To Buy or Not To Buy

I have to admit I'm a little softer on DLC than I use to be. Don't get me wrong, I haven't accepted it. I still roll my eyes at it and I still get pissed at it. I also still make purchase decisions based on it.

However it seems consoles have realized there are people out there like me. They no longer advertise on the back of the package, particularly with Sony with how they use to standardize it's advertisement in the top right corner of the back cover. This becomes a bit more of a pain for me to verify if something is designed to be a DLC whore or not.

I won't get up in arms overall if there's just a couple little things cut out as DLC. This of course depends on the type of DLC which I really should do a rant about on my website...

But then you get into games that end up having more paid DLC than the entire cost of the base game - sometimes to the tune of several hundred dollars. Those in particular I stay the hell away from.

I do my homework before purchasing now. Originally all I needed to do was check the back cover. If there was going to be DLC, it was generally known before the game was released and it ended up with a notice on the cover. If it didn't say DLC there, it was typically safe to buy.

But I guess they noticed lots of games were being left on the shelf due to that "feature" being interpreted by people like me as a WARNING instead. So they apparently removed it.

Now I have to check PSN (or Live, but I so rarely buy 360 games anymore...) to see what kind of DLC is out. Before the DLC was so early you'd be able to check it in the store on launch day and see all the Day 0 DLC for it. So I'd make the decision to buy on Wednesday assuming any copies remained at the store.

I buy a lot of small run JRPGs so there are times when the stores in town will have 1-3 copies and that's it. So the odds of them being gone the next day were always a possibility.

JRPGs are usually out in Japan up to a year or two before they get translated and released in North America. So seeing the DLC available on launch isn't too surprising. It's in fact more surprising to see DLC show up later than that!

And here's where I get to my issue. Fairy Fencer F was released a couple weeks ago. I bought it on a Wednesday after checking the store for DLC like I usually do. I saw 2 free items for the game. Both of them item-starter kits. I look at these as "Oh shit, we made the game a little too hard to start off with, let's give them something to start them off." Basically a band-aid for a failure in game balancing during debug/testing.

Ok, that's all they have? So I bought it. I played through it. Seemed a bit short to me. It said 40hrs, and I actually spent closer to 60 I guess, but I did a lot of grinding too. How much grinding? Enough such that I don't know what the game over screen looks like. I have never lost, or run away from, a battle. Including bosses, of which for some of the bosses I kicked the crap out of. Which is why those tropes I mentioned in an earlier post iirc erked me so much.

While checking on PSN for a new jrpg I heard was released today, Tears to Tiara II, I didn't find anything about the game at all. I'll assume it'll be added to PSN after 5pm. I went ahead and bought it anyway since it had a free mini-art book >_> and the company that released it isn't currently on my conditional boycott list. We'll soon see if they end up on the list if this shows up as having shitloads of DLC.

What I did find on PSN however, was that Fairy Fencer F now suddenly had a total of SIX DLC items. 4 free, 2 paid. (Total of about 3-4 bucks on the DLC, but both are completely insane. One gives you a free bonus fairy, the other is nothing more than a level limiter unlock. It basically lets you gain an extra 300 levels if you're willing to grind, and it gives you a bonus dungeon to go through with those hyped up levels. Basically, a level they should have included in the game, and an artificial level lock is imposed on the base game.)

So... maybe I'm being too generous and lax with these companies. I'll certainly be watching to see how the Fairy Fencer F DLC progresses each and every week from now on. Because it looks like what they've learned from us anti-DLC people is that we seem to be not buying the game because they're showing us too much DLC at once. Rather than... you know, us having a problem with there being useless, pointless DLC in the first place.

I'm thinking I'm soon going to be abandoning day 0 purchases entirely. This of course means I'll likely not have a chance to buy most of the games I like to play since they get small runs to begin with. I'll just wait 4-6 months then check the DLC at that point and then check if Amazon still has copies for sale. If it's full of DLC or Amazon is out of stock, guess I'll be out of luck. Oh well. Life will go on and I'll still have something to play anyhow.

