Saelorn

@sohcahtoa

I would argue that they could NOT have merely included this content unlocked from the start. They would not have spent the thousands upon thousands of dollars to design AND test all of this stuff if they couldn't justify those costs by charging for them. (As anyone who has ever worked on a port could tell you, even that is never as easy as you think it should be.)

Try and imagine the business meeting between the character designer, the costume designer, and the budget director. The art people want to give us more stuff, because it's their job to make the product as awesome as possible, but the budget guy has to make sure that they don't lose so much money that they can't keep everyone employed for the next game.

Capcom isn't exactly operating with a huge profit margin these days, and this is a way that they can try and afford to make a better product. If you don't like it, then please, by all means, don't pay for the unlock code; if they end up losing money on it, they will get the message and stop making these sorts of additional features in their future games, but don't make the mistake of thinking that their base products will have more in them to compensate.

A perfect demonstration of proper use of a free patch.

I think it is mis-leading to call it fake money.

It seems odd that they didn't go to S yet. I suppose it goes AAAA, then S, SS, SSS, SSSS, and finally SSSS*

@Mechazawa Prime

It's a reasonable opinion. I could definitely see this swinging anywhere from a 3 to a 4.5, depending on how much each individual cares about online or the DLC controversy.

Definite kudos to the reviewer for explaining where the demerits come from, so us readers can evaluate for ourselves based on our own priorities.

I find it interesting that this review focuses so much on the competitive on-line demographic. While it's certainly a vaild playstyle choice, and the neglect of such is definitely an issue, there are plenty of players who prefer the "Arcade" mode in fighting games and might check out the online options only after a few weeks - if ever - by which time they should have cleaned up the netcode. Fixing that kind of code is exactly the kind of things that online patches were meant for.

For what it's worth, as a professional tester, random online conditions are hard to simulate.

Likewise, just because there might be an ideal gem set for each character for top-of-the-line players, the best set for each individual is going to vary depending on their own strengths and possibly even the playstyle of the opponent. Even if gems a/b/c might give theoretically higher damage output or survivability for ideal circumstances, then if I know I'm strong in area d and weak in area f then I can pick gems f/b/g to optimize my own ability. You know how some players never use throws, and others express an over-reliance on projectiles? What is best for the best has little impact on me or the group of friends with whom I play.

From my perspective, the review reads, "There is some graphical slowdown on the character select screen, and a lot of the combos require the ridiculous timing that this genre is known for, but the overall gameplay is still a lot of fun." Sounds closer to a 4/5 or a 4.5/5 to me.

@agenttg009 - I'm inclined to believe that it will be a package deal, maybe $20 or $30 for the whole lot. I don't believe that they would risk everyone buying another $60 on top of a $60 game; even if you think they're greedy or evil, they're not that foolish.

If I can get them all for $20 - $30, I will. If they're $5 each, I'll just get the one or two characters I really care about.

@omicron1 - You are saying that $60 is ridiculous for a game that cost how many millions of dollars to make? The price of console games has remained fairly flat over the past few decades, despite a significant increase in the cost of development (helped, in part, by a significantly reduced cost of production and distribution). Sixty dollars was a huge amount of money twenty years ago, when I was lucky enough to get SFII as a holiday gift, but nowadays.... not so much.

That's not just taking into account the difference in earning potential between an 8 year old and a 28 year old, either; the actual inflation is real and non-negligible.

Consider also that the people on this site are more likely the type to obsess over one game for months at a time, if not longer. (I'd be surprised if I got less than a hundred hours of play out of it.) For the quality of the game, $60 is a steal. And if that's still too much, then in six months when the DLC becomes available for unlocking, you'll probably be able to buy the base game (used) for $30 and still come out ahead after buying "the rest of the game."

It's not like Capcom is just wallowing in their own greed, either. According to public record, they made $728.1 million in 2010, but only $23.6 million of that was profit - they invested almost 96% of what they earned back into making jobs and producing games. I don't know about you, but even in another country, these are my peers; I want these jobs to exist, for people like me, so they can do what they enjoy to spread a little fun in the world.

