane medieval settings and genre?I'm sorry but I've had enough of old crumbling, imposing victorian structures where you go to fight some ungodly creature, beast witches, giants and warlocks, ancient kings or corrupted knights and princes(basically just dnd or classic medieval enemies again), whereas in FFVII you fight ungodly creatures, sewer creatures, ghosts, mutated scrapyard creatures, human experiments, chimeras, robots and mechs, cave and mineral creatures, animals, soldiers, hand to hand combatants and yes, aliens.Plus whatever else you can think of.
And now you get to explain how ffviir's story is so convoluted
Anything that becomes popular and mainstream loses prestige. It happens.
I think it has more to do with us than FF. When I was young my imagination filled in the gaps more. But as you get older and the games get more detailed, less is left to the imagination and so, less fulfilling. Same with story telling, you begin to be less and less surprised by certain “plot twists” because you’ve absorbed so much already. This is also why they stop making games for the original fans and instead shoot for younger audiences, they are easier to wow.. My children when they were younger rather play with the box than the toy in it-then the toy rather than the box- then the tablet rather than toys.. It’s sort of a natural progression. NOT ALWAYS, but definitely a factor.
I feel FF games have become more and more generic starting from 10. The series have lost it essence. If SE changed the title of FF13 to ABCD and deleted some superficial signs like Shiva or chocobos, I wouldn’t have known it was a FF game.
It lost its prestige by 2013. I’ve been praying for consistency for so long I’ve given up. Ff7 rebirth is the closet thing to Final Fantasy quality
no sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu?
bad writting ?
fanbase getting older ?
no turn based?
put all that back again = profit ?
squareenix should hurry up nobuo and sakaguchi arent getting any younger!!
☹
Always funny to see how people think it's because of turn based being absent lol
@@AsadKhan-ic9qi it's not exactly a core reason but part of final fantasy's identity is rooted in turn-based. identity is kinda important and final fantasy's has been kinda blurry for a while. if it's gonna be action based, it needs to express its identity through that and frankly i don't see it.
I got into ff because of Dissida 012 when I was 11 the only final fantasy game I have completed. Currently playing ff remake and all I have to say is I wouldn't have played any of those games if they were turn based. Ff just needs to lock in on there writing and cut the exclusivity with playstation and they're golden @@AsadKhan-ic9qi
It sucks already. I hated and wasted time on rebirth.
All they have to do is dump their exclusivity, move to real time combat as the main games while having spinoff turn based final fantasy games. You expand the potential audience while having goodwill with the turn based fans which will give them more motivation to try out the realtime games.
Squaresoft is wheret it at,when it became Square Enix,it die slowly years after.
i'm personally really optimistic about the next mainline. i had a few issues with XVI and Rebirth but they were still so good, i'm sure if they listen to the player feedback of both games and continue on the line of what XVI was they can make an amazing game. and i feel even *more* confident since they intend on making it multiplatform now: surely a release on switch 2 will impact development positively. at this point they can either go AAA again or go back to ATB pixel art games like yoshi-p suggested, any direction is fine as long as they aply feedback from XVI and Rebirth
I like Final Fantasy, but I won't buy inferior hardware (PS5) just to be able to play it. I just bought Intergrade and I like it, but if I had known it was a trilogy and the second part would come out on PC at an unknown time, if at all, I wouldn't have bought it.
I think what caused the decline for FF is the lack of backfeed of Square Enix itself. The change of era and the change of platforms and conventions put them in a rough spot. And as someone said in this company, there's too much pride inside this company. For instance, they were so ambitious with FNC but they executed it poorly. They wanted in made engine, showing off their technical dominance, but made struggling the development of 3 whole games ( versus 13, 14, 13 itself). In result : versus 13 was scrapped, 14 launch was a mess and had versus 13 team focus on 14 then, 13 was a good result but it took a lot of risks so it became hard for some to enjoy it though it's a great game but divide people, own pov in the end. Then 15 had to take on some of ideas of versus 13 but losing its core and soul in the process that it became a good game but not what expected at all so a lot of disappointment. They've made too many mistakes during the ps3-ps4 era and that's the company's fault. They wanted to be so ambitious but they forgot that they were in denial and needed to get back feed and thinking more seriously how to get things done correctly.
