Fire Emblem Echoes sold less on its first week in Japan than either Shadow Dragon or New Mystery did.

[Armagon]

23 minutes ago, Harvey said:

Oh great...Echoes can't even outsell a licensed game which is Dragon Ball Fusions...

Now we're screwed.....

 

.....My God, the doom and gloom is real.

Fire Emblem's popularity is a fucking atom compared to Dragon Ball's.

[Harvey]

1 minute ago, Nobody said:

You clearly don't know anything about japanese game sales. With few weeks (including mario kart, which will just keep selling), games's sales tend to be extremely front loaded i.e most of them happen on first week. That dragon ball game will see a 70~80% drop in sales on its second week just like echoes did. It's just how game sales are in japan. First week sales are extremely higher than other weeks'. 

So yeah, no, it's not possible for a game like fire emblem to not have much lower sales on week two.

So then what about the case for Monster Hunter then which consistently keeps selling well until several months?

 

 

[Nobody]

7 minutes ago, Harvey said:

So then what about the case for Monster Hunter then which consistently keeps selling well until several months?

 

 

Monster hunter's first week:

01./00. [3DS] Monster Hunter Double Cross <ACT> (Capcom) {2017.03.18} (¥5.800) - 848.467 / NEW <72,39%>

monster hunter's second week sales:

01./01. [3DS] Monster Hunter Double Cross <ACT> (Capcom) {2017.03.18} (¥5.800) - 280.293 / 1.128.760 (-67%)

less front loaded but still a huge drop. Even to this day, over half of monster hunter xx's copies were sold on its first week.

if you sell a lot on your first week, you will also sell well on your second week even if you see a big drop. 30% of a million is more than 200,000.

btw, monster hunter is a MUCH bigger franchise than fire emblem. For a matter of fact, that monster hunter game also underperformed according to capcom themselves, considering they wanted it to sell two million copies by the middle of april but it came a few hundred thousand copies far from that.

Edited May 3, 2017 by Nobody

[Harvey]

@Nobody Oh I see...well, guess that settles it, FE is doomed.

10 minutes ago, Armagon said:

.....My God, the doom and gloom is real.

Fire Emblem's popularity is a fucking atom compared to Dragon Ball's.

I know right? I mean of all the nerve that Nintendo can't afford to market their big IPs like that.

well folks, its the beginning of the end for Fire emblem...atleast it sold better than Path of radiance right.....

 

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Echoes sold 80-100% of its initial shipment. And we see an 80% drop the next week. Sounds like nearly every copy produced was picked up if both figures are to be believed. The only variable is people picking up the game digitally either through preference or because they have to due to supply constraints

Edited May 3, 2017 by Gustavos

[Nobody]

6 minutes ago, Gustavos said:

Echoes sold 80-100% of its initial shipment. And we see an 80% drop the next week. Sounds like nearly every copy produced was picked up if both figures are to be believed. The only variable is people picking up the game digitally either through preference or because they have to due to supply constraints

Nah, you're misreading it. Both that sell through and that drop are normal. There aren't necessarily suply constraints, and had there been, it wouldn't take long for them to solve it. It's just that stores tend to know well how many copies they will sell, so they don't usually overship. 80% drops in second week game sales are very common. Awakening and Fates both saw drops in the high 70's

10 minutes ago, Harvey said:

@Nobody Oh I see...well, guess that settles it, FE is doomed.

I know right? I mean of all the nerve that Nintendo can't afford to market their big IPs like that.

well folks, its the beginning of the end for Fire emblem...atleast it sold better than Path of radiance right.....

 

I don't understand what you're saying. You got to be trolling.

Edited May 3, 2017 by Nobody

[Armagon]

13 minutes ago, Harvey said:

@Nobody Oh I see...well, guess that settles it, FE is doomed.

I know right? I mean of all the nerve that Nintendo can't afford to market their big IPs like that.

well folks, its the beginning of the end for Fire emblem...atleast it sold better than Path of radiance right.....

 

Nintendo could've marketed Echoes at a galactic level, it still wouldn't surpass Dragon Ball's popularity.

And wow, what is this doom and gloom? "Beginning of the end if FE". Because IS totally isn't making money off Heroes. Because FE Warriors and Switch are totally not happening.

[Tryhard]

yeah fire emblem is dead guys let's just go home and shut down our websites and accounts

that said, on par with the other remakes sounds like a fair estimate

[Nobody]

Anyway, why is everyone bringing up dragon ball's popularity when Echoes will almost surely outsell that dragon ball game in total sales? Echoes' first week was 40k higher than dragon ball's, that's a very high difference to make up.

