| pokoko said: No one knows anything about Dragon Quest except, maybe, the name. There is really nothing about it that makes any kind of splash. It's easy to miss and easy to skip over. If you look at what happened with Final Fantasy, it didn't blow up huge until it starting pushing image and style above all else. Every 12 year old kid in the world thought Cloud and Sephiroth were COOL. It had incredible cutscenes that looked amazing in TV commercials. Likewise, Persona is incredibly stylish and unique. Really, most people in the west don't like JRPGs. A massive portion of the people who buy Final Fantasy don't even like JRPGs. They buy it because they're used to buying it and they want to complain that no one is cooler than Cloud. They don't actively go out and look for JRPGs, the publishers and developers have to make them interested. That would probably mean changing Dragon Quest, so it's probably best if they don't. |
I think that's an extremely narrow viewpoint of the growth of Final Fantasy as a franchise. The first Final Fantasy released late in the NES' life (1990) and sold less than a million copies. Final Fantasy II (in the West) released within months of the SNES launch in the West and more than doubled the sales of its predecessor (1.77m). This was followed three years later by Final Fantasy III (in the West) which went on to again nearly double the sales of the previous installment (3.42m). Final Fantasy III was huge went it came out. People were talking about it where I lived, and at the out-of-state college I was going to at the time. Final Fantasy VII (the 4th Final Fantasy to release in the West not counting stuff like Mystic Quest) did get a huge advertising push and a lot of hype for the 5th gen graphics as was typical for major franchises making that jump (Zelda, Mario, etc). Yes, it almost tripled the sales of Final Fantasy III, but you are comparing console user bases of SNES (49m) to PlayStation (102m), PS2 (157m), PS3 (86m), and PS4 (91m). So, it's not surprising that installments on those systems received a bigger jump over their 4th gen predecessors. My point is that Final Fantasy was already exploding in popularity before Final Fantasy VII. People weren't just hyped over Final Fantasy VII's cutscenes. They were hyped over the next Final Fantasy game that they had been waiting for since Final Fantasy III. Truth be told, getting the next installment of Final Fantasy was one of the driving motivations behind my getting my younger brother a PlayStation for his birthday with the money I was making from my first job.
