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Silver Kirin
Joined: 09 Aug 2018
Posts: 1763
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 Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 11:27 am |
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That's a pretty great debut for Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, its combined sales amount to 456,462 copies, if we compare to the most recent DQ remakes' debut week numbers, DQ III HD-2D sold 641,195 copies on the original Switch and 180,575, while DQ I & II HD-2D sold 232,250 on the Switch, 96,812 on PS5 and 84,456 on Switch 2. We have to take in consideration that DQ III is the most popular game in the series, and while the original DQ VII became the best selling PSOne game in Japan with over 4 million copies sold, there was also a remake on the 3DS 13 years ago, it seems there's been a decrease in sales, but some Japanese Twitter users were discussing that franchises like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy aren't selling as well as they used to since their mainline games' release take longer than they used to, compared to franchises like Pokémon, which releases new entries more frequently. Still, DQ VII Reimagined had a better debut than Square-Enix's previous remake of a PSOne-era game, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which debuted with 262,656 copies.
The other noteworthy data is how bad the recent My Hero Academia game sold, Bandai Namco's Code Vein II also had a huge drop, not that the game had a great debut last week, it sold less than FFVII Remake's Switch 2 port, and that was a port of a six year old game, Code Vein II was a new release.
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ZelosZoidberg
Joined: 23 May 2018
Posts: 1065
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 3:02 pm |
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^ It's all making me wonder what does Japan want now? I would say new games in long standing IP's that are RPG's but I'm also thinking they are into mobile (as in cell phones) games these days.
Clearly the Switch 2 is doing well over there compared to the west but I believe the lack of Dev kits is what's limiting it from it's true potential (certainly in the west). Come May we will have to see what cards Nintendo has because at this point it's looking like the PS5 library where we have only seen a few games that justified the purchase. Right now It's only Donkey Kong and 2 racing games (3 if you count Sonic which is multi) along with a Pokemon game that can be played on the original Switch.
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AiddonValentine
Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2952
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 3:36 pm |
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| ZelosZoidberg wrote: | |
Clearly the Switch 2 is doing well over there compared to the west but I believe the lack of Dev kits is what's limiting it from it's true potential (certainly in the west). |
Except this was a complete lie or at best a complete misreading of things; simple process of elimination made it easy to narrow down. Most big name studios had dev kits (SqEx, SEGA, 2K, Bandai Namco, EA, Ubisoft, CAPCOM, CD Projekt, etc), a lot of indie devs had them (Yacht Club, Team Cherry, Supergiant Games), even mid-size teams had them (Koei-Tecmo, Falcom, Nippon Ichi). There was never any "dev kit shortage", it was just a few mid-size devs or teams as bigger companies grumbling they hadn't had a chance with the new toy yet.
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Purple Tentacle
Joined: 03 Aug 2025
Posts: 45
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 4:14 pm |
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| ZelosZoidberg wrote: | | ^ It's all making me wonder what does Japan want now? I would say new games in long standing IP's that are RPG's but I'm also thinking they are into mobile (as in cell phones) games these days. |
The latter. Blue Archive has gotten so big they've had to divide it into different sections by school at Comiket. Quite literally the defining video game of our generation. All the passion and talent are in mobile games now. Console games seem to be limited to remakes/remasters and kid focused Nintendo titles.
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ZelosZoidberg
Joined: 23 May 2018
Posts: 1065
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 5:08 pm |
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| Purple Tentacle wrote: | | ZelosZoidberg wrote: | | ^ It's all making me wonder what does Japan want now? I would say new games in long standing IP's that are RPG's but I'm also thinking they are into mobile (as in cell phones) games these days. |
The latter. Blue Archive has gotten so big they've had to divide it into different sections by school at Comiket. Quite literally the defining video game of our generation. All the passion and talent are in mobile games now. Console games seem to be limited to remakes/remasters and kid focused Nintendo titles. |
The Comiket doujin count is what drove me to think it was mobile games. It gotten so huge I had to put it along with Kantai Collection and Touhou on a tag black list.
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Silver Kirin
Joined: 09 Aug 2018
Posts: 1763
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| Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2026 2:45 pm |
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[quote="Purple Tentacle"] | ZelosZoidberg wrote: | | All the passion and talent are in mobile games now. Console games seem to be limited to remakes/remasters and kid focused Nintendo titles. |
I wouldn't say that there isn't any talent in console games developed in Japan, outside of remakes/remasters, in the last 10 or so years we had titles like Elden Ring, NieR Automata, Death Stranding, and new entries of established franchises with titles such as Tales of Arise, Final Fantasy XVI, Tekken 8, Street Fighter 6, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, etc.
I do believe that part of the reason why some of those titles don't sell as much as they used to back in the PSOne, PS2 and even PS3, it's because the PlayStation brand has declined a lot in Japan, and some of the games I mention couldn't have run on the original Switch, not that it'd have mattered, since many Japanese developers still have some grudges with Nintendo, or were reluctant to develop for them out of loyalty to Sony, Nihon Falcom was a good example, though Namco is another big one. I think a reason why some Japanese developers sometimes don't feel like they're losing too much money by not selling as many copies as they used to in Japan, it's because they believe international sales will cover all costs, but it seems companies like Square-Enix and Capcom have realized that's not entirely the case.
As for mobile games, while I know about its importance, I don't actually have a lot of knowledge, and while it's huge, it seems some of the biggest Japanese developers have had a lot of failures in that market, I do remember SEGA cancelling tons of Sakura Wars mobile spin-off titles.
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