Edited May 3, 2017 by Nobody

[Ivy Wife Supremacy]

8 minutes ago, Armagon said:

Nintendo could've marketed Echoes at a galactic level, it still wouldn't surpass Dragon Ball's popularity.

And wow, what is this doom and gloom? "Beginning of the end if FE". Because IS totally isn't making money off Heroes. Because FE Warriors and Switch are totally not happening.

Exactly this is just a hold off till those games which are gonna get massively pushed.

[Harvey]

1 hour ago, Armagon said:

Nintendo could've marketed Echoes at a galactic level, it still wouldn't surpass Dragon Ball's popularity.

And wow, what is this doom and gloom? "Beginning of the end if FE". Because IS totally isn't making money off Heroes. Because FE Warriors and Switch are totally not happening.

Who knows? After seeing the sales of Echoes not doing well, the devs might start panicking figuring out how to make big sales like Awakening & Fates.

 

[Dandee Leone]

Fire Emblem sales are heavily frontloaded, meaning that the majority of sales occur during launch week, then drastically drop off in the following weeks, then don't even make the top 20 list in a few months. FE has always been like that, along with Zelda. 

Mario Kart, Mario games in general, Pokemon, Splatoon, Smash, and Animal Crossing are Nintendo's evergreen franchises, meaning that they stay in the top 20 for years. 

[LB44]

4 minutes ago, Harvey said:

Who knows? After seeing the sales of Echoes not doing well, the devs might start panicking figuring out how to make big sales like Awakening & Fates.

 

Except that Echoes still sold decently well...

Mate, there is no way SoV was going to be on par with fates and awakening in Japan as a remake of game already available there and on a console that is near the end of its lifespan. It still sold 80% of its initial shipment, meaning that it roughly met what they were expecting in the first place.

Japan makes up a small part of fe sales anyways compared to the Americas, and since Gaiden is not available on this side of the world this difference may very well be exaggerated even moreso.

They're doing just fine.

[The DanMan]

On 4/29/2017 at 0:31 PM, Dandee Leone said:

I'm not saying that the FE series is in danger of dying, all I'm saying is that IS literally has no financial incentive whatsoever to implement old mechanics not constrained to just Awakening and Fates. This is undeniable.

Heck, IS has been treating Chrom and Lucina as mascots more that Marth as is (while Chrom is my fav lord, him replacing Marth, the OG, is sacrilege)

Now, while I personally wouldn't mind, since I loved Awakening, I still do like mechanics and the thematic structure from older games as well, and for the sake of appealing to as many fans as possible, I would prefer FE Switch to be a blend of old and new. 

 I know Gaiden is far different from any of the other pre-Awakening games, but to see it do as it did despite its high Famitsu score, is a shame. 

 

What...?
Chrom was rendered a joke in Smash and Marth got a massive place of reverence in TMS by pretty much replacing Chrom as Itsuki's Mirage. The most recent Monster Hunter titles have had a Marth-themed armor set. Marth is still the most iconic character to the series.
And SoV sold through 80% of its initial shipment-- meaning it did as well as Nintendo expected it to.

On 4/29/2017 at 1:26 AM, Irysa said:

Gee, it's almost as if there was never any real overlap between the majority of people buying the new games and those who bought the old ones! How on earth could a game lacking in a stupid self insert, extensive shipping/dating sim mechanics, groping/petting minigames, and pandery/highly sexualised character designs possibly have not appealed to the fans of neo-FE? Remember, all they actually cared about was casual mode and accessability guys, it had nothing to do with the overall tone of the series!

What the hell are you tripping on?

Edited May 3, 2017 by The DanMan

[Silas Crowley]

Man, you can say whatever you want about Gaiden or what have you; that isn't the problem. Fire Emblem is quickly drying up- the pool of interest it can draw from is shrinking, and I feel like the majority of casual gamers are experiencing a very natural disinterest in the game.

Why? 
It hasn't actually done anything new. 

Any new features Echoes had were impressively lazy and minimal. 

Etrian Odyssey, Pokemon and plenty else have done the dungeon-crawl sort've overworld before. FE: Echoes brought nothing new to the table, aside from smaller features and some rather nonsensical reworks, such as demolishing weapon variety and locking-off a bunch of cool magic and skills to Enemy-Only. Alm/Celica is no more interesting than any FE protagonist before and, dare I say, has a staggeringly similar personality to the protagonists we've been using for 20 years.

Echoes suffers a lack of innovation.

