Get Up To 70% Off Final Fantasy Games On Switch In Square Enix's Golden Week Sale (North America)

FF X/X-2 and XII never go below $24.99 on the eShop.

If my backlog wasn't so strong, I'd definitely bite on Actraiser and Legend of Mana. As is, I still want to start and finish Arceus and finish Xenoblade Chronicles 2 before adding more games to my endless backlog. At this point, it's better for me to have a never ending wishlist than a never ending backlog. Just finished Triangle Strategy, which was an incredible game. You know a game is good when you're sad that it's over.

@IronMan30

Hmz have all those games never even tried any Will do since they take alot of time (remembering ps2) but yeah.

I MEAN ON SWITCH

I picked up Star Ocean First Departure..on my phone..since I forgot it existed and Star Ocean 2 was one of my favorite RPGs ever. Other than that the majority of these are their normal "rock bottom" sales that won't ever change sadly.

Why does voice of cards only get 20% off? I was kinda hoping for a bit bigger discount 😅

@IronMan30 you can tell what games Square discounts heavier than others. Same with Capcom too. Ubisoft and Bethesda have handed out the more surprising discounts on their titles lately.

ActRaiser Renaissance is a lot better than most first impressions believed. I had a fantastic time with that game, yes even the Tower Defense segments.

I hope more people check out I am Setsuna. Really cool retro RPG in a similar vein to Bravely Default, with more position-based combat. Lost Sphear is also a pretty good pseudo-sequel, though not as memorable as the first one for me.

I keep almost buying Chocobo Mystery Dungeon on sales like this...maybe this is the time?

B—b—buh... Whutif I want physical…? 🥺

@Anachronism It's telling that IAS has a cheaper base price, but higher sale price, while LS has a higher base price and cheaper sale price.

I don't know anybody who wasn't disappointed with LS in some form. Same with Oninaki.

@BlubberWhale

Ah I don't get paid until the 12th! Happens every time, there's a sale but I have no moneys

Already have all the ones I want. I'm glad I got to play X and XII again. Maxima was okay. Rest on the backlog for re-visitation

I'd jump on the Final Fantasy titles I don't already have if those prices were even more than the 50% off they're sometimes marked down to (They're not). The early Dragon Quest titles are tempting too, but I can afford to wait. Especially since the HD-2D remake of III is in the works.

Still irked that I was in quarantine Black Friday weekend when NEO: The World Ends With You was cheap in-store at Walmart....

@Tyranexx Blessing in disguise. NEO: TWEWY wound up being incredibly mediocre, I don't recommend it.

@TotalHenshin Lost Sphear's definitely got some rough edges, though I did still enjoy it. It improved on the combat system and had some really beautiful locations. My biggest complaints were that the story got a bit convoluted and the mechs felt sort of tacked on. Still need to grab ONINAKI at some point, but I always seem to have something else to play.

@TotalHenshin lol basically. Death of my wallet

The only square enix games. I care about are tomb raider & sleeping dogs & neither are on switch

Lots of NIS America games on sale as well if anyone's into SRPGs

@MatthewYoung Not a fan eh? I'm curious, do you mind explaining (without spoilers if possible) why you find it mediocre? I enjoyed the Final Remix version on Switch, though none of the control schemes entirely suited me.

@Tyranexx Sure sure. To clarify, the first TWEWY is one of my favorite games ever, especially after my most recent playthrough (which was just before playing the sequel).
I'd say NEOs two major issues are its combat and its narrative.
The combat starts off promising in the beginning but becomes monotonous as the game goes on. Essentially each of your party members pins (which you choose yourself) are mapped to a button on your controller. So Rindo will attack if you press X and Fret will attack if you press Y and so on. It's a neat system at the start, but as the game progresses and you get more party members it just becomes a matter of holding or hammering every button on the controller at once until the enemies die.
What makes this worse is that there aren't a huge variety of unique enemies in the game (about the same as the first game) and in order to circumvent the fact that you can attack with your entire party at once the game just keeps beefing up enemy health as the weeks progress. So incredibly simplistic button mashing mixed with damage sponge enemies on top of the incentive to chain up consecutive battles (and to play on hard mode) for better rewards leads to some incredibly sleep inducing combat that you'll be doing often for roughly 35-45 hours.

That's something I could tolerate if the story was good (after all the first game's combat loop got pretty repetitive too), but that unfortunately isn't the case.
I'll keep this part short to avoid spoiling anything but essentially you have a story that follows roughly the same structure as the first, but the script has been BLOATED up to accommodate a 40+ hour game. And unfortunately none of the new characters come close to the amount of development put into the first game's cast despite them never shutting the hell up.
It's hard to explain without using examples but basically the characters are talking very often but not much is actually being said and you don't learn very much about any of the characters by the end.
And if you're interested how the story holds up as a sequel, it doesn't. The first game had a pretty definitive ending, so they had to invent an entirely new scenario for this one. Characters from the first game are involved, but they don't impact the story to any degree that they couldn't have been swapped out for brand new characters.

Some other notes

In terms of presentation the game looks nice enough, it's very clearly a lower budget game, but it has a nice art style that pops just like the original.

This game does the annoying Square Enix thing where only SOME cutscenes are voiced and many others are not. Not a big deal but it's always irked me.

And the music is absolutely the best part of the whole thing. While I do not recommend the game itself I do recommend its soundtrack.