I find it odd what was not addressed by the video.

For example, Final Fight allowed for multiple of the same enemy to be onscreen at the same time, so wouldn't that imply that there are an entire brigade of Poisons? Like, there's a Mad Gear army and Poison is just one squad, and it's a more elite squad than the Breds or the Dugs (they'll let anyone join) but not as elite as the Bill Bulls, etc. That leaves plenty of room for Poisons born as both genders, as long as they self-identify as female and are willing to cultivate their distinctive image.

There are also the comments provided by Ryu and Chun-Li, which seem particularly designed to encourage ambiguity but which were counted only toward the first category rather than the second:

Ryu could have VERY easily been referring to Poison's skimpy outfit and provocative carriage; recall that none of the women he normally fights really use their image as a distraction in quite that way (the ones with skimpy outfits wear those because they are practical, and are otherwise very serious fighters; the exceptions to the rule are from other cross-overs, which are decidedly non-canon here).

Chun-Li seems a bit more straightforward in her accusation, but consider how "you fight like a girl" is usually taken as an insult (so saying that she "doesn't fight like a girl" would be semi-back-handed-compliment), even though Poison's actually fighting style is more She Fu than Chun-Li herself uses. (I think it's actually fairly clever to say that Poison doesn't fight like a girl, because she relies more strongly on She Fu and the girl in comparison uses a more direct fighting style). It makes it hard to place exactly what Chun-Li is trying to say here... which is the whole point of ambiguity.

Ambiguous Gender is a gold mine of a trope, and they can milk it for quite a bit as long as they never resolve it. The longer they heavily imply something without actually coming out and confirming it, the greater of a surprise it would be if the minority opinion turned out correct -- but carry that on too long, and people will assume that they're trying to be sneaky about the truth, to the point where it would be more of a surprise for her to just confirm what was so obvious to everyone from the beginning.

I also think it's weird that they would use ambiguous gender as a reason to potentially not use a character, given that it's the same world with the Claw, Boxer, and Dictator. Is it that strange for Poison to be pre-op in a world where the Big Bad is named Vega, and for her to be post-op where the Big Bad is Bison? After all, a good part of self-identity is a product of the society in which you grow up; maybe there are cultural connotations that don't translate perfectly, and changing the hard facts of the situation do a better job of invoking the intended feel of the character than if they'd just left things how they were. (This is almost bordering on the sub vs. dub debate, whether it's okay to change a story to make it more accessible to the intended audience, and where the line falls between Woolseyism and Macekre - suffice it to say, both sides have their merits and personal preference weighs heavily.)

Story and game are two opposite ends of a spectrum. A story has a pre-defined beginning, middle, and end; a game is about choices and how those choices affect later stages of the game.

A traditional RPG (what this article is calling a JRPG, though that term is imprecise and misleading) is about the story, much like a novel or movie. The thing is, although they give plenty of time to develop character as characters, novels do a terrible job of describing action, and a standalone novel doesn't even give us much time to enjoy the characters once we know them - that's why trilogies and series are popular. Movies, meanwhile, are great at showing action but generally don't last long enough to define the characters and make us care about them.

A traditional RPG is somewhere between a novel and a movie. There's plenty of time to develop and showcase the characters, and the action is kept interesting by making it interactive (and sometimes challenging).

The thing I really hated about FF XIII was how the combat system was so obtuse (you have to double unlock the ability to damage an enemy by filling a gauge and using a dedicated class to prevent that gauge from draining) that it prevented me from getting into the story.

I would have had a much better experience (i.e. enjoyed the story more) if they had simply used the traditional class system from 4/6/9 (where each character had a pre-defined class - instead of each character having a crystarium that was designed to pigeonhole each character into those classes while giving the illusion of choice), mixed with the gold standard ATB combat from 5/6/7. It wasn't broken, and there was no need to fix it. Even flat turn-based combat would have been fine.