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The story
Fire Emblem: Banshi Senkō (万紫千紅, lit. “a riot of purples and reds”) opened its first week at 127,000 copies, falling short of both its immediate predecessor Engage’s 144,000 and Three Houses’ 143,000. Thread debate centered on how to weigh the roughly 2.2-million-unit gap in hardware install base between the Switch (at the time of Three Houses) and Switch 2 — one camp argued the game is “holding up well once you factor in the smaller install base,” while another countered that it’s not that the series is “finished,” but that it’s clearly on a downward slide. Many posters also brought up 3DS-era numbers like Awakening (262,000) and Fates (353,000) for comparison, once again highlighting the series’ long-term decline in opening-week sales.
What people said
Software units Hardware units
143,130 8,593,033 Fire Emblem: Three Houses
127,131 6,316,079 Fire Emblem: Banshi Senkō
Don't try to compare it with Three Houses — that game had a slow-burn, steady-selling tail. You'll lose that argument
Huh? That's not much of a gap at all
So this really is a flop after all
If week two doesn't grow, can we agree Banshi Senkō is an even worse trash game than Engage?
Some retail chains don't seem to have much stock left, so there's probably a fair amount of lost sales too
If there's barely a difference, that's a success. What are you even saying?
The install base is only 2 million units off from the Three Houses era, and on top of that this game has the name recognition of being a sequel to Three Houses — and this is what it does
This isn't even on the FF8 track (a sequel that sells less but still does fine), it's a straight-up flop
If there's a 2-million-unit gap and sales barely moved, that means it's actually selling well
2 million is a massive gap lol
You're really reaching just because you want to bash it
Fire Emblem first-week sales
262,399 Awakening
353,201 Fates (released in Japan as "if")
143,130 Three Houses
144,558 Engage
127,131 Banshi Senkō
Engage > Three Houses > Banshi Senkō
That's basically how it shakes out
So it's a steady decline then
Obviously it matters, come on
Don't panic just because your made-up smear campaign isn't landing lol
Nah, it definitely matters lol
You seriously think you can use this to troll people?
FF16 was a PS5 exclusive and still got mocked even after selling 3 million
Was FE ever really a title on the level of being compared to FF?
Is FF even a brand where a comparison with FE makes sense?
Even though the install base is already 6 million units?
I'd get it if this were the very early days, but…
You'd have to be out of your mind to call year two of a console with a planned 10-year lifespan "the very early days"
Three Houses had the "katachike" pre-order bonus (some kind of bundled perk — exact details unclear) but Banshi Senkō doesn't
That alone accounts for roughly double the effective price difference
Three Houses also had a bigger install base
So a drop of about 20,000 copies seems reasonable
More importantly, what about Wolverine, which isn't selling despite having the install base to back it up…
What does even sell on this console at this point…
Wait, is the underperforming Wolverine even a first-party title?
This is a conversation about exclusive-title sales
You can look at FE as a series too, you know lol
Fire Emblem first-week sales
262,399 Awakening
353,201 Fates (released in Japan as "if")
143,130 Three Houses
144,558 Engage
127,131 Banshi Senkō
A third-party's flagship title being put on the same level as a first-party's third-string title — just how far has third-party fallen
I never imagined something worse than Engage would actually show up
Banshi Senkō's user score is 8.9 versus Engage's 7.0, you know
That's not reliable at all
Engage is the more fun game to actually play
People rating it high are just story/character otaku
If you like Engage, I won't argue with that
But having played it myself, I get why Engage ended up less well-received
Not just top-tier — THE top
Super Robot Wars sells more than that though
The newest entry, Y, is only around 90K combined across PS and Switch
Does Super Robot Wars even sell 100K anymore?
He's going out of his way to visit every thread just to get mocked
Palworld topping the pop-up store charts, the weekly sales numbers, Wolverine flopping, the Switch 2 version of Trails winning out — there's just too much stuff for that guy to lose his mind over
Background and Key Points of Debate
A metric that comes up often when discussing first-week sales is the comparison against hardware install base, and this time the starting point for discussion was the gap between Three Houses (at a Switch install base of 8.59 million) and the Switch 2 version of Banshi Senkō (an estimated install base of roughly 6 million). Looking at raw unit counts alone, sales dipped only slightly, from Three Houses’ 143,000 to Banshi Senkō’s 127,000, but once you factor in the roughly 2.2-million-unit gap in install base, opinion split between “proportionally, it’s holding up well” and “this is evidence the new hardware’s own growth is sluggish.” Looking at the series as a whole, first-week unit sales have been on a downward trend — from the 3DS era’s Awakening (262,000) and Fates (353,000) down to the Switch generation’s Engage (144,000) and Banshi Senkō (127,000) — but this overlaps with a broader trend of shrinking physical-copy launch sales across the console/handheld market as a whole, so it would be premature to chalk it up purely to FE losing steam on its own. As for the gap in user scores (Banshi Senkō at 8.9 vs. Engage at 7.0), review-site scores can skew depending on sample size and timing, so that should be read separately from the first-week sales comparison.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “Fire Emblem First-Week Sales — Banshi Senkō 127K, Engage 144K“.
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