lt wasn't wishful thinking but it was also very obviously a personal target. The interview went through 2 layers of translation but the english quote was "Well, I'd say 250 000 copies.". Does that sound like an official company sales projection to you?
If the "Well I'd say" seems to bother you that much then rest assured it was a direct translation of "So desu ne", I still have the direct transcript of that interview since I was the one asking the question if you need it (if I had to retranslate it today I would have done it differently, but well that was five years ago) and as you can guess it didn't go through 2 layers of translation before being in english
It's not a number he thrown in a jest either, it's the producer of the game sharing his expectations of the game sales, it's also in line with other expectations they shared on the Tales series before and after (at some point Bamco expectations were treated as a joke because they never reached them, I think they stopped sharing them after Symphonia UP)
And given Symphonia Chronicles followed and sold worse, both domestically and globally, I'd say if that was Namco's takeaway they pretty clearly misjudged.
Since we're talking about sales let's share some numbers for context
Japan
Symphonia UP >120k
Abyss 3DS > 150k
Rest of the world
Symphonia UP >150k
Abyss 3DS >220k
At a glance yes, Symphonia would have most likely sold more on 3DS worldwide (in Japan I wouldn't say that's a given though), but there's more to it than just sales, Abyss 3DS was done in house and took more effort than they expected (many assets had to be redone from scratch), as it was discussed before PS2 -> 3DS ports were not a smooth process at all, besides TotA and Metal Gear Solid I fail to see another one in fact, the game had to be delayed due to unexpected development difficulties (and unfortunate circumstances, Fukushima).
Whereas Symphonia UP was outsourced to Tri-Crescendo, and followed their global strategy of concentrating the fanbase on one ecosystem,
the one where every single Tales game sold wellever since the series started and the one where they could better monetize with additional streams of revenue (expensive collector, DLC costumes etc.), in light of that I don't think either choice was wrong, one was easier and less risk averse and they went for it.
It was the better effort, for all the reasons I said both objective and subjective. It was earlier, higher budget, global and more polished, all important objective measures. And I think it's personally the better game too. And not simply because Team Destiny struggles with QA.
You seem to be pretty dead set on your opinion which is fair, why not, but would you mind sharing any proof on that?
It was not higher budget, both games were developped for 2 1/2 - 3 years (see their latest respective release, Abyss December 2005, Destiny Remake November 2006, Destiny DC being a low effort expanded rerelease with minimal effort), both had around the same amount of people working on it, we have
the credits for the two games(thanks
datschge for that) to check that, being early (???) has absolutely zero thing to do with higher effort unless I'm missing something, and Vesperia wasn't polished since a notable amount of content had to be cut from the game and it was rather apparent when it released, unless you define polish by "bug free" and in that case let's agree to disagree (eg. polish meaning full of content AND bug free)
Being global is true, thanks to Microsoft push they most likely had higher expectations and a bigger marketing campain outside Japan but it didn't impact the scope of the game or anything else.
If anything from a game design point of view Vesperia was just an iteration from what was built with Symphonia and Abyss while Graces was the first 3D title of a team that only did 2D games beforehand, it also didn't use cel shading to hide any technical weakness (unlike Vesperia, which is a great looking game but full of low poly assets), was also the first Tales episode to have everything displayed with realistic proportions (besides the characters faces that is) which took more effort, the battle system had to be built from scratch as well (unlike Vesperia whose battle system name directly refers being an evolution of the one from Abyss), there was no world map and every place had to be connected with different kinds of field area etc.
Overall I just don't see what your point is, every single mothership title done in-house was treated in a similar way, it's only recently that we began to see a new pattern of releasing more quickly made entries by reusing a lot of assets and gameplay mechanics with Xillia 2 (madein a year) and Berseria (made in a bit more than one and half a year and blurred development staff with a lot more of outsourcing works (mainly starting from Zestiria, which coincides with the merge of Tales Studio within Bandai Namco)
PS : Since quality seems to bother you that much do know that I also prefered Vesperia to Graces but that's 100% unrelated to the discussion we're having.