Toyo Securities estimates Final Fantasy 16 has sold 3.5 million

[Shadow1980]

JRPGfan said:

This is the market telling SE that they don't want a Action game from them.
They have to go back to having more RPG elements, and preferably dropping the action-lite rpg root as well.
Go back to turn base please SE.

Stop chasing new audiences! (at the cost of your old ones) 
Just give your fans what they want, and make each game better than the last, and things will slowly grow.
Also stop reinventing the wheel. If you want to grow a fan-base, there needs to be consistency with how the games look/feel/play.

It should be obvious, to most everyone.

This.

90s-era Final Fantasy was the peak to me in terms of how much I liked it. It was the peak in terms of sales/popularity as well, at least once the series jumped to PlayStation. It was also the era of menu-based combat using some iteration of the ATB system introduced in FF4. I don't think that's a coincidence. I did not care for FF15 and never got around to finishing it, not just because of its uninspired open world but also because of the combat system. It was too frenetic, too busy, too melee-focused (magic turned into consumable items? WTF?), and you could only control Noctis. To be honest, the only action JRPGs I ever liked were the Souls games and FF7 Remake/Rebirth, the latter of which at least tried to integrate some elements of the old ATB/menu commands system to create some sort of hybrid system.