Boxing Day Buys

[PizzaKat]

ANyone pick up any good deals on boxing day?

I got Doom for PS4 for 30
Final Fantasy XV for 50
GTA 5 for 30
and Im going to see if I can get the latest Forza for 50. The selection was alright this year, if these prices seem high its cause these are in Canadian dollars

[Gameguy]

I didn't bother with any boxing day shopping. I never found it worth the hassle.

[kupomogli]

When you guys say boxing day, do you mean boxing as in the sport, or boxing as putting stuff in a box? We don't have that here so I always hear boxing day and I'm like, you guys celebrating boxing by getting cheaper stuff?

That being said, what I've currently picked up this holiday season.

Skyrim PS4 $25
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2(garbage btw, stick with Raging Blast 1 and 2 if you want a Tenkaichi like Dragon Ball game in HD.) $25
Mirror's Edge Catalyst $20
Dragon Quest 7 for $19(Best Buy had a buy one get one 40% off on Nintendo games on top of the 20% off on GCU.)
SMT 4 Apocalypse for $30
Hyperdimension Neptunia 1, 2, and 3 on Vita for $20 each
7th Dragon 3 for $20

I didn't get any deal on it other than the 20% off from Best Buy with a $10 reward certificate, but got FF15. Finished the game, never going back to it, sold the game, and just so happens to be only the second FF game I've ever sold. It's not as bad as Lightning Returns, but FF13 or FF15 being worse is very debatable, they're both pretty bad games, easily two of the worst games in the series.

[PizzaKat]

When you guys say boxing day, do you mean boxing as in the sport, or boxing as putting stuff in a box? We don't have that here so I always hear boxing day and I'm like, you guys celebrating boxing by getting cheaper stuff?

That being said, what I've currently picked up this holiday season.

Skyrim PS4 $25
Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2(garbage btw, stick with Raging Blast 1 and 2 if you want a Tenkaichi like Dragon Ball game in HD.) $25
Mirror's Edge Catalyst $20
Dragon Quest 7 for $19(Best Buy had a buy one get one 40% off on Nintendo games on top of the 20% off on GCU.)
SMT 4 Apocalypse for $30
Hyperdimension Neptunia 1, 2, and 3 on Vita for $20 each
7th Dragon 3 for $20

I didn't get any deal on it other than the 20% off from Best Buy with a $10 reward certificate, but got FF15. Finished the game, never going back to it, sold the game, and just so happens to be only the second FF game I've ever sold. It's not as bad as Lightning Returns, but FF13 or FF15 being worse is very debatable, they're both pretty bad games, easily two of the worst games in the series.

at is so bad about XV?the emo dudes?

[kupomogli]

at is so bad about XV?the emo dudes?

All of this is spoiler free.

I've beaten the game, but the first one or two hours I did enjoy it. Just the combat was the best thing about it(gameplay wise atleast,) and the other bad stuff about the game didn't really sink in yet. Is the combat really good? Well, no, but it's atleast good enough. The world map I've also felt was really good, one of the best WRPG like maps in a video game, possibly the best, but it's wasted because there's nothing to really do which I'll get to below. Then finally, technically the game is amazing. When it comes to animations, character movement, jumping(although no running jump,) etc, the game is well done.

So the combat being a little enjoyable just gets old. So depending on the weapon you're using, you can either hold up to do one combo, or back to do another. With very specific weapons like the great sword and the spear, there's one specific attack that can be done if you switch to that weapon and use it at a very specific moment of attack with another weapon, and as much as I did that within the first few hours, I realized that the damaged isn't any better than if you were to use just a single weapon. With the regular sword, there's no reason to use the hold back and attack to do that combo, and infact, it's not even worth holding forward and attacking. The best combo to do when using the sword is a small hop then attack, because you'll do an air dash which gains quite some distance and a really quick triple attack that is the speed of a single attack, and instead of continuing to follow up, you just drop to the ground and repeat. Sure, I did ground attacks now and then, but most of the time I repeated the air attack because there was far more dps by doing that. The daggers are good, good dps, but you only have a single combo attack. Holding back and attack with the daggers will make you shift around the enemy, so sure, that's cool, but you'll just do your continuous attack combo when you hold the attack. Great sword you either do a forward leaping smash and follow up combo attacks which are too slow it's not worth doing anything but the leaping smash, or holding back is a super slow never worth using wide swing, however, if you do a leaping smash and then you holding back and attack then you do a charge attack of the wide swing attack, but it's super fast if you immediately do it and without any charge it takes about four times the damage and you have no knockback when you're using it. This is all I did whenever I used the greatsword, forward smash, charge attack, repeat. There are other weapons(lance, shield, gun, and crappy engineer weapons that use names from Edgar's tools from FF6 but are identical,) but these three are the best, and you'll be using probably two of these and doing the same actions over and over again, or in the case of the dagger, the one combo.

