One Game for the Price of Two - Television Tropes & Idioms

So you Gotta Catch Them All, eh? Well, the Marketing department has come up with a wonderful way to encourage social participation! They'll divide some of the game's content (characters, mons, subplots, or so on) between different cartridges! Sure, you can still play the game by yourself, beat the Final Boss and watch the credits roll, but the only way to get true 100% Completion is to find other people who have purchased the other versions (or simply buy the other versions yourself) and trade your exclusive content for theirs. This version is particularly common with mon games.

Of course, this now means that those same characters, subplots, and mons are now effectively interchangeable in the overall scheme of things, thus making characterization inconvenient. Also, anyone who doesn't have access to large gatherings of people with the other versions of the game are likely screwed.

Sometimes it's the same game for everybody, but you still need to "connect" with someone else to unlock ... something. This also applies to situations where you need to interact with a separate game (generally of the same company) to unlock certain content. Such scenarios usually require the presence of a certain save file on your memory card or hard drive, or even console-handheld interaction. This version isn't as annoying to most players, since the content involved is less central to gameplay; on the other hand, it can be much more annoying to actually get, and Guide help you if you're going for 100% Completion...

A variation of this involves ending a game's story on a Cliffhanger and having the sequel pick up where the first game left off, giving the player the feeling that the entire series was, narratively, one game split into multiple parts. However, this practice isn't as well regarded here as it is in other media: Individual volumes of a series of novels, films, or television shows frequently are not expected to be anything but the continuation of a single, overall work in progress. Videogames, meanwhile, are largely expected to stand as discrete, complete works in and of themselves.

Novels, films, and television shows also do not cost $40-60 an installment. (Though hardback editions of novels can come pretty close sometimes...)

Of course, if you want to acquire both versions yourself, this not only means twice the money (to purchase them with), but twice your free time (to actually play them).

Compare the arguably more benign cousins, the Expansion Pack and the Old Save Bonus.

