Famitsu Sales (12/21 - 12/27)

[dunno001]

RageBot said:
I just wanted to hear your reasoning for this, since I wanted to know why you thought that 2D FF will be/sell better than a 3D FF.

Actually, I'll give you a reason why: The Final Fantasy series explosion with the intro of 3-D at FF7 was not due to the switch. It was due to the fact that Sony put a huge marketing machine behind it worldwide. As fwap mentioned already, the pretty graphics of 7 pulled in new players, and they had to keep pushing the graphics to keep some of these new people. Unfortunately, the focus shifted from gameplay and story to graphics. The depth, the intrigue, the hookpin, if you will, that kept people playing before 7 was gone, replaced with pretty pictures. And, since 7, the only thing that FF has really had to offer that was top-notch was graphics. Graphics alone aren't going to keep people buying your game, and thus, the decline of the FF series.

So why would 2-D be good? If you can't use graphics to sell a game, you have to fall back on the old ways that you sold them- gameplay and/or story; these were things that prior FFs exceled at. There will be many of the old graphics fans buying the first one of this style because of the name alone. They will initially dismiss it for being "ugly." But some will keep going. And they will see what made a FF of yesteryear. I imagine that the first one would have a weird sales curve, something akin to FF5, even, as word gets out that the focus went back to where it should have been all along.

But, but... the old Nintendo 2-D games didn't sell! True, but how many fewer systems were sold in Japan at this time? If you line up the number of systems made and adjust as a percentage the game sales, suddenly you have sales matching the better 3-D games. (This low system count I also think is part of what is keeping the downturn with FF13, rather than the boost 10 saw.) I do think that if you bring back what made the old FF games so memorable, and had to use actual words, story, and sprite animation (C'mon, who has played FF6 and doesn't remember the Opera House?) to sell the game, sales would rebound. Coupling this with the cheaper development costs would only cause skyrocketing profit for SE.

However, I don't see them returning to these days. FF has become their "Ooh, look what we can do!" for graphics. And as long as they ignore the other parts of a game, or what made people like so many of the FFs of the past, sales will only continue to decline.