So, did you read what I posted about the weapons above? Other than magic, which you'll create within the first hour or two, which is pretty much three elemental spells and that's it(regardless that it can be enhanced with items,) your character will be identical at the beginning of the game to the very end of game. There is literally no progression in this game whatsoever. Sure, you can go to a FF15's version of the sphere grid and give each side character a few extra "cinematic" special skills that you can use when you have a high enough bar, and Noctis can do an air step, block in the air, or evade in the air, but everything else is pretty much statistical.

So there are both hunts and side quests. As for the hunts I've finished 80% of everything in the game, and for the side quests I've only finished 15-20/80. Out of that 15-20 quests, every single one of them was a fetch quest except the boring as hell dead eye one. Go here, collect frogs and come back, go here, collect dog tags and come back, go here and collect these ingredients and come back, go here, kill these enemies and come back. As for the hunts, you can only have one hunt at a time, and you're required to come back to the station that you accepted the hunt to finish the hunt before you can acquire another one. So between driving, running, or riding a chocobo to the each of these hunts, you were going back and forth 5-20 minutes each way. Have a parking spot unlocked? There's about three minute loading times whenever you fast travel and then you'll be running, driving, or riding from that point on as well. You can fast travel back to the last rest stop you've rested at, but if you're at the end of the game and saving all your exp for the 3x exp boost, then you can't because if you rest at an inn you'll gain exp, additionally, your car doesn't come back with you, but you can also fast travel to your car, and hopefully your objective is near the same location. Just way too much backtracking in this damn game.

Another thing about the world map in the game is it's literally lifeless. So at the very beginning of the game, you have quests to do and hunts. I did them all including the one that was .5 miles away(honestly should have waited on this one, however it gives the perfect example. So the hunt that was .5 miles away, and yeah, took me quite a bit, there and back I ran into only one battle. One freaking battle. If you also consider that there are 80 quests within the game, all of them being fetch quests, and the few hunts that there are, there's also no content, and I think Square Enix developed it in a way to force you to go back and forth or be unable to see quests on the map just to extend the time it takes for the player to do these quests, to artificially increase play time. In which completing the game and the amount of content I completed, it was 25 hours, so I expect finishing the rest of the fetch quests and platinuming the game, I'd assume it'd be 40-50 hours. So about 30-40 hours of backtracking?

There's even fetch quests in the main questline. I think it's chapter five, but one of the towns you go to in chapter three, you don't have access to your vehicle. You have to either run or chocobo your way to one area on one side of the map to collect one item, then all the way at the very end to collect another, and then all the way back over 1 mile back to where you were just at. It's ridiculousness like this. Then because you can't fast travel during periods that characters are going to have interactions, you'll often times have to drive 15 or 20 minutes to the next objective.

Then the story. If you've ever played Dissidia, then there's a representation of how bad the storyline is. No it's not as bad or boring as Dissidia's storyline, but what I mean basically is how bad their storylines have been in the past decade, Square Enix couldn't make a good storyline if their lives depended on it. Now people will argue that "you have to watch Kingsglaive and Brotherhood before you play the game." Why? Why the hell should I need to watch something else for the story of what should be a finished product to be any good? On top of that, it doesn't take away from the non existant story from chapters 2-10, and then the poorly written story from 10-14. It's like the developers put together this world because according to SE graphics are everything, and the story was an afterthought, something that they shoehorned in because they decided to throw it in at the last minute. It makes sense since according to rumors, the story was being cut and added all the way up to release. You'd think if you were going to be making a story focused game, then the storyline would be one of the first things finished. Even after the discs were printed, there's an 11GB patch that includes a scene from Kingsglaive which at the time of it playing, it makes no sense whatsoever what's going on, camera angles are garbage, etc. Honestly would have been better if they left the scene out since they tell you what happens 10 seconds later anyways. It was just really poorly placed and didn't fit in the game whatsoever.

