Street Fighter Cross Tekken: Limited Edition - Not an In Depth Review

Street Fighter Cross Tekken: Limited Edition

 

Note: This was never going to be a review of the game itself. This was going to be a review of the Contents of the new Street Fighter X Tekken Limited Edition. In the end, it is neither.

I was really looking forward to my upcoming review of Capcom’s Limited Edition offering for Street Fighter X Tekken. I haven’t yet had the chance to review a Limited Edition that wasn’t accompanied by a sizeable premium above the standard price. At only 10 bucks extra, I was curious to see if such a release could offer enough unique content to justify a modest upgrade for devoted fans.

Sadly, this budget-style Limited Edition will never see the light of day on my blog. Just one day before it was time for me to pick up my fully paid off pre-order copy of said title at my local Gamestop, I read (via N4G) that there were an unprecedented 12 locked characters on the game’s disc that were being held back as DLC.

Being a Capcom fan, I’m no stranger to disc locked content that needs my Visa card in order to be accessed. It’s something that I’ve come to accept from this generation of consoles. However, by locking away 12 presumably complete (depending on who you ask) characters to facilitate future purchases on a 60 dollar title, Capcom crossed the line of what I could and could not accept. Locking away such a substantial amount of completed content is something that would have made (and does make) sense on freemium ipod touch games, but using the same business model on a 60 dollar release seems shameful.

Whether or not Capcom’s actions were justifiable were, at first, concerns of mine. But, as I listened to the rhetoric being used by Capcom apologists and Capcom critics on various forums, I started to see something very comforting. There was a large vocal collective of once-loyal Capcom fans simply calling it quits.

Maybe Capcom really needs to charge extra on the back end. Or maybe it’s just Capcom being too greedy for the sake of extra profits and at the expense of their fan’s bank accounts. Happily, the reasoning behind the character withholding no longer has any relevancy to me. I have already, mentally, opted out. It does not matter if Capcom thinks that their intentionally worse title is still a good value with 12 characters locked out. It only matters (to my bank account) if I think it is still a good value. And, funnily, even though I had up till recently thought that it had been a good value, knowing that so much completed content was taken out has had a profound effect on my perception of the title’s worth. How strange it is to me that Capcom is intentionally trying to sell me less than their best effort. Why should I pay for that?

In response to my new dissatisfaction, I (on the day before release) decided to do as many forum goers had already done (or had pledged to do in the near future). I went to Gamestop and canceled my SfxT:LE pre-order. I opted out of the Capcom DLC proposition and put my pre-order money towards the Ninja Gaiden 3 Limited Edition.

Problem solved in 1 easy step!

My apologies to anyone who hoped I would review the SfxT:LE. Please come back in a couple of weeks to check out what I hope will be a very slick package. The aforementioned Ninja Gaiden III!!!