On other notes, in addition to all this I saw two other games that I'll probably want to pick up soon. One is a collectors edition of a jrpg that I can't remember the name of offhand. I'll have to see if I can research about that. But another is a jrpg called "Ar nosurge" that was released a few weeks ago. There's apparently already no copies left in town, assuming there was more than 1 copy in town to begin with. As the "Ar" might indicate, it's got something to do with Ar Tonelico. From what I've read it's apparently a prequel to the series although it's a sequel to a vita game that never got released out of japan. I don't think I'd buy that original vita game however since it looks like it was released as a per-chapter DLC thing. (Apparently the way such games as Strongbad's game was released, only with like twice as many chapters) I may have to get that game via Amazon, but until I order it I'll be keeping an eye on the DLC issue. Currently just 1 item.

Ok, adding the "rants" tag now. :P

Not to Buy

So the PSN store has updated for Tuesday and the verdict is in from the last post.

Fairy Fencer F's DLC is now standing at 11 items. 6 free, 5 paid I believe.

Tears to Tiara II is finally listed. I believe it was 6 items. Mostly bonus characters from the Aquaplus universe.

In all cases, it's things that either shouldn't have existed in the first place, or are things that use to be free hidden things in a game.

Tears to Tiara II shows me not to buy a game before it's listed, period.

Fairy Fencer F shows me not to buy a game FOR AT LEAST 3 MONTHS AFTER RELEASE. To watch them drip out the DLC each week.

Looks like they've indeed learned to hide DLC as much as possible to avoid lost sales. This means I can't properly determine if a game is worth buying or not on launch day.

As a result, I will never again, EVER, buy a game at launch. Minimum of 3 months before I buy something, and if I still see DLC increasing near that 3 month mark - as I will follow their progress for the games I'm interested in until the DLC makes me lose interest - then I'll add additional months onto the wait time.

Being JRPGs, these things get small runs usually. If I can't find a physical copy at an acceptable price at the end of the wait time, they've still lost a sale.

Atlus is now on the shitlist due to Fairy Fencer F btw. They can join NIS America on the list with all the others over DLC whoring.

This being said, while Ar Nosurge will be waiting until after Christmas as a result of this, that game is still only at 1 DLC item. Not sure what I think about that as I'll have to re-read what the content of that DLC is, but at least it's a good sign compared to the BS the other two games have demonstrated.

sigh.

I liked Atlus too...

I am on a roll today!

So while noticing that the video game publishers have started in on this slow drip policy for DLC, I did a little more checking at some recent jrpgs I've bought to see if they were affected. I had to stop after the first one I checked to avoid rage. :P

I checked Akiba's Trip. When I bought it, on launch day, there was a total of 2 free DLC items. They were basically free clothing/character models.

Today I check, and there is 20 DLC items. All of them except for 7 are free.

6 of them are swimsuit models for the female characters in the group (1.99 each). The 7th is a batch. For the price of 4, you can get all 6. (7.99) The rest are clothing/model options much like the first set.

I haven't gotten to the new low that was rage inducing. Wait for it.

All of the items, every single one, are unlock codes. They're all 100kb files. There's no way they have full 3D meshes etc in there.

That's still not the new low.

What I found insulting is that even with the paid DLC unlocks, YOU DO NOT GET THE ITEMS YOU JUST UNLOCKED.

Instead, the items are added to one of the shops in the game, and if you desire you may then purchase those during the course of the game!

Meaning, you are not actually buying the items, like you would with the ever so common "item set" DLCs you see common in jrpgs (See Mugen Souls Z) but instead you're buying the OPTION to buy them in the game if you want to grind up the money for it.

Yeah. 3 month wait period. Minimum from now on.

*also*

I'd like to point out and stress that ALL of these items are unlock codes. This means that all the content is already on the disc you've purchased. This means that there was no reason for any of these items to not show up in the list on launch day along with the 2 that I saw and based my decision to purchase on. That is, this slow drip was most certainly deliberate.