Examples

Pokémon is the Trope Codifier (Older than They Think...). The Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald versions mix it up a bit by having different antagonists with different goals in each game. Other versions just have different Pokémon with varying rarities. Diamond and Pearl also include the ability to trade over Wi-Fi, theoretically allowing a player to collect all the Pokémon without knowing someone with the other version personally or buying it yourself. It's eased significantly from Diamond/Pearl onward; the GTS (Global Trade Station) feature allows you to use an online Pokémon-trading marketplace to fill your collection, but one can only search for Pokémon actually registered as "seen" in the game; however, the games do make an active effort to allow the player to see as many Pokémon as possible under the ownership of other NPC trainers.
- Don't forget that there are some critters you can only get by trading - no one can catch them in the wild. Alakazam, Golem, Scizor, Steelix until Generation IV, Machamp, Kingdra, Politoed and the list goes on.
- The GTS in Diamond and Pearl aside, collecting Generation IV's massive list is further complicated (ignoring the GTS's obvious limitations) by the fact that in order to even see a Manaphy, one must physically import it from Pokémon Ranger; this was rectified in Platinum and later games, which allow the player to see a picture of Manaphy in books sitting around in certain locations, registering Manaphy as "seen" and enabling the GTS route. For those without a Wi-Fi connection, don't even think about trying to get a Spiritomb without the GTS. This near-impossible-to-achieve-alone feat requires meeting 32 players in the underground (or the same one person thirty-two different times).
  - Pokémon Yellow brought this to an ultimate - it lacked Pokémon you could only get in Red AND only in Blue, so if you bought Pokémon Yellow, you also needed trade with BOTH Red and Blue to get certain Pokémon.
- Pokémon also brought this to an extreme in its third generation. Ruby and Sapphire together had only about half of the Pokémon. FireRed and LeafGreen, having come out later, had most of the other half, leaving only a few. Emerald had a good chunk, and Colosseum and XD: Gale of Darkness had one of these each (Ho-Oh and Lugia, respectively). Jirachi was available from a connection bonus from Pokémon Channel in Europe and Australia only, or a preorder-only version of Colosseum in America only, and Celebi was available through the latter method in Japan only). That makes six games, one of them having to be preordered and bought twice in different languages (or once plus buying another game in Europe), on two consoles, for 100% Completion. Except there were still Pokémon you could only get through Nintendo arranged events, but these were not counted by the Pokédex.
  - Speaking of Celebi, it was better in the second generation (for Japan at least) because back then all you needed to get a Celebi was a cell phone and a special link cable for the Game Boy. This connected you to a wireless trading/battle system that could also trigger an event to catch Celebi.
- Pokémon Mystery Dungeon pushes this further to the extreme. The first set of games were at least released on different systems but the second set give absolutely no reason for the double release. Trading is not an option here so all but one of the few differences in Pokémon listings are solved by entering passwords which are far easier to find online than in the opposite version. It basically boils down to whether you wanted Mewtwo or Celebi after you've beaten the game. The third Mystery Dungeon (No Export for You) is One for the price of Three, and interconnectable with each other because they're all on the same Wii.
  - Explorers of Sky subverts this by having every Pokémon except Arceus available without any interaction at all, partially because the game uses a completely new password system that does not work with the previous games.
- And then there are the Pokémon Stadium games. Some do give you certain Pokémon that you can't get more than one of, but it requires completing several absurdly difficult challenges. On top of that, all the rental Pokémon that the games provide generally have bad stats and mediocre move sets, neither of which will help in the harder battles. In other words, you need to have a copy of your own handheld Pokémon game and import your own team over in order to even stand a chance of winning.
- Black and White Versions have notably been given some bigger differences: several routes and towns are significantly different in each version (what is a forested rural town in White Version is a heavily urbanized city in Black), one has one non-optional rotation battle and many triple battles while the other is the opposite, and the last Gym Leaders are different people (with the same, gender-swapped team) depending on the version.
- The anime has used this starting with the first fifth-generation-based movies. Just like the games, there are two versions of the movie, with similar plots, but different Pokémon appear in the different movies.