That about sums up my less than stellar experience with the game without delving into spoilers. Certainly not a bad game but it's not one I'm gonna remember as the years go on.

I'm so bummed that Nintendo published The World Ends With You: Final Remix, meaning it will NEVER go on sale

@Tyranexx @MatthewYoung

Hard disagree on both counts (though obviously, you are free to have your own opinion.

I actually found that the new battle system incredible. DS TWEWY is still amazing, but I actually found myself more engaged and encouraged to swap things up with this one. You describe the single input to a character correctly, and yes, you can just stack multiple characters on single buttons for it to be more monotonous, but if collecting pins and upgrading them all is important to your experience, you'll get much more out of it. As the game introduces more into the battles, your timing for attacks becomes more important to rack high damage and reap rewards from battles (which is key if you want to play on higher difficulties). The battle becomes more about finding the ebb and flow of timing all your pins together to combo up, and just swapping out one or two pins can make you remap your entire approach. I will grant that yeah, enemy variety was lacking in terms of what you would hope from a sequel, but I never found battles to get stale; and even if I did, you can cruise right past them anyway.

Plot/story is a bit more subjective, and I can see how some people would find it lesser to the original. Without going into spoilers, a flaw is certainly that it heavily relies on you being aware of the events of TWEYW:FR in order to appreciate fully - and at times comprehend - what's happening, but I think that once that platform is there, there is lots for OG fans to enjoy. There are a couple chapters where the dialog does overstay its welcome (especially a specific day in Week 3). And to be fair, I don't think the original is exempt from that either. Personally, I found the cast charming overall and have a good chemistry. The story does a good job of having relevant plot points that make it feel current, and there are some great times to be had with the dialogue at many instances.

Not sure how important it is to you, but the music ABSOLUTELY slaps in this too.

At any rate, I think the sale price is well worth the entry ticket for you to make your own judgement

@Minfinity Fair enough on the combat, I did fail to mention that there are a large variety of pins that do change up your strategy quite a bit if you change out just one of them. However the optimal strategy is there and enemy health gets so large on harder difficulties I found myself just using whatever pins had the highest damage values throughout most of the game. I'm sure if you mix and match to a larger degree than I did you may find more out of the combat but I will stress that enemies still become huge HP sponges near the end.

I'll say the story is a little less subjective. Obviously whether or not you enjoy the story is but those structural problems are very much present and vacucous dialogue plagues the entire game. I think that's mostly due to SE trying to force a certain amount of 'play time' out of it.
Now to be entirely fair, I have only ever played the original DS version of the game, so the only experience I have with FR's additional plot is a YouTube video and a cursory Google search to fill me in on details I was missing. So I could very well be missing some context. This game is a sequel to FR's epilogue story moreso than it is the original game, which makes sense because like I said before the first game has a definitive ending, you kinda have to staple something on if you want to continue the story.
Ah man, there's a lot I wanna say about the story as a whole but I don't want to get into spoilers.

The music (just like the first game) is 10/10 though I do agree. Bird in the Hand, Breaking Free, and Act the Fool have become some of my favorite tracks in the series.
@Tyrannex Like Minfinity said it's up to your judgement and if you can get this game half off like I did, go for it. But I'd still assert the game isn't worth the time.

@Minfinity, @MatthewYoung I appreciate the amount of detail in both of your responses. Music is a big part of games for me, so I'm glad the track slaps like the first game. I'm a little cautious when it comes to bloat in RPGs, but that usually depends on how said bloat is implemented. I'm no stranger to wordy games, being a Golden Sun veteran. I enjoyed the plot in Final Remix. If the events are more of the same, that's likely not a bad thing IMO.

Sounds like the button combat/general gameplay can be pretty subjective. None of the control schemes in Final Remix (since it was a port of the mobile Solo Remix) entirely suited me. I've also read mixed reactions to the controls in the original DS title. I gave the original a miss when I had the chance to get it since the control scheme was too touch-heavy for my liking.

I think I'll decide on this one by downloading the demo to see if it's for me. It'll likely be a bit in any case since I have several games to finish. As it's a Square Enix title, it'll likely go on sale again before long. Thanks to you both!

@Tyranexx I will throw my vote in for giving NEO TWEWY a shot - I very much enjoyed the combat overall, especially at higher difficulties and with late/postgame enemies and bosses (though 100%ing the Noisepedia can get a bit grindy).

As for the story and writing, I thought it was really good. The story and character development takes a bit longer to get going than in the original game, but I don't think that's strictly a bad thing, and I found the payoff for most of the cast highly rewarding. By comparison, I recently started replaying TWEWY, and it's still a fantastic game, but early game Neku is absurd. In retrospect, TWEWY leaned hard into the JRPG trope of forcing character development by making the protagonist start off as an insufferable little s**t. NEO TWEWY doesn't rely on this trope quite as heavily, and as a result character development is more subtle, but I don't think the overall experience is necessarily less enjoyable.

Of course, not everyone is going to enjoy the combat or the story/writing in NEO TWEWY. All I'm saying is that the game is doing things on both fronts that can be enjoyed.

@DJDM I'll definitely give the combat a fair shake, though except for rare circumstances, I don't often 100% games these days. So probably no Noisepedia completion here lol. I'm fine if a game's plot takes a bit to get going as long as there's a worthy payoff. And you are correct, Neku IS pretty insufferable in the beginning of TWEWY lol.

I'll definitely try out the demo and if I like it enough, will pick up the full game. Thanks for your two cents.