Did Ff16 Flop?

I'm about 70% done with New Game Plus right now on Final Fantasy difficulty... It's really not any harder, just enemies have a ton more HP so fights are longer. My first playthrough I was very focused on using my abilities to get through fights, however on my NG+ playthrough I'm doing more sword focused fighting, only using moves once staggered. It's really made the combat more engaging and enjoyable, rather than a constant cycle of abilities and waiting on their timers.

The game is every bit as enjoyable the 2nd time through on NG+. I do have complaints about the game, but not many compared to most other modern games. Some of the mission progression feels very filler material, but at least the game NEVER loses scope of the lore or world. You may be asked to go pick flowers and bring them back, but at least it's by a doctor and needed for a medicine. Not like FF7 Rebirth where absolutely every side quest has nothing to do with anything.

I also forgot to say that XVI borrows a LOT from FFXI, which I appreciate as well. Some of it may be from XIV, but that game also borrows from XI. Many people will play XVI oblivious to this... but we know. We know all too well.


Good to know. I don't believe I'll do NG+ as I have at least ten other games lined up to play, but in the distant future if I have nothing left, I may revisit it for nostalgia on FF mode.

It's so cute to watch you flail when you get caught lying.

Says the biggest deflector-lier around here! lol

Post the spiderman meme!

Nice lie. Didn't work at all.

Having just finished the DLCs, I loved the end battle of Echoes and all of Rising Tide from start to finish. Rising Tide's scenery is absolutely gorgeous!

The DLCs feature some of the most fun fights in the game, and the most beautiful area. My only gripe is that they are too short, but they are DLCs after all. Echoes probably isn't worth the price tag, but Rising Tide most definitely is.

@Viciouss

>flopped on steam
>flopped on xbox

A year later. Multiple sources saying this game was a huge disappointment. Majority of buyers of FF7R are over 30. Time for SE to give up this crap with trying to appease GenZ. They should focus on their core audience and maybe leave the experimenting to the side games.

All the people in this thread trying to support this are wrong like I originally said. It flopped, case has now been closed!

I don't think Square Enix even know how to make good games anymore, they are captured so hard by shareholder/focus group pandering that the inherent passion and creativity they used to have is all gone.

At least Nintendo know what they are, they are member berry *** pandering to 30+ year olds pretending to be kids again. Square Enix still don't know where their actual audience is, and still think they can capture zoomers and GenA and ignore their actual customers.

Worldwide sales are a bit shy of 4 millions of copies.
Now clearly that's not a success, should we call it a failure? Well, a disappointment sales-wise for sure, it sold way less than they expected/wanted it to sell.

Now though calling it a HUGE failure? I mean 4 millions is clearly not what they were aiming for but "HUGE" failure is something else.


Personally I loved pretty much everything about the game, it was absolutely brilliant as an *ACTION GAME*.
Is this what I dream of for a FF main?
Well, clearly not.
It's still full of love for FF and in several aspects, ironically, it ends up being more FFesque than FF15 and 13, which is... kind of a paradox I guess lol

So yeah, imho an incredibly cool game pouring love for FF from every single pixel, but the fact it's an action game, while a pretty good one, is not what most of us desire from FF main titles.
Hopefully they finally understood that with the success of Clair Obscur and we're gonna get something different for the next FF? Which won't happen I'm afraid in many years I'm afraid.



PersonallyI think that if they called it "Final Fantasy somethingsomething" instead of 16, a lot of people who (understandably) were incredibly biased about it, would've greeted it in a much different way.

A mainline FF title doing that poorly is a absolute disaster. Simply calling it a failure is too nice.



Final Fantasy VII 1997 - 15,300,000
Final Fantasy VIII 1999 - 11,292,792
Final Fantasy IX 2000 - 8,900,000
Final Fantasy X 2001 - 14,663,667
Final Fantasy XII 2006 - 7,971,624
Final Fantasy XIII 2009 - 9,300,000
Final Fantasy XV 2016 - 10,000,000
Final Fantasy XVI 2023 - 3,500,000

Stranger of paradise was a complete failure too, but no one talks about it because it's not pretending to be a mainline game.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin 2022 - 906,633

It's funny you say they were appealing to genz when the guys I know who played it and are DMC fans are 40...

A lot of people are brand captured, if you release anything with a brand they like they will buy it based on brand loyalty (star wars, star trek are good examples). The copies sold would be good for a new brand, but this is a very long established brand and so selling 3-4m is a flop.

FF16 and ff7 remakes have all been financial flops, ff15 was where the rot started imo (it sold well, but it was a crappy game).

They failed to attract new audiences, and divided the actual fans that they should have heavily pandered too. They failed on both fronts, even in many fans liked it many didn't.

Square Enix are terrible at pandering to their fans.

I don't think it was trying to cather to genz in particular, for the style of the game.
That's something I could say maybe for FF15 and 13. They were clearly aiming for new audiences.

Style-wise everything in FF16 is very solid, "adult", it aims for FF fans, FFXIV audience and fans of Fantasy Shows like GoT etc.


Now if we're talking about the gameplay... it's the opposite. They clearly were aiming for a completely different public with their full-action style of gameplay. They thought that given how everything else was exactly what a lot of people have been clamoring for over the years would've been enough for that same audience to "accept" the action style.
Well appearently it wasn't :-P

where'd that one guy go that was always talking about how square enix is a good investment. afania or something?

FF16, for me, set up a lot of interesting premises then just outright refused to answer them. The most annoying one being the climate change allegory.