The Mega Man Battle Network games started doing this with the 3rd installment. At first, it just affected side bosses and cards. Later, what version you got affected what storyline bosses you faced and abilities you acquired. This means that, for some reason, in one version of Battle Network 5, the Navi in charge of a water world is NapalmMan.
- The game also hilariously inverts the trope in MMBN4, making you play the game over 3 times to get everything you need. In theory this made one game much longer in comparison since you got three times the play time. It even looked so, since there are 6 plotline bosses you can fight, with 2 completely new ones with their own side quests on each rotation. In practice, however, this was anything but fun, as apart from the 2 side scenarios (which are rather short and comprised about 20% of the overall game) everything else was the exact same, and while the enemies also leveled up through each run, they only got more HP and attacking power, rarely adapting their strategy. Effectively you invested three times the playtime for the same thing over and over again.
- Battle Network 3 also involved a rare chip called the Z-Saviour. This chip can only be obtained by linking up your game boy to a Megaman Zero 3 game. However, each Megaman Zero 3 cartridge only contained one copy of the Z-Saviour chip, meaning that not only did you have to find another game, you'd also have to find one that hasn't been tapped of it's chip (making rental store copies completely worthless, as their chips have already been gutted and put into their own Battle Network games). This basically meant that if you wanted the chip, you HAD to buy another game.
Mega Man Star Force is One Game For The Price Of Three. However, through Wi-fi, you could get the benefits of all three games, making the differences effectively the high-end cards and one boss. Star Force 2 is One Game For The Price Of Three For The Price Of Two, with three versions consolidated into two distinct cartridges (Zerker x Ninja and Zerker x Saurian; at the title screen, you choose whether you play Zerker or your cartridge version, and each version has its own save file). Star Force 3 is back to just two versions.
Demikids, aka Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Children. To be fair, though, the story is different depending on what version you play.
For a while, the Bomberman games tried to add Mons called Charabombs to the series and started splitting up the portable games into two versions.
A handful of the Digimon portable games do this. Notably, Cathode and Anode Tamer, and Digimon World Dusk and Dawn.
- Digimon Story (Dusk and Dawn's precursor) did something similar, although there was only one version of the game, several of the 'elite' Digimon required multiplayer features to access. Fortunately, most didn't and the ones that did were only necessary for multiplayer battles and a few side-quests.
  - Veemon, a very popular Digimon with several possible evolutions, required the player to go on Wi-Fi, find someone with the game and match Digimon to make an egg that may turn into a Veemon. Also, several evolutions were there, but the pre-requisite was to, previously, having owned that evolution in your team. As in, you would have to do the matching, leave a special egg in the farm that would take eons to hatch, to get said evolution to THEN be able to evolve your Digimon to it.
Metabots, a Mon series featuring children playing with alien robots rebuilt into toys (no, really) did this.
- And the first three generations of the game subverted it with the Parts Collection games, which were just a series of battles allowing you to get a complete collection of Medals and Parts without having to trade, wrapped in a flimsy Excuse Plot.
Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen and Might and Magic V: Darkside of Xeen did this. Though players had a very clear advantage starting a game in Darkside as level 5 characters, and then going to Clouds and open a can of whoop-ass on the baddies. Also, there was a final story that could not be reached (all of the level data files belonged to the "Darkside" game) and completed unless you bought the other game, to reach 100% Completion. Justified in that both worlds are just the two sides of the same slab of earth floating in space (one of the passageways even involves a Journey Through The Center Of The Earth ).
Robopon and Telefang, both shamelessly trying to ape Pokémon, pulled this.
The portable Shaman King games do this, turning the ghosts of the series into collectible mons.
While you can go through the single-player campaign of the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Expansion Pack Dark Crusade with all seven races by itself, in order to play any races other than the Tau or Necrons in multiplayer, you have to have the original game(for the first four races) and the first expansion, Winter Assault (for the Imperial Guard).
- Given that it was a stand-alone, expansion-pack priced game, this was more like 2 games for the price of one. Dark Crusade got a lot of accolades for its format, even if you do need the other games to fully access the features.
- Winter Assault also averts the Expansion label to a degree, as not long after the release of Dark Crusade, both the original Dawn of War and Winter Assault were starting to be packaged together for a lower price, meaning it's fully possible to play any of the games without the other, and all three (Soulstorm followed a similar format as Dark Crusade) were rather well priced given what you got.
