I hate what they did with the story, the whole whispers of fate bullshit, God they are so annoying. But as a videogame I actually loved remake, the combat is super fun, the characters are still as great as ever, the music is beautiful, etc..

" FFVII is a title with a strong presence not only in Japan but globally, and as a result, we’ve been able to achieve sales that are satisfying on a worldwide level."


For some reason my brain is reading this as shade to Japan lol

Genuinely all the story changes are terrible. My friend is playing it for the first time and I'm just kinda sad that he's going to get an inferior narrative, especially where Part 2 is concerned. Still great games overall and character development is better.

Considering they were multiplatform from 2009-2016, I don't think this necessarily escaped them... but with 90% of the audience coming from Playstation anyway, I think they were happy to run with Sonys money and priotise their preferred hardware.

Now the sales are pretty bad for AAA (Rebirth probably <4m), they have to react and try and expand the audience. Equally Playstation probably has no interest in bank rolling more <5m selling games where they already own the audience. Mutually I think they expected the series to explode like GOW/Uncharted/Spiderman/Horizon etc which all did 20m, even Ghost/Days Gone outperformed FFVII Remake

Also Nintendo finally has hardware that wouldn't butcher the games. 

The overall decline is still something I think they're going to have to think about creatively.

For one I think they may need to change the naming convention. Secondly I think they need to lean heavily back to turn-based or something close. The huge ARPG audience out there simply ignored FFXVI

Oddly for a JRPG I feel like FF is quite a bit stronger in the West than in Japan nowadays, just cos Japan moved away from PS home consoles where mainline FF was, while the West did not.

Considering how absurd Square Enix's expectations tend to be when it comes to sales, the fact that they're satisfied with VII Remake's sales on other platforms is saying something.

Hamaguchi also described Rebirth's sales on PS5 and PC as "doing very well" so I wouldn't read too much into it.

It's not really shade to Japan. It's shade to Square Enix when you think about it. The most popular platform for gaming in Japan has been Nintendo for quite some time. Square-Enix did little to foster a following for Final Fantasy on those platforms. So you have a generation of gamers in Japan that don't view Final Fantasy the same way as their forebearers.

On the flip side, Square Enix made sure to put as many mainline DQ games on Nintendo platforms as possible. They designd DQX with the WII as the lead platform. For DQXI, they literally rebuilt the game from scratch with a newer build of UE4 to get the game on Switch. That in addition to having a seperate, also purpose built, version of the game for 3DS. So it's popularity in Japan has remained far stronger.