One of the big stories this year so far has been Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s relative underperformance in its home territory of Japan. Historically one of the region’s most popular franchises, the Square Enix sequel couldn’t even outsell fellow PS5 console exclusive Final Fantasy 16 in its first week on the market – a surprise considering its strong critical reception.
Behind Final Fantasy 16, too
Now its second week numbers are in, and the results are still pretty underwhelming. The game slipped 91 per cent week-over-week, registering just 24,867 units at retail. A decline like this isn’t uncommon for retail software in Japan, but considering the original results were disappointing, some had been hoping for a smaller slide. It should be stressed, this data only accounts for physical copies.
Elsewhere, the acclaimed Unicorn Overlord has done pretty well for itself, securing a combined tally of 74,186 units across all consoles. Atlus has had to apologise for undershipping the title, so it’s possible it could have moved more copies at retail had it provided stores with more stock. It’ll be interesting to see whether it enjoys a second-wind once more inventory is available.
In the hardware sales department, PS5 added another 39,064 units to its overall tally – a decent return, but still considerably less than the seven-year-old Nintendo Switch. It’ll be interesting to see if Sony can engineer a bit more positive momentum on its home console as the year progresses, but it feels like it’s probably going to need a price drop to achieve that.
As the Editor of Push Square, Sammy has over 15 years of experience analysing the world of PlayStation, from PS3 through PS5 and everything in between. He’s an expert on PS Studios and industry matters, as well as sports games and simulators. He also enjoys RPGs when he has the time to dedicate to them, and is a bit of a gacha whale.
Something is clearly wrong with Square Enix's vision of Final Fantasy now and they need to start
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