The Transfer Pak for the Nintendo 64 allowed a handful of games to interact with their Game Boy versions, unlocking extra content in either or both of the connected games.
- Becomes a Wall Banger with regards to Updated Rereleases, notably Mario Tennis on the Virtual Console. In the N64 version, four human characters could be unlocked by plugging the Game Boy Color version into the Transfer Pak. The VC release? Nope, they just took the characters out entirely. It's the same with the Virtual Console N64 Mario Golf. At least it is partially justified because the human characters' stats depended on how you leveled them up in their respective GBC versions.
The PSP remake of Final Fantasy Tactics requires you to link up with another player to do the multiplayer battles that give out some of the uber equipment that could only be gotten via theft in the original.
- Ironically, they could only be stolen in the US version of the original due to it being made easier. In the original Japanese the Genji equips cannot be obtained at all due to the boss having Maintenance/Safeguard like in the PSP version (though his katana can be caught at high levels).
Tales Of Hearts has a twist. One version has prerendered FM Vs for its cutscenes while another version has hand drawn anime for its cutscenes.
- And as largely suspected by any fan of the series, the sales of the former so far were barely over 1/10th of the latter.
- Probably as much because the CG version, while having gorgeous effects, left all the characters sitting in the Uncanny Valley.
DJMAX Portable 2 has six unlockables that must be obtained by winning multiplayer matches. Barring that, you can play lots of songs (360 at the least for one of these six, and 2,284 at the most for another). Yet more unlockables can be obtained either in Link Disc mode (which requires you to have a copy of the original DJMAX Portable); many of which can't be unlocked in any other ways!
The Transformers movie games for the DS (but not the Transformers Animated game, also on the DS) are basically the same games split between 'Autobot' and 'Decepticon' versions. Naturally, some vehicles are only available on one or the other...
- This is lampshaded in an early mission, on either game; whichever version you are playing, you get a short piece of dialogue with what's implied to be the protagonist of the other version, in which the Decepticon tells the Autobot that 'we may be on different sides, but we're both still playing the same game.'
The now-defunct company Smilesoft is probably the KING of this trope: All of their monster-collection RPGs had two versions. The Telefang series came in Speed and Power versions, each focusing on Mons with that attribute, Bugsite had Alpha and Beta versions (Though they're equally buggy hahaha) and the Dino Device games came in Dragon and Phoenix versions.
Capcom's Super NES port of Final Fight only had two of the three main characters from the arcade game. Due to limited ROM space, Cody and Haggar were kept, but Guy was left out. Capcom later released a second SNES version titled Final Fight Guy, which replaced Cody with Guy and added a few minor improvements (such as a few new power-ups and different enemy placement), but not much else (the Industrial Area stage with Rolento is still missing and the game is still 1-Player only, unlike the arcade).
A few months after Capcom released Vampire Savior (the third Darkstalkers game) for the arcades, Capcom released not one, but two updated versions of the same game in Japan. The only difference between the three versions, aside for a few improvements made to the fighting system in Savior 2/Hunter 2, are the character roster. Vampire Savior 2 brought back Donovan, Huitzil, and Pyron from the original Vampire Hunter (aka Night Warriors), who were missing in the first Vampire Savior, but did so by removing Jon Talbain, Rikuo, and Sasquatch, while Vampire Hunter 2 kept the entire Vampire Hunter roster by removing the four new characters from Vampire Savior (B.B. Hood, Q. Bee, Lilith, and Jedah). The Sega Saturn port of the first Vampire Savior had all 18 characters, while the PlayStation version (titled Darkstalkers 3 in the U.S. and Vampire Savior: EX Edition in Japan) is actually a compilation of all three games, except that all 18 characters are available in all three games.
Inverted with the Vocaloid release for Len and Rin Kagamine. It's two voices for the price of one!
In the second Dragon Quest Monsters game, your choice of game (Cobi's Journey or Tara's Adventure) was also your choice of Purely Aesthetic Gender. While the two games had virtually identical main storylines, the real differences came to play in the Playable Epilogue, when they opened up two completely different new areas to explore. Both versions needed to trade in order to unlock the final world.
Robert Stanek's Ruin Mist series is the literary variant. It comes in four different versions - the adult version, the children's version and two different alternate histories. Each version is deceptively marketed as a completely different series, which the books in each having completely different titles, yet the difference between them is minimal at best.