I at first loved, then hated Fates; why? Because it gave me the illusion that we were going to have choices, character development and a lot of options. Instead- ... magic was slashed, there were a lot less spells despite that they had plenty to recycle from Awakening, and poor balancing ruined the appeal of PvP (tell me how fun it is fighting a full Replicate + Warp team every time you look for a match) without much else to fill the gap, beside playing around in your castle... which isn't going to entertain you for long, because even then, you don't have much to work with. 

I'm going to stop before this becomes a Fates review, and restate my thesis: Fates failed to give adequate choices and baited the availability of them, and likely in some effort to improve upon the game's shortcomings, I believe IS provided the player with even less freedom thinking it might have been what put-off the players.

I like the old games as much as the rest of you, but we're in a new age, and it's getting to the point where even solo hackers here can write better code than IS did in the GBA releases; that wouldn't actually matter much, but having played a lot of the hacks the community has made, man- some of us do storywriting infinitely better than IS. Shout-out to Alfred Kamon; Midnight Sun's story really enthralled me up until the very bitter end. 

Fire Emblem needs more diverse features.
You know how lame it is that all those Messiah tomes are pretty much enemy-only? All the cool stuff is walled off. Why can't the player ever summon skeletons or cast the really badass magic? The best stuff is always locked off to enemies, characters have linear short-lived development that usually dies off after their recruitment, and I haven't really seen a great or original Fire Emblem story that made the most of its assets in... I don't know, maybe never. 

They need to make more things player-obtainable. High-tier magic, special effects, even some of the crazier skills like Dragonskin or Iago's staff-sorcerer class; counterplay is already built-in for what the players use to negate these things. There should be rare, extremely difficult, possibly missable objectives for really cool stuff like that which we struggle to obtain. 

Fire Emblem needs to give the player story choices.
They experimented with this in FE7's & FE8's different lord paths. It felt kind of like you made a decision which impacted the tone of the story, and that was cool. Fates seemed like a recreation of this... but, honestly, not a good one: Kamui's decision to support Nohr felt like he had every reason to not do it, and he confirms this in speech, but he's doing it anyway in what seems to be a forced plot made for no reason other than to play on Nohr's side. I hated it. He had almost no character development. I rapidly lost immersion on something I'd been hype for months leading up to release, but the plot was genuinely so bad I lost that interest in a dissatisfying decline. 

I don't care if it's an Avatar or another Lord I'm playing, but for the love of Naga, I don't want to be a flat piece of cardboard who makes no real decisions all over again! I won't buy echoes primarily for this reason- that I have no actual options in the store, that the main character I'm playing is completely disinteresting, and that I'll never be able to do anything to change that.

I'd rather gouge my time late into the night and beg people for help working on a rom-hack than send IS money to keep making the same mistakes. 
And why else are the rest of us here-?

Why do people who love this series work so hard to make fan-games? It's not to worship the vanilla series; nobody's putting Kamui or Chrom into their games, so we're obviously not in love with IS storywriting. We do these things to ad-lib and correct the shortcomings of the series.

And when we do, the results are pretty kick-ass... Staff of Ages, Midnight Sun, and plenty others I haven't gotten to yet are all just damn amazing. 
These are made by small, unpaid teams of people who achieve greatness on creativity and passion alone.
But, that seems to tell me there's a lack of both those things in the current developers of FE...

We'll keep seeing dumb scams like cheap phone-games and waifu systems until people get sick of it again, after which the series might die for good. I have no actual love of IS anymore. I have nothing against characters having romances and children- that's actually a great story mechanic, but it was so artificial and skin-deep! They didn't use the tool well, and while Echoes separated itself from this mechanic, it did cater somewhat to that audience; there were gay pairings that didn't exist prior in Gaiden, and a lot of things are abritarily as they were in Gaiden, only it appears now that the story is forced and flatter than before.

At some point- someone's going to do the same thing we do, except they're going to put together their own engine and sever themselves from the Fire Emblem name, then make a superior game of the same genre. There's nothing protecting the core mechanics of the game... and if they're really improved, the end product would be incomparable to what we're getting.

Edited May 3, 2017 by Silas Crowley

[Tryhard]

24 minutes ago, Silas Crowley said:

Man, you can say whatever you want about Gaiden or what have you; that isn't the problem. Fire Emblem is quickly drying up- the pool of interest it can draw from is shrinking, and the majority of casual gamers are experiencing a very natural disinterest in the game?

Why? 
It hasn't actually done anything new. 

Any new features Echoes had were impressively lazy and minimal. 

