Ka-pi96 said:
Mandalore76 said:
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.
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All of that is only true for the US though, not "the west".
FF7 was the first FF to release here in Europe, so there was no hype whatsoever about it being the next FF. There wasn't any popularity for the franchise at all, yet it still exploded with FF7 anyway.
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It's not really true for the US, either. FF6 (3) wasn't that big a deal here and Square didn't see it as a great success. It was nothing like FF7, where you had millions of people who'd never heard of Final Fantasy rushing out to buy a PS1 for it. Square actually made changes to the Final Fantasy formula for FF7 because they wanted the series to sell better in the west. You can't just say, " well, you doubled 1.5 million with the second game so of course the next game will sell 10 million," either. It doesn't work that way.
I also believe marketability to non-JRPG fans is one of the reasons why FF9 represents a dip in sales for the series.