Examples of games that get bonuses from other games

A good number of Nintendo DS games have extras that can be gained if you have the right Game Boy Advance game in the DS's GBA slot.
- Of course, Pokémon does this, and some Pokémon are only obtainable through transfer from a GBA game, making Diamond and Pearl One Game For The Price Of Eight, since you need Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, and FireRed or LeafGreen at least for the legendary Pokémon (and you'll need to add in Colosseum or XD: Gale of Darkness if you want every single Pokémon). Also, Platinum, Diamond, Pearl, HeartGold, and SoulSilver. That's THIRTEEN games.
  - All of these of course, are now impossible if you got a DSi which doesn't have a GBA slot, meaning no, you can't catch them all. Which is why they made HeartGold and SoulSilver!
  - Not quite. You only need Platinum, HG/SS, and patience to catch every Pokémon to date now.
- In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, you start a new game with a Rare Ring if its predecessor Aria of Sorrow is in the DS's GBA slot. There's also a cute Mina doll in the background of Yoko's shop that's only there if the game is in the GBA slot.
  - Rather annoyingly, this only works with the original Aria of Sorrow cart, not with the Two Games For The Price Of One Castlevania Double Pack which contains both Aria and its predecessory Harmony of Dissonance.
- Having Yggdra Union in the GBA slot while playing Knights in the Nightmare gives you the opportunity to recruit Pamela at a random point later in the game, and the tutorial will have Yggdra as its guide instead of Maria, with arranged music from Yggdra Union in the background.
- Project Rub (Feel the Magic: XY/XX in the US) gave you bonus outfits if you had other Sega games in the GBA slot. They could also be unlocked in the game itself, but it's pretty difficult.
- You get a free use of Libra (which lets you see traps) in every battle in Final Fantasy Tactics A2 if you have Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in the GBA slot. Thus you get to use another battle enhancement in its place.
- If you have any Mega Man Battle Network game in the GBA slot when playing Mega Man Star Force 1 or 2, you can find an optional quest that gets you a new weapon. The sidequest in the second game also provides an epilogue to the Mega Man Battle Network series.
In the first Boktai game, in order to get the most out of the Bonus Dungeon, one needs to trade "emblems" with other players. Later ones let you hook up and interact with Mega Man Battle Network games.
The Mass Effect series does this as a feature. Each game's story is dependent on major choices made in earlier games, and Mass Effect 2 (and presumably the upcoming third installment) has a pre-selected set of choices for all unique characters. To choose the other option for any of the important decisions in the first game, you must either buy it or use a special DLC designed for just this purpose—that isn't free!
In the Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy III, sending and receiving a certain number of e-mails via the DS e-mailer unlocks special events and equipment.
Unlocking the hidden character Jake "The Snake" Roberts in WWE Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 requires connecting with the PSP version of the same game. Yes, that's right, you need to own the exact same game on two different platforms for this one.
- Same goes for the Gamecube version of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, where you can unlock the original Prince of Persia game by linking the GCN and GBA versions — but at least this isn't the only way to do it.
- Ditto with Crash Tag Team Racing.
Unlocking the Captain Olimar trophy (required for 100% Completion) in Super Smash Bros.. Melee requires having a Pikmin save file on your memory card.
Unlocking some extras in various EA Sports games requires you to have save files of previous games in the series.
Both Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion contain bonus content available only by interacting with one another.
- Also, you can connect Fusion to Zero Mission (via link cable) for some bonus pics, including all the ending images from Fusion as well the Japanese exclusive ending pictures.
- Metroid Prime Trilogy averts this by providing 3 games for the price of one. The original 2 Prime games have been ported to the Wii with improved graphics and controls, building on the already excellent gameplay. For the price of one game, you get three superb games and one hell of a deal.
  - At least until its collectors' edition eventuality of discontinuation.
  - The MPT actually FURTHER averts this trope by also providing the Fusion Suit unlockable WITHOUT requiring you to even think about the Game Boy Advance. All you have to do is beat Metroid Prime.
Completing both Metal Gear Ac!d and Metal Gear Solid 3 allowed you to hook your PSP up to the PS2 via a USB cable and automatically unlock three bonus items which could only be obtained otherwise by long, difficult and arduous means.
American gamers were disappointed when Battle Network 5 lacked a way to obtain Bass Cross MegaMan, an e-Reader bonus available to Japanese players. Then the enhanced DS version of BN5 did make it available. The catch? You have to plug in a copy of the GBA game. And not just any copy — one where you've defeated the final boss and all the post-game bosses.
The Suikoden series for PS and PS2 has used this several times. In Suikoden II, you could recruit the Hero from the original Suikoden, providing that you had a completed Suikoden save on your memory card. Since both of those games are well worth the price independently, that may be more of an Old Save Bonus... however, in Suikoden Tactics, you can use a "Perfect" savegame from Suikoden IV to unlock two secret characters, including IV's extremely powerful hero. And that just may be the only good reason to buy Suikoden IV...
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption includes a feature wherein you can use "credit" icons obtained in the game to buy extra stuff. The green credits, however, can't be obtained on your own... you have to have someone on your Wii's friend list send you "Friend Vouchers" that they got on their game (the vouchers are totally useless on your own game.)
- Players also have to make sure their friend has the same version of the game, otherwise the feature won't work.
- One of the unlockables are bumper stickers for Samus's ship if you have the appropriate game saves on your Wii.
  - Meaning that, in order to get all bumper stickers, you have to buy ten games. Ten.
The DS game Monster Farm DS has a variant on this trope, in which one method of unlocking monsters is by inserting a game - any GBA game - into the GBA slot, and some formula works out what monster to make, but is still played straight as there are two special monsters that can only be unlocked with this feature, with the required games being the two GBA games of the Monster Farm franchise. (That is, the Japanese versions of those games. "Monster Rancher" is the English name of the franchise, and the English versions of the game do NOT give the special monsters.)
