The "beginning" is usually also the "end" for Level-5 sales in general.
Their products suck, and no one gives a fuck anymore. The only people even buying their stuff anymore are kids who don't know any better, and even those numbers are drastically reduced. It's over for Hino's scam empire really.
Honestly, it''s not that your comments are so neutral about L5...
Re-releases are still worth for them. with minimum efforts they still register decent numbers (unless you consider bad the 50K that both LBEW and FLlink will easily register on 3DS, for example), and I still remember that the re-release of the first episode did great on 3DS last year. Probably the brand new installment for 3DS will do similar numbers to the first PSP release or slighlty less
Inazuma Eleven seems to still be able to cross the 400k mark, and even if it will reduce its number with the next installment, considering how they probably spent not so much, reusing the assets.
Even Prof Layton 6 bombed, and still was able to do numbers that, balancing the efforts done for the development (existing patterns, assets, characters and ingame engine) don't seem so poor (otherwise we really should re-focus the comments on the vast majority of the software released in Japan), with 250k more or less. And the crossover with AA did almost 300k (280K?)
Fantasy Life was a brand new IP developed internally by L5, withou cross-media investment, and was able to register around 250k. This re-release obviously is some milky move from the softco, I don't think that if it will hit the 50K mark will be a negative result. Waiting for the western release and the obvious sequel (with re-use of assets and engine and so on, that's part of L5 oculate business model). I've seen people thanking GOD for 250k of FFBravely Default, and sacrificing souls to Chtulhu for Soul Sacrifice 130k, so...
Yokai watch is another brand new IP, that hit the console before the release of any main Pokemon episode (unlike previous DS L5 games) and already surpassed the 100k, waiting for the release of the anime and the manga. Also Inazuma Eleven 1 for DS didn't register records before the anime airing. I'm not saying that the anime will boost 10x the sales of the game, but it's not so strange to foresee a little bump. Could rach Fantasy Life level of success, for example. Or even better.
And the cross-media costs, that you were implying to judge disappointing the videogame sales, should be considered also looking at possible manga and anime (merchandise) revenues, not just looking at vg sales.
Yokai watch and Fantasy Life could even be horrible to you, and targeted at kids. Imho, could be to interesting games (I've seen people like me hoping for western release, for example) and being targeted at kids obviously isn't an horrible thing. And it's not true that L5 beginning sales are also ending sales. At all.
We are not talking anymore about the huge success of Layton and Inazuma on DS, but seriously: DS peaks cannot be seen as the standard milestone for success, otherwise we should simply throw the 97% of Japanese sales in the bin.