Not the greatest flex, but Falcom's hasn't been a big time developer in a very long time. Even assuming equal sales (which of course they wouldn't be, these titles are all direct sequels), that's 625k units per game (I'm also not diluting for silly side stuff and just counting mainline titles).
Osborne + Rufus >>> any Final Fantasy villain.
Osborne sucks dick. A victim of Falcom's ambition maybe but they were really only able to
technically close that story and in a totally unsatisfactory way. Spoilers through Reverie:
The curse being responsible for everything in Cold Steel is so fucking weak and at odds with the personal menace and ruthlessness on display from the man in prior titles. As a member of the audience, I felt hoodwinked, and not in the good way. "Oh, he wasn't really evil! His way of thinking was constrained by an ever-present devil on his shoulder." Oh, cool, great. Thanks, Falcom. That's not what it looked like before. I especially hate the Reverie daydream for his diary that frames him as totally able to be tender towards his new subordinates. No, Falcom, you can't have it both ways - He can't be so overwhelmed by an ancient evil that it warps his every action and simultaneously let him be moe for his worker bees, even in private.
Rufus is the only one of the Cold Steel villains worth a damn, the only one with any real ambition, whose cause was relayed to the player in an understandable way, and who you're ever made to
really hate
Of course he'd backstab Arianrhod, and, for me at least, that made not seeing it coming sting that much harder.
Weissman's still my favorite villain of this series. He's not overexplained, and his outlook is at direct odds with the hero's. Their dialogue actually feels like a clashing of ideas and experience instead of another round of beating up bad guys with the power of friendship (I mean, there's some of that too but it actually feels justified is what I'm saying). Weissman's character is also actually interesting - a chicken and egg question where you're left wondering whether his narcissism and sadism came first or his superman ideology did because they both feed into and enable the other, and you're given just enough info on his background to understand how they both could come about but not enough specifics to form a clear timeline.
As a general rule of thumb, this series' bad guys have gotten worse over time (although it hasn't always been a straight line down, just trending). For all the hype around Kuro/Daybreak, I hope we get some meat but I'm not entirely optimistic.