final fantasy xii and versus both will break 1 million in japan first week,
but i don't think they will get close to ff7

I'm sorry, FF8 had a bigger launch, but that doesn't make it better than FF7. It just meant that it was more front loaded, because FF7 has more LTD sales in every region. FF8 launch was huge, because FF7 was such a massive game, so obviously FF8 went in with amazing hype.

Stangable: FF7 sold the most in the end, if you so happen to look at final numbers and not only first week.

Besides, one could argue that FF8 sld that much first week riding on the success of Final Fantasy VII

Edit: tuanniez you said the exact same thing I did, seconds before i posted my mesage hehe

I didn't mean to imply DQIX cannot overtake FFVIII - I don't live in Japan, so I'm not sure how anticipated it is. I wouldn't be surprised if the game passed FFVIII, simply because the DQ on the DS sounds like the perfect recipe for the country.

As for why the userbases may not scale with the game sales, I think the issue is more that RPG's just aren't as popular as they were in the PS era. You can even look at their LTD sales - the PS2 sequels haven't sold as well as their predecessors, even though it had a larger userbase than the PS1. Since the Playstation era was pretty much the height of cinematic gaming, for Japan that meant FF & DQ were at their best.

The most popular games today (Nintendo) are not cinematic or "hardcore", which seem to lead to Titanic-like sales, making it entirely possible for FFVIII to remain on top forever. Unless Square Enix changes the game formula, the RPG's will probably continue their steady decline.

lo0l thats easy the ff8 reamke will

Already happened.

Japanese sales have always been somewhat accurate because their reported in Japanese magazines and data websites.

Dragon Quest VII Day 1 1,821,450
Dragon Quest VII Week 1 sales 2,988,634
Final Fantasy VIII 3 days sales 2,592,405
Final Fantasy VIII 9 Days sales 2,872,994

Dragon Quest VIII Day 1 sales 2,267,827

Anyways back when DQ 7 was released in August 2000 I remember reading news stories about Japanese retailers saying the game sold like 2.5 mill on day 1.
And there were over 3 million preorders. So who knows.

Dragon Quest VIII sales are impressive because of the 9,000 yen price.
Or lets talk about Dragon Quest VI on Super Famicom it cost 11,400 yen.

I could see a MHP game getting a 1-1.5 million first week, and DQ games to break the 2 million but chances are slim for that...

FFVIII rules!!!! looks like 8 is the magic number. maybe GT8 will break the curse. Another thing that I noticed is that Japan seems to have lost its flair for gaming. Even the 1st DS title ranks very low. This gen is nonexistent over there---it seems!

Monster Hunter 3?

@pristine, look at ltd sales not at first week...
DS takes 4 of the top 10 titles and 6 of the top 20 of all time.