Pay to see ending of Final Fantasy XIII-2

[ZenErik]

Im not a big fan of DLC but I'll certainly get the DLC if I enjoy the rest of the game enough.

[Flake]

Hey, reason #4567 why I turned my back on Square years ago.

Square selling DLC in the future made you turn your back on them in the past? Why haven't you use your prognostication skills to become rich off the stock market?

Not necessarily this gimmick but the cheapening of Square's products and the dilution of their franchises in general is a large part of what made me walk away. What does it say that I am not even surprised that they would make you buy the ending for a game separate from the $60 disc?

[J T]

[noiseredux]

on the flip, Square did a really good job with FFIV Complete last year. For a low price (since it was on PSP) we got an amazing remake of FFIV, along with all of the After Years episodes (which would have cost you more to download separately on Wii than to just buy this UMD), ANDDDD we got a new exclusive episode connecting the two games. I mean you can argue that it's further milking of IV which has been released enough times already, but it really is an amazing package too.

Oh and by the way I watched Back to the Future II last night and when it said "To be continued..." at the end, I thought of this thread.

[casterofdreams]

I want to chime in and say that this is horrible. I have no clue as to why this is happening at all. Square-Enix is a complete bullshit developer. Not knocking the quality of the games but the business models that they have employed.

I can't forget the crap Capcom did with RE5 and charging for multi-player @ a 2KB download. That was on the disc already. Also the total destruction of anything "fighting" from them.

It seems that a lot of big name devs from Japan are going down a path where they try to nickel and dime people because they lost a lot of ground to western devs. It's a far reach but its gotta be something right? You have the two mentioned above, Sony and the expensive proprietary memory for a $250+ system, Sega and 70% of the titles released are stale rehashes, etc. (that last one may be a bit opinionated, sorry)

It seems that Nintendo (not including the 3DS pricing fiasco, they did bounce back rather quickly), Atlus and other smaller firms are doing very well... I just don't know...

It seems most large western devs do this DLC stuff right: Rockstar with GTA 4 and Red Dead adding basically 2 new games that took me 25 hours each to 100% and adding a hysterical side story with zombies to RDR - 2K and Bioshock 2 Minerva's Den which was a bit shorter than the original game but much better overall - Visceral's Dead Space 2 Severed which was a pretty tight experience. Don't forget Bethesda with Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

[sabrage]

It seems most large western devs do this DLC stuff right: Rockstar with GTA 4 and Red Dead adding basically 2 new games that took me 25 hours each to 100% and adding a hysterical side story with zombies to RDR - 2K and Bioshock 2 Minerva's Den which was a bit shorter than the original game but much better overall - Visceral's Dead Space 2 Severed which was a pretty tight experience. Don't forget Bethesda with Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

I wouldn't call that "most." You pretty much listed every single DLC release I can stand, out of thousands. I especially hate that they put DLC in short, single-player story-centric games like Alan Wake and Heavy Rain. It just reeks of cash-in.

Now, when an indie like the Jamestown folks comes out with additional content, I can actually believe it took time and effort to develop. I just prefer to get the full game the first time, and not get strung along by every little thing the developers want to do after that.

[Breetai]

If this was an actual sequel, it would be okay. It seems that it is not, though. If it is more like the ending of Shenmue II, where you go to Guilin and get to actually play the ending, or Lunar 2: EBC, then it clearly was designed as part of the game and it really is just Square pulling a fast one.

I haven't bought a FF since FFX, and this just makes me want to play the FFXIII games even less. Why bother if I already know that after playing through a large RPG that I cannot be fully rewarded at the ending without paying extra?

I'll just stick to being a retro gamer who occasionally does purchase new games and avoid this one. This kind of crap IS enough to sway my decision to put my current gen gaming money into a different game.

[isiolia]

I haven't bought a FF since FFX, and this just makes me want to play the FFXIII games even less. Why bother if I already know that after playing through a large RPG that I cannot be fully rewarded at the ending without paying extra?

Thing is, XIII actually had an ending. XIII-2 changes it in order to set the game in the same world, most likely because SE seemed to have one of the least efficient production strategies ever for XIII, and generated massive amounts of unused content.

XIII-2, even the linked article mentions the game already having multiple endings, and the "to be continued" text being intended to point players to that. If you look at some of the already-in-game Paradox Endings, most of them require you to use an item you get from the last boss.
From a passing glance, it looks like 5/8 of them are like that, making the "to be continued" text fairly valid, DLC or not.

Making DLC possibly fall under that umbrella of Paradox Ending makes some sense anyway - kinda like the Fallout 3 DLC, SE would probably want to package things up so that fans who have already beaten the game have a reason to buy the DLC other than for a replay of the game. Making then alternate endings, even if not post-last-boss endings, would be a way to package them up to accomplish that. It's not like the plot of the game doesn't already support it.

[bigjt_2]

Not be negative, but immediately hearing upon FFXIII-2's release the first thing that hit my mind was "complete waste of time." And I'm one of the few who actually liked FFXIII! I'd had my problems with some of the recent installments, but really? The end of FFXIII summed up everything pretty nicely for me. Couldn't really imagine what there was interesting beyond that story-wise except Square wanting to screw me out of some money.