I will have to disagree about E33 being better than what SE made recently too, because I finally got into DQ through the recent remakes, and I loved each one of them. The HD-2D trilogy is fantastic. I've heard great things about DQXI, so that's next for me. And if you want original games, I will mention Team Asano again (oh, and also, DQXI), they released many bangers in this generation that you should check out.

But remember when I mentioned JRPG by Western devs? I also want to bring up the Trails series, I got into this series earlier this year through the remake of Trails in the Sky, and it blew me away, it's my favorite JRPG of all time, and I'm very excited for the remake of the second game coming out this September, because most of the opinions I've seen of the original is that it's even better than the first one. But if even every JRPG made by Square Enix not named "Final Fantasy" is niche in the West, JRPGs made by other, smaller japanese studios barely even get any recognition by the mass market, so I doubt most of the people who put E33 up on a pedestal even heard of that game, and even less will ever play it. Final Fantasy is everything most western players know, so of course the game by darling indie ex Ubisoft devs will be the new FFX to them.

The big one of me is fluff.  Final Fantasy, for a while now, has too much fluff.  Parts of Rebirth were stellar, other parts where boring as ****.  I think Expedition 33 lacked fluff, never got bored with silly stuff.  Like Cloud herding literally cats.  Or Clive running around and figuring out knives need to be sharp.  Square games just lack focus and feel crammed with nonsense with no logic rationale.  Feels like Square targets are run time and forces the game to fit.  FF16 would be an excellent 10 hour game, it is terrible at 25 hours.  

DQ11 was spectacular.  but is from 2018 and isn't this generation.  Heck, it runs on the Switch 1..    I have beaten it twice.  I also beat Octopath, Remake and Rebirth.. and FF16.  Expedition 33, IMHO, wasn't just better, but way better than the aforementioned games.  

I have heard of the game, and it is in my wish list.  Just haven't gotten to it yet.

At the end of day, personal preferences aside, E33 outselling Final Fantasy is a big deal..  especially when it was developed cheaper and faster.  Assuming the internet is correct (which is an assumption), Rebirth was $110,000,000, while E33 was $10,000,000 in development costs.

And even Square admits their strategy is crap.  They have been forthcoming about having to re-structure their strategy, because they have fallen hard. That isn't to say they don't have good games, but they are not what they once were.  I don't think that is debatable.    

The part of SE's strategy, that they have been very vocal about abandoning in the past 2 or 3 years, is the platform exclusivity, not the type of combat or the quality of the games.
And I strongly believe that if E33 was made by SE, it would have been overlooked by the vast majority of gamers like every other SE RPG that doesn't start with the words "Final Fantasy".

I own and have beaten every mainline FF game, some of them more than a few times. IMO FFXVI is one of the worst mainline FF games. It's not that the main character Clive is bad, the story is actually really good imo. The problem with 16 is that its just not a fun action game. It feels like a watered down DMC, with wwaaaaaaaayyyy to much winded useless dialog. If you go back and play any of the older FF for a few hours and then you play any of the newer FF games, you will see exactly what im talking about. Theres no need to take a sentence and turn it into a paragraph, theres no need to take what could be a short 30 second amazing scene and draw it out to 5 minutes just fro the sake of trying to be cinematic. Recent FF games have a few major problems.

#1 Bloated - Content is bloated, dialog is bloated, scenes are bloated
#2 Identity Crises - I get that SE wants to reach more customers, and I get that they want to keep trying to innovate the combat, but recently they have really lost focused on what made FF great in the first place. Having mainline games that are traditional JRPG, Action-RPG, MMO, and Action genres all falling under the mainline entries really doesnt help with building a fanbase. Theres nothing wrong with wanting to have FF branch out into other genres, but they should do what Nintendo does with Mario, and have separate titles for those. That way when a Main 3D mario drops people have an idea of what to expect. 3D isnt going to be mario builder, a 2D mario, nor is it going to Mario Kart or Mario Party. All of those each have their respective categories with their own fans. I believe this is what SE needs to do with FF. Stop mixing everything under a # and keep the number enetries for the traditional JRPG

What?!!?  Lol.  Square specifically has announced quality over quantity and their revamp is way more than exclusivity.  

Medium-term Business Plan (FY2025/3-FY2027/3)

Seriously, you seem behind on what Square is doing and why.

As for E33, we will have to agree to disagree.  The game is flatly fantastic and is nothing short of amazing.  It crushes FF16, it isn't even close.  The game got press and love because it is amazing.  

Wow... I wasn't totally off with this one :) (from back in early may, 2025)

Well I hope they're are paying attention. Exclusivity isn't the reason why FF is in decline, so although multiplat will definitely offset that decline, they need to pay attention to why they're loosing their core audience in the first place

Oh, that. Thing is, the only "quantity over quality" problem Square has is with mobile games, and even then they ended service for many games that people liked (RIP Dissidia Opera Omnia) just to... make more mobile games (who asked for Dissidia Duellum??).

On the console space,  most of the RPGs that they released in high quantity  (team Asano, the DQ remakes and spin-offs) have high quality, and the games that are the very source of the "SE doesn't know how to make RPGs" discourse, are the FF games, which they can barely put out more than two of per generation.

8 million baby. It's gonna exceed my LT prediction.