The game Legend of Mana for the Playstation, there are several instances of this. One is the first pet: normally it is a Rabite, but if you have a Final Fantasy VIII save on your memory card, you will receive a Chocobo instead. The second is a secret weapon obtained by defeating a secret boss which can only be fought if you have a SaGa Frontier 2 save on your memory card. The third is a ring obtained from an NPC if you have a Chocobo Racing save on your memory card.
- Actually, you can fight the boss without the SaGa Frontier save file; you just don't get the sword if you don't have it, nor do you get a cool pre-boss cutscene.
There is a system in Geometry Wars Galaxies for both the Wii and DS which is unlocked by linking them via wireless connection. As these are among the highest-scoring levels in the game, it is nearly impossible to ascend the scoreboard without linking.
In Mega Man X 8, having a Command Mission save on your memory card will let you fight Cut Man from the original Mega Man as a bonus boss in Optic Sunflower's stage, right before the boss proper.
- However, the PC port scratches that (mainly because Command Mission never had a PC release), instead having you complete every area of the stage at the highest level to be allowed to meet Cut Man.
In Harvest Moon: Friends Of Mineral Town (GBA) connecting to a Gamecube with HM: A Wonderful Life unlocked Van and Ruby, from whom you could buy certain bonus items. On the flip side: playing AWL with FoMT connnected would unlock the hot springs (Where your character could recover lost health and stamina without the use of foodstuffs).
In Harvest Moon DS, playing with Friends of Mineral Town in the GBA slot resulted in unlocking the five brides from FoMT within HM DS. Although if you chose to marry any of them, the game ended the moment you did.
- Luckily, in Cute you can marry one of the five Mineral Town bachelors,with the game continuing after marriage.
  - Slightly subverted, since you can marry one of the Mineral Town guys without having to connect said game.
When playing Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the DS with one of the two GBA games inserted into the GBA slot, you can unlock some additional maps.
Marvelous has done this with almost every one, maybe everyone, of their Harvest Moon games. The latest being Hero of Leaf Valley for the PSP which is more of an enhanced remake of an almost ten year old game.
F-Zero GX (the Gamecube version) got bonuses when you took its memory card to a F-Zero AX (arcade version) machine — bonuses that were insanely difficult to get otherwise.
- And insanely difficult to get from AX cabinets too, since at the height of their popularity there were a grand total of 20 of them available to the English-speaking world. (There's a database.) If you wanted those bonus tracks and cars, a Game Shark was always your best bet.
  - And if your local AX cabinet is of the wrong region or has a broken GC card slot...
The infamous "Stop 'N' Swop" from Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel, whereby you could swap the two games over during play, taking items from one game to another to unlock secret bonuses, would have been an example of this had it not been cut because changes to the N64 prevented them from implementing the idea.
- But ten years, a buyout, and two complete system generations later, the Xbox Live Arcade ports of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie properly implement Stop 'N' Swop, also working with Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts 'n Bolts.
In Mario Kart Wii, having a Super Mario Galaxy save makes unlocking Rosalina much easier.
If, for some strange reason, you still have a Madden NFL 06 save game on your memory card, a special Madden van will be unlocked when you start up Burnout Revenge on PS2
Having Resistance 2 for the PS3 linked up with Resistance: Retribution for the PSP will allow for PSP Plus, giving the player an almost entirely different storyline and locations to access within the PSP game.
Having certain Gears of War achievements on your gamertag unlocks some Gears 1 character skins for Gears 2 multiplayer.
The Professor Layton games have "Secret Doors" that can be opened with passwords from the game that comes either before or after it within its trilogy (or, if the game is second of three, one door for each).
In the 2005 Ganbare Goemon DS game, popping in the GBA port of the SNES Goemon 1+2 games into the DS's GBA slot will unlock character cameos from the two SNES games into the DS adventure.
The trading card-based Phantasy Star Online Episode 3 featured several cards that could only be unlocked by having saved games from other Sega titles on your memory card.
- The GameCube version of PSO had a secret within a sidequest that will reward you, assuming you have a GBA and a GC-GBA link cable, with an unique Tails Chao for Sonic Adventure 2 Battle or Sonic Adventure DX.
John Madden Football: Gamers who own both NCAA Football and Madden in the same year can download the NCAA draft classes into Madden so that you can follow the same players through their career. If you also owned NFL Head Coach 09, you could use its advanced play editor to import custom plays into Madden 09.
The Quest for Glory series is known for, among other things, allowing players to import characters from past games into later ones, meaning that if you played your cards right you could start each game significantly stronger than a brand-new character, and with a ton of cash to boot. There's also the personal "reward" of seeing your hero develop from a rookie in game 1 to a legendary figure in game 5.
- Most notably, at the end of Quest for Glory II, the hero may become a Paladin, a class which cannot be obtained without importing a hero. Importing a paladin into Quest for Glory IV also unlocked specific events which cannot otherwise be accessed, while the third and fifth games are not as distinctly different.
The 2009 Bionic Commando game has an unlockable "retro" skin for players who own both Bionic Commando and Rearmed on the same system, in addition to a secret room in Bionic Commando for players who have beaten Rearmed 100%.
Monster Rancher 2 would generate certain special monsters by reading other Tecmo game discs, such as Dead or Alive.

Examples of single games released in multiple parts

Sega originally planned to release Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic and Knuckles as a single, mammoth game. However, time constraints and the manufacturing costs made that impossible, so Sega dropped the ability to play as Knuckles and released the levels they had (Angel Island through Launch Base Zones) as Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Later, the remaining levels (Mushroom Hill through Doomsday) were released as a second game, Sonic and Knuckles. The latter game featured unique "Lock-On Technology", which allowed the games to be combined and played