Magic is the mechanics to which this world works. We enslave people for it. It is at the core of empires, of economies, and indeed every days people lives.

But it is destroying the planet.

A team go out of their way to destroy the way it is created. They do so knowing the short-term pain that it'd cause.

Except we never _focus_ on the short term pain of it. Instead we just do a fight with a big bad in a split ocean. Then there's that stuff with Ultima.

It felt like they saw Game of Thrones, were like cool I want swearing, sex, and a dog ***ending too.

That ending...
Other things I felt that were really odd:

At the start, you can cast Cure with Joshua - In the opening cinematic. Healing magic is never seen again after that.

The combat devolved into hitting 3 buttons. I played on Hard, the game was decidedly not that. I had to SLOG to get to the end.

Gear progression. Unlocking Excalibur, just for it to be immediately replaced. I found that stuff incredibly frustrating.

I didn't hate the game. I just think it really overstayed it's welcome and by the end I was really happy that it just ended. I no longer cared.


On the sales... I do think it suffered from being a PS5 exclusive. I'd argue until recently there wasn't a lot of reason to get a PS5. Cross Platform games lasted a hell of a lot longer this generation. And when it came out I'm not sure how many PS5s were sold. And I don't think anyone was going to buy a PS5 for FF16.

In the ps1 and ps2 eras final fantasy games were reasons people, particularly in Japan, bought a PlayStation. I personally bought a ps3 just for ff13. Never again.

I suspect the exclusivity deal is a hold over from that, and SE were locked into a contract with Sony that forced exclusivity for some period of time.

Banger after banger after banger

hey, strangers was awesome! they just screwed up by dropping it when elden ring came out imo. jack is a beast!

Not just that. Also the fact that the installed base of PS5 was very very low (compared to, say, the base of PS4 and PS3 when FFXV and FFXIII came out respectively).
Those two aspects really hurt the sales at release.

But even if I could bet all my money that FF16 would've sold much more if it was released on PS4 as well, at the same time we can't deny that being locked on PS5, while a truly relevant factor for low sales, is NOT the only factor.


In other terms: even if FF16 was released on PS4 and PC at the same time as PS5, I could bet it still wouldn't have surpassed FFXV's sales.
It would've reached something like, I dunno, 7-8 mils at best, maybe?
Which is still solid! But not what they were looking for probably.
Then again I'm not entirely sure FF has that charm for the broad public after all. They should be spending less money and make more realistic expectations for sales.
Expecting to sell like Elden Ring or GTA is not realistic for a FF, even if it's a "proper" jRPG like everybody here wants it to be.

Since someone defined "shy of 4 mils" an embarassing total historical failure, I'd love to know what is your term of comparison?
Because titles that sell 30+ mils ain't exactly the "standard". A FF never sold that much.

FFX is probably the most high selling title. If we sum up all the versions of all FFX for the countless formats it was release for across over 20 years, it reached ~20m
FFXV passed 10m (and was called a success)
FFXIII passed 11m (and was called a failure?)
FFXII with all the recent updates and zodiac stuff is shy of 9 millions.
FF7R sold ~7m (and was called a success)
Original FFVII with all its versions is at around 16m
The beloved FFIX is at ~9 mils.


I mean... Different times, different eras, different formats, different "size" of the Videogame world in their respective eras, sure! Hard to compare these numbers 1:1 because of all the huge difference, but the point is that FF never reached such huge numbers even in their golden era.
And interest for FF as a brand, if anything, is constantly going low through the years.
So yeah, expecting a FF to easily sell 15+ mil in the first year is just not realistic?

I'm saying this in general not for FF16. Despite the fact I liked it as a game even if clearly it wasn't an RPG, I wouldn't dare to call it a "success", it's quite obvious it wasn't.

People gotta remember that high sales aren't necessarily a good thing all of the time.

If a developer makes a bad game, but it sells like hotcakes based on brand or marketing alone, then all it will succeed in doing is damaging the brand and the developer's reputation.

Look at FFXIII. It sold almost 10 million. Which would be a landmark occasion for many other beloved IPs.

It's considered dog water, because the game itself did not appeal with its characters, story, or gameplay to the majority of people who bought it.

But based on its sales, Square-Enix corporate decided to green light not just 1, but TWO sequels for it. Both of which sold less than half, with XIII-3 barely managing to break to 1 million in sales after several years of sales.

Square-Enix has damaged their several times since FFXIII, and not every one of its fans were on board for XI, XII, or XIV either.

Surely you all remember the vitriol coming out of supposed fans of FF when FFXI first released?

The series is so long running that who makes up the majority of its fanbase and player audience has shifted several times over the course of the series, and so Square-Enix actually doesn't have a clear audience to target... Outside of FF7 nostalgia ***, hence the FF7 remake.

But the thing is, is that all of these entries that have damaged the brand haven't brought in nearly enough new players, save for FFXIV 2.0+ which now faces its own controversies for allowing activists into the development and hiring chairs.

Every entry in the series being a new story was once novel, but in the long run, it's a high risk, moderate reward scenario, as it turns out.

Looking at Elden Ring, it's a larger Dark Souls clone with new gameplay mechanics and refinements. Fromsoft has been making basically the same game, conceptually, since 2009.

A year later, SE is still in business and releasing games. Nice necro bump though.

I enjoyed 16 for what it was, but have never once had the desire to go back and play it again, neither for the story or for something else I missed.

I think it is the only FF title I have only played once.

Surviving not thriving

Also development and marketing costs will eat into income.

Signed,

All of Humanity.

CEO literally had a whole thing with crypto. They're about as far away from thriving as they can be :(