Etrian Odyssey, Pokemon and plenty else have done the dungeon-crawl sort've overworld before. FE: Echoes brought nothing new to the table, aside from smaller features and some rather nonsensical reworks, such as demolishing weapon variety and locking-off a bunch of cool magic and skills to Enemy-Only. Alm is no more interesting than any FE protagonist before and, dare I say, has a staggeringly similar personality to the protagonists we've been using for 20 years.

What? First of all, it's a remake of Gaiden, which is the game in the series most people put as the most experimental along with FE4, but Echoes has far more new things in Fire Emblem compared to the last two games and is more in line with a traditional RPG than a strategy one in many regards and nobody can deny it. Just saying it's been done in other RPG series before is pointless, because of course it has as it is hard not to trod on ground already covered by quite a lot of games already, but it's never been done in Fire Emblem before. Let's remind ourselves that this is the series that rarely stays the same for more than two games in the row, I highly doubt there is a problem with "innovation" (which may not even be a good thing to strive for anyway) when the core mechanics seem to be relatively liked.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

24 minutes ago, Silas Crowley said:

You know how lame it is that all those Messiah tomes are pretty much enemy-only? All the cool stuff is walled off. Why can't the player ever summon skeletons or cast the really badass magic? The best stuff is always lacked off to enemies, characters have linear short-lived development that usually dies off after their recruitment, and I haven't really seen a great or original Fire Emblem story that made the most of its assets in... I don't know, maybe never. 

They need to make more things player-obtainable. High-tier magic, special effects, even some of the crazier skills like Dragonskin or Iago's staff-sorcerer class; counterplay is already built-in for what the players use to negate these things. There should be rare, extremely difficult, possibly missable objectives for really cool stuff like that which we struggle to obtain. 

Those things need to be made special. The player being able to obtain them is actually the opposite of interesting. I don't get this point. I don't mind seeing some spells in a game that are enemy-only, especially things that make sense.

I don't really mind if there was an introduction of the battle mastery system from Super Robot Wars, though. It sounds like a decent idea.
 

And I have no hate for those fan game makers or hackers but they aren't on the level to compete with IS yet.

Edited May 3, 2017 by Tryhard

[JSND Alter Dragon Boner]

1 hour ago, The DanMan said:

What...?
Chrom was rendered a joke in Smash and Marth got a massive place of reverence in TMS by pretty much replacing Chrom as Itsuki's Mirage. The most recent Monster Hunter titles have had a Marth-themed armor set. Marth is still the most iconic character to the series.
And SoV sold through 80% of its initial shipment-- meaning it did as well as Nintendo expected it to.

What the hell are you tripping on?

Well theres Heroes "promising" at least 4 variation of Lucina right now(with 2 already in the game), and there being 2 variation of Chrom while Marth besides the original version is nowhere in sight.

 

But seriously speaking if theres any character that Heroes have been giving special treatment its really only Lucina(who'se popularity somewhat confirms how iconic Marth really is) and Ike(being used as their sort of "secret weapon")

[The DanMan]

1 hour ago, JSND said:

Well theres Heroes "promising" at least 4 variation of Lucina right now(with 2 already in the game), and there being 2 variation of Chrom while Marth besides the original version is nowhere in sight.

 

But seriously speaking if theres any character that Heroes have been giving special treatment its really only Lucina(who'se popularity somewhat confirms how iconic Marth really is) and Ike(being used as their sort of "secret weapon")

They're marketable because of Awakening. But in no way has Marth been "dethroned" as the other poster was saying.

1 hour ago, Silas Crowley said:

At some point- someone's going to do the same thing we do, except they're going to put together their own engine and sever themselves from the Fire Emblem name, then make a superior game of the same genre. There's nothing protecting the core mechanics of the game... and if they're really improved, the end product would be incomparable to what we're getting.

Hey, if the series got actual competition I'd be all for it.

[Silas Crowley]

There's other ways to make something special without locking it off to enemies.

A good tactic some games use is for an object/character to be enemy-only, but it becomes player-obtainable later under special conditions; i.e, fulfilling a challenge.
The problem with Echoes, though, is that you can't really be a necromancer / darkness mage despite that there's very good magic of both categories in it...

It's just enemies-only, and those happen to be my favorite things.

If you've always been a Sword / Lance guy, then Echoes is probably the game for you, but that's very flat for me. 

I wouldn't even care if there were less powerful, obtainable versions... just that I could have them and be a valid sorcerer.
I don't like that axes and the like are gone, Gaiden or not; they ported stuff over, changed a lot of old features and even changed the canon sexuality of characters from Gaiden, so why is it a stretch to include our old weapon types?

