Despite rave reviews, Final Fantasy 16 has some of the series’ worst launch sales in Japan, selling less than Final Fantasy 5 for the SNES. This goes to show how the series has fallen somewhat in Japan, though it remains a hit everywhere else around the world.
On Twitter, user @GameDataLibrary revealed that the 16th entry in the franchise only sold over 300,000 copies for its Japanese launch. That’s less than half the amount that entries like Final Fantasy 15 and Final Fantasy 7 Remake managed to sell on their respective launches.
Game Data Library isn’t counting digital sales, so the user is assuming that it probably sold about 500,000 copies. Obviously, that’s not the worst, though considering how hard Square Enix has been pushing Final Fantasy 16, it’s not the desired result.
It’s been long theorized that Final Fantasy and console gaming in general hasn’t appealed too much to the Japanese market. Currently, the most popular form of gaming over there is mobile gaming, which is why we kept getting those mobile spin-offs during Square Enix announcements.
While the series could have done better, this doesn’t mean that the game is doing badly everywhere else. Square Enix confirmed that the game has already sold 3 million copies worldwide, which is pretty good for its launch week. While still less than the launch of Final Fantasy 15, it’s far from terrible.
At the least, Final Fantasy 16 isn’t a bomb and Square Enix can see that fans want more games like this. Granted, those fans might not be from Japan but there’s definitely an audience that wants more mature JRPGs done this way. It will be interesting to see how this game affects the next few installments going forward.
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Final Fantasy 16 is readily available on PlayStation 5, with the possibility of a PC release coming in a few years.