What is wrong with Turn-Based Combat?

[Wolf Kanno]

Bravery Default sold well, it's numbers are good for small companies but nothing compared to mainline FF or Skyrim's numbers.

Those numbers are meaningless without context though. Skyrim was a AAA production on the major home platforms with an absolutely massive marketing campaign behind it. Of course it's going to sell more than a 3DS RPG with a relatively tiny amount of advertising behind it. Also Bravely Default outsold Skyrim in Japan, so it really didn't do badly all things considered.

Yes, and Square doesn't want to market anything that doesn't look like a sure fire hit. As I said, Bravely Default only left Japan because of Nintendo and that was because the original turn based 4 Heroes of Light did poorly on the DS which is one of the best selling gaming units on the market. This also doesn't change that Demon's Souls and to a lesser extent, Dark Souls also sold relatively well with little to no PR outside of their console communities. Oblivion itself was a PC/360 exclusive that did better on console, and got nearly half of its sales as a port for the PS3 a year later. Marketing does give you results but it's speculative at best to think BP would have sold significantly better had it had actual marketing on Skyrim's scale. Hell Squenix is one of the worst companies in terms of marketing their titles besides maybe Nintendo. Again. 4 Heroes of Light actually had some marketing and did terribly despite being a pretty decent game. The other issue to remember is that Elder Scrolls, Diablo, Fallout, Mass Effect, and the Tales of franchises have pretty much outsold every non Action-RPG on the market in the last ten years. Only the mobile titles have probably turned more of a profit and that has nothing to do with preference and more about development and tech.

Square took a hit last gen with just about every game they released getting hit with mixed reviews and mediocre sales compared to previous generations. Combined with high cost of production, it's not a surprise that SE's best selling products are subscription based MMOs and mobile titles based off old properties. The last true Turn Based RPG that SE has made that broke 4 million in sales was Dragon Quest VIII and it did terrible in the West. Before that, it was FFIX. Squenix's best selling property that isn't FF or DQ is Kingdom Hearts, of which the pure Action-RPG console entries have fared much better than the more experimental handheld units.

In short: SE has simply convinced themselves that Westerners don't care about Turn-Based combat despite the numbers not really being there to support it. They believe their own hyperbole and sadly there is nothing we can do to change VII's fate. We can change the trend by still supporting games that offer old school combat but who knows.