Is staying true to Gaiden so important that we should just ditch the weapon triangle and continue to limit player options?
Echoes would've been better if it carried good features from other games over. It's not a true remake as-is, so it might as well exploit past successes and experiment. 

I'd rather see a Fire Emblem where I can raise the dead, explore grey or even black morality, and make at least a few decisions that alter the path of the story.
That's no more difficult than making a 3-branch game (Fates)

But honestly, I'd rather someone compete with this series. It's a good genre! The core mechanics are robust and interesting, even if at times derpy or random. 
However- to be quite honest, I never liked the direction Awakening took the series in; it wasn't a bad game, but waifu-petting and p2w phone games don't jive with me.

[RJWalker]

Pretty much every game has enemy exclusive stuff. Getting upset over that seems silly to me.

[NoNameAtAll]

1 hour ago, Ranger Jack Walker said:

Pretty much every game has enemy exclusive stuff. Getting upset over that seems silly to me.

To add onto this:

FE1/11: Imhullu and Earth Dragonstone

FE2: Messiah, Dark magic, Duma's tentacles, eyebeams, monster weapons...

FE3/12: Imhullu (Discounting that one DLC chapter where you actually have playable Gharnef), Dark Dragon breath

FE4: All of the holy weapons you can't get and Loptyr tome and dark magic

FE5: Loptyr Sword, Stone and Poison spells (They literally turn into Fenrir if you steal them)

FE6: Outside of trial maps, Fimbulvetr, Tomahawk, Ecksachs and some other certain weapons I can't remember offhand lol and Idunn's Dark Dragon breath

FE7: Ereshkigal is the main one. I'd count the Fire Dragon's flametongue but no manakete lol

FE8: Ignoring glitches, the monster weapons and Fomortiis's specific stuff. Naglfar outside of Creature Campaign

FE9: Ashnard's sword, Alondite...sorry, I'm not as familiar with FE9's weapons

FE10: Creiddylad and the dark magic during a first playthrough

FE13: Grima's Truth, Expiration

FE14: Bolverk and some other stuff

FE has always had enemy only stuff. It's just the nature of the game. And players having Imhullu not only makes no sense, it's game-breaking due to how it works. >_>

[Harvey]

10 hours ago, lbrasz44 said:

Except that Echoes still sold decently well...

How is selling above 10K decent?

I get that Japan sales are different compared to NA sales....but NoA hasn't even bothered to market this game enough to develop hype for it to begin with. So its still a wonder if this game will do well or not.

9 hours ago, Silas Crowley said:

Echoes suffers a lack of innovation.

What the hell are you talking about? FE has always had innovation from the start. Every game has new features that makes each game identical. I can't recall an FE game that didn't do anything original or that it played safe(And yes Awakening was a very risky game for many reasons).

9 hours ago, Silas Crowley said:

Fire Emblem needs more diverse features.

Dragon veins have been there in Fates which alters the battlefield in many unique ways. To some its mostly pointless but to me, its a blessing.

 

[The_antithesis]

W-w-waifu emblem is getting justification?!?

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...

Ehem. I'm sure the western release will patch up any inconsistencies, so we can't say anything for certain until all the numbers are known. We may see FE become more popular in the west than Japan at this rate, which would be weird!

[Lyon's Dirge]

21 hours ago, Harvey said:

@Nobody Oh I see...well, guess that settles it, FE is doomed.

I know right? I mean of all the nerve that Nintendo can't afford to market their big IPs like that.

well folks, its the beginning of the end for Fire emblem...atleast it sold better than Path of radiance right.....

 

 

Wow a remake of an unpopular Fire Emblem game not selling too well doesn't equate to Fire Emblem dying. Nintendo isn't going to drop Fire Emblem like that because they've been shown they can sell well in the past. I wish people would quit it with these knee-jerk reactions. This also doesn't mean that only "Waifu Emblem" can sell well and that traditional Fire Emblem can't, especially when Gaiden and Echoes aren't even traditional Fire Emblem games. So I also wish people would stop looking at things in black and white.

Edited May 4, 2017 by Lyon's Dirge

[Zangetsu]

7 hours ago, The_antithesis said:

Ehem. I'm sure the western release will patch up any inconsistencies, so we can't say anything for certain until all the numbers are known. We may see FE become more popular in the west than Japan at this rate, which would be weird!

 

Man, that would be unbelievably ironic    O_O