It does if overall physical retail sales are below it at the same point in time. (Which I cannot confirm, but definitely suspect with digital.)

And not only that but the biggest non launch week for PS4 just happened at 118k compared to 220k+ for PS3. Clearly the console market is split or having problems when it cannot produce a 1m seller, but it is doing a much better job at it then the Vita which has even higher install base and is a handheld in Japan.

Edit: And the Wii U can accomplish many 1m sellers and even one is near FFXIII sales. (Splatoon) But it has less install base in proportion to PS3. Makes you wonder why this happens? So then we have the 3 home consoles and their differences.

PS4: Diversity, but low price HW (Faster adoption of HW)

PS3: Launch hiccups with lots of games going to Xbox 360, FFXIII being the first big JRPG to have PS exclusive in Japan, Eventually became diverse, High price HW (Slower adoption of HW)

Wii U: Lack of diversity, High price HW (Slow adoption of HW)

So bottom line is we can't always use install base to make fair comparisons, despite it being so fun :).

Yeah, in Japan it sold around 3 thousand physical copies lol.  

The whole game was designed for and marketed to westerners. I'm not surprised Japan doesn't care for it.

Then there's the whole "no Final Fantasy worth anyone's time since [arguably] XII".

I don't really buy it. No "Western dudebros" would look at these characters and go:

Yeah! That's what I want! It looks like they're going to break into a Japanese pop song dance video at any moment. 

The one glove ... like what the hell is that even about, lol. 1985 called and wants that back. 

If Square-Enix thinks this is what Western gamers want they need to lay off the drugs.  

Lol, that's too bad. "It's okay considering the state of the Japanese market-" No, it's not ok. Look at Splatoon, a random game about Squids shooting eachother with ink will be the best selling console game this generation. Final Fantasy is a damaged brand, there's nothing "okay" about it.

The game is Japanese, its obvious that the design style would look Japanese. But there are throngs of elements on it that were clearly influenced by western games, the clearest of all is the open world and the gameplay mechanics, wich is as un JRPG as it can be and very obviously aimed at the western gamers.

i was on this site posting when FF13 was released and everyone thought 1.5 million was ok or not very good. It's hard to spin 690k as anything but terrible. I would like to dig up some of these threads about FF15 where certain people were predicting up to 2 million FW. Where is that legendary swordsman or whatever his name was now?

10 years for these pitiful sales.

Not surprising, the game is too westernized for Japan (probably japanese people felt that SE were so obviously trying to cater to  the western audience and they didn't liike that) + Japan doesn't care about home console games + any damage the FFXIII series could have done (though I'm not sure if FFXIII was hated in Japan as much as it is in the west).

P.S. Final Fantasy 6 on SFC deserved more sales than the others 

Nicccccce. My copy can't get here fast enough ;)