| Farsala said: FF is struggling because JRPGs are thriving. The sheer amount of quality JRPGs in the past few years has been astounding, and FF has to compete against them all. Atlus JRPGs have seen quite a bit of growth. Sega has joined the mix with Like a Dragon. SE competing with itself with DQXI, Octopath, and Star Ocean the Divine Force doing great. Soulslike JRPGs surpassing FF. Even small JRPGs being greenlit and pumped out every year. |
Dragon Quest, Octopath, and Star Ocean all sell worse than Final Fantasy, though. The same goes for Persona and Like a Dragon (except for P5, yes, but even that would just about match the worst-selling FF games).
Besides, it's not like similar games if not these same franchises didn't exist back in the PS1 and PS2 days.
You are free to count Souls games, or Monster Hunter, or Zelda, for that matter, as JRPGs, but I doubt there's much overlap between Sekiro and Persona and Kingdom Hearts userbases, for instance.