Final Fantasy lost its prestige almost 10 years ago.
Yeah it’s peaked and it’s never turning back the clock. People just don’t care about Final Fantasy anymore. Square had thrown everything at the wall for over 20 years now and all they get are diminishing returns.
FFXIII didnt sell 11 million, it sold 6.9M. The 11M number its for the entire Final Fantasy XIII series ( FFXII + XIII-2 + Lightning Returns)
@@FloripesTavares You're correct. There were several minutes of dialogue cut from this video to shorten the length. When I was patching everything together in the editing process, I accidentally left the cumulative total for the series in there by mistake thus reading it as 11 mil instead of 7 mil. My mistake.
I was baffled to see how little people cared when FF XVI came out.
@@Radical_Dreamers That is what largely prompted this video. I couldn't believe how it came and went seemingly unnoticed by the larger gaming audience.
I also think that the issue with XVI was because it only saw PS5, which, in the current year of its lifecycle hasn't gotten close the amount of PS4's sold.
Im still playing original ff7 on steam. 7remake was a insult in story perspective. Both rebirth and 16 exclusive to playstation(I dont have one). Idk its looks pretty understandable why ff going down for me. Edit: I didnt buy ff7r after seeing that changes. And probably i am not only one. At least others could be choosed to dont buy rebirth after those.
Game lost its identity. MMOs....action games....weird divergents of the atb system...no world map....badly executed narratives...and more....
you're so quiet i can't hear a thing you're saying even at max volume..
@@Yggdrasill-X I believe something messed up during the rendering process. The audio was better in my editing program. After upload, I listened to it on my phone and it sounded different. Not sure what happened.
It sounds okay on my iPhone. Most people are used to being screamed at by RUclipsrs. It’s irritating.
@@karasu-chan not the problem here
i'd say u got a little late to the party bro, FF lost its prestige somewhere around the early 2000's lol, last good ff i remember is 9, oh and 12 too for sure, everything else they've been doin is crap. EDIT: 7REMAKE is cool
Final fantasy hasn't been interesting to me since 10
Rebirth was a pretty lame FF7 theme park to me. Square has been chasing trends since 13 flopped and they got cold feet. I didn’t like 13 but having played it again just last year my mind changed. But yeah, FF isn’t what it used to be.
Funny, I think Rebirth is the best game they made since the original 7.
Final Fantasy 14 is that big seller?
Final Fantasy peaked at VI.
this video seemed cool at first but about half and I can't see your point, you gotta get to the point and not just talk numbers because I was interested, not bothered by your voice or anything, could have gotten subscribed as well, but after 8 minutes of numbers and "I'm sing numbers as a tool to my point" which never came, I gave up. Sorry
Falloff began at 13
The design and music has become too childish and 'anime.' the characters feel weak and cheesy. Everything plaguing them boils down to simple artistic decisions that they are bombing daily. I would STILL have bought FFXVI by now, but it is not on steam. They are doing this to themselves
no
It seems that the prestige of Final Fantasy is diminishing, as many games are drawing inspiration from the series. However, it was recently mentioned in an interview that even Marvel is taking cues from Final Fantasy elements. This suggests that the decline might be more about the rising popularity of other brands. Nonetheless, this situation could change.
ruclips.net/user/postUgkxQIm_dmJ6eZ9PRcNs0-VcyCzz3wv4Bb81?si=3DHsts9F7C_XRU2O
no its not
Nah, ffxiv, ffxvi, ffviremake and rebirth are pushing the bounties of what is possible in a video game, same as the series always did, if there was a moment FF was not prestige it would be ff12-13
It already did.