There's also another chapter within the game, or two chapters, I don't remember if it was one big segment or another. But you randomly decide to go to one area to collect something. It's never told what you're going there to collect within the storyline until you collect it, which is apparently something you really need based on the character interactions, but the item in question is never brought up again in the entire game, no joke. You are given some in the next area you go to, but in terms of it being the reason you went to the area to collect it in the first place, you never hear about it again. Additionally, the chapter right afterwards(or the same chapter,) your characters are like, we need to go and protect this location as they're under attack. And the first thing you'll wonder, is how the hell did they know this? No one came to the characters and told them, there was no distress signal, there was nothing, the characters literally just came out and said they need to go there and protect it, and only after getting there are they told that monsters are attacking. None of this had anything to do with the rest of the story though, again just thrown into the game like the previous chapter. The storyline progression is so poorly done it's ridiculous.

Everything within this paragraph isn't really a part of Final Fantasy 15 and is my critique on the fanbase. Yes I'm overall saying their opinion sucks, but read it and it'll make sense why. Will also make more sense with the last paragraph which isn't speaking bad about someone's opinion/// Like Final Fantasy 13, this game has people who either love it or hate it, although most people enjoy it more than hate it. The people who like it though when defending the game from criticism, don't offer any reason why these criticisms are invalid. They're just invalid because they are. They give no examples on what the game does well, it just does. Lines like, "It's a good game, it's just not a good Final Fantasy." What does that even mean? Does that mean that you're too much of a fanboy to believe that anything else can be as good as Final Fantasy and that every Final Fantasy is the end all of RPGs? I'm a Final Fantasy fan if the username doesn't make it obvious, but I've actually played other RPGs because I'm not just a casual scrub who plays the most popular thing on the market. The other statement that Final Fantasy fans like to throw out there in defense is that "You just don't like it because it's not like the traditional Final Fantasy." And that statement makes it sound like they like the game just because it's Final Fantasy. How did I ever enjoy almost 30 years of gaming if I didn't enjoy games that weren't Final Fantasy? Does having a game that's named Final Fantasy that doesn't play like a traditional Final Fantasy make it different in any way? No. I've enjoyed Dirge of Cerberus when everyone else bashed the game for being a shooter, I've enjoyed Crisis Core, Chocobo Racing, Crystal Chronicles, and Dissidia. Being named Final Fantasy had nothing to do with my disliking the game, infact, actually playing other games are what make me dislike this game. It's like how I enjoyed Dragon Warrior because it was the first RPG I've played, but as soon as I played the Final Fantasy, it was clear that it wasn't any good, there just wasn't anything else to compare it to and it's probably this way for a lot of Final Fantasy fans.

So what is Final Fantasy 15? Well, it's a WRPG developed by Japanese and unlike From Software who has made good western like games for over two decades, or like Dragon's Dogma which also had a lot of backtracking(and horrible storyline, everything else was great though.) they just didn't do it very well. Before moving on, speaking of Dragon's Dogma, everyone pretty much slams that game for the amount of back tracking, but Final Fantasy 15, it pretty largely ignored. New IP over an established franchise, so much bias going around between journalist and gamer alike. Metascore with the most reviewed version of Dragon's Dogma is 75, while most reviewed version of Final Fantasy 15 is 82. Honestly, Final Fantasy 15 is mostly like Dragon's Dogma just much much much worse in just about every aspect of gameplay, but Dragon's Dogma indeed has major faults and isn't nearly as good of a game as it could have been due to the massive amount of backtracking which Dark Arisen apparently fixed as long as you owned the original(also a new large dungeon that I haven't played, seeing that I haven't played Dark Arisen.)

So comparing Final Fantasy 15 to a JRPG that's good, it clearly sucks, but how does it far between WRPG styled games? Well, it's comparable to Risen 2 and Arcanium, and those might even be better. But really you compare it to the "good" WRPG games, or even the fairly decent WRPGs. So when you play Elder Scrolls game like Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, you actually collect equipment, collect books, notes, scrolls, spells, etc. Quests are literally scattered all over the place, and there's always a dungeon or area at equal intervals all across the map to explore. You can build proficiency towards being melee focused, ranged, or magic, and it does it well enough in all aspects, and as a spell caster, you can actually create your own spells in Morrowind and Oblivion, although with Oblivion it requires you to complete the mages guild quest line. The quests in these games are usually fairly good, especially in Oblivion, though there are fetch quests here and there. Witcher 3 is a little janky, especially with that damn horse, also a bit unbalanced, but the combat is a bit of a mixture of Souls and the Arkham games and pretty fun. I've just started really putting some time into Witcher 3 and I've never played a Witcher before this so don't know how the rest of the games stand up, but the side quests within Witcher 3 are second to none. Side quests are done so well that many of them are just as good as main quest lines. I've even came across a side quest within the game that was tied to a main quest line, and it actually effected what happened in the quest line. I basically got the bad storyline on that quest and when doing the "side quest" I knew what I was doing was going to turn out wrong, just didn't know it'd effect the main quest. So then Dragon Age Inquisition, another open world WRPG. In terms of gameplay it's a step backwards from Dragon Age Origins as it's similar but more action based this time around, and as action based light strategy style, it's good, and I put a ton of time with friends in the multiplayer, I just wanted more strategic style. There are several open world maps in this game that look absolutely beautiful, with what's unfortunately tons and tons of fetch quests, but a plus would be that you can see every single marker on the map and there's far more than what Final Fantasy 15 offers, so in that aspect, there's a lot of back and forth, but you can easily go from marker to marker. The storyline is worse than the rest of the series(what I've experienced,) but it's still decent, far and away better than anything Square Enix's past decade. The character progression is also very good, the best of the three examples.

The games above are the only similar ones that are good or even decent that I've played, and Final Fantasy 15 doesn't even rank anywhere close to them. I could throw out games like the Diablo series, Sacred, Divinity Original Sin, Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Might and Magic, etc, but then we'd be getting to other western games that don't play similar(but are still better.) If I had to compare it to a game that I think is better that I didn't think was good? Then I would say Two Worlds 2. The combat to Two Worlds 2 sucks, the storyline was painfully bad, but there was still atleast a storyline, and there was more progression with character leveling than the no progression from Final Fantasy 15 with a crafting system, magic crafting system, etc. What I've played I will say I enjoyed it better than Final Fantasy 15, though what with it not being named Final Fantasy, that's the reason I didn't put more of an effort to play and finish the game. I have too many games to be stuck playing a game that's not very good.

So anyways, there is my long overly detailed reasoning behind why imo Final Fantasy 15 sucks.

*edit*

Btw, by "FF15 sucks," in no way means that it's unplayable, just that it's just fairly meh. Very boring to play through, that you're playing through just to complete objectives rather than getting any enjoyment out of it. Also the Two Worlds 2 things may not be completely true as I don't really know if I really thought it was better being so long ago that I've put time into it and I only put a few hours, it's mostly true about FF15 being that level of quality.

[BlastProcessing402]

When you guys say boxing day, do you mean boxing as in the sport, or boxing as putting stuff in a box? We don't have that here so I always hear boxing day and I'm like, you guys celebrating boxing by getting cheaper stuff?

In Britain, it was a custom for tradespeople to collect "Christmas boxes" of money or presents on the first weekday after Christmas as thanks for good service throughout the year.[7] This is mentioned in Samuel Pepys' diary entry for 19 December 1663.[8] This custom is linked to an older British tradition: since they would have to wait on their masters on Christmas Day, the servants of the wealthy were allowed the next day to visit their families. The employers would give each servant a box to take home containing gifts, bonuses and sometimes leftover food. -- wiki

Also living where it's not a thing, it seems ass backward. At least Black Friday has the excuse of paying less for gifts (even if in practice not so much for others) This, being after Christmas, just seems pure mememe, and I suspect it was dreamed up by stores getting rid of extra stock they couldn't sell before the big day. Not that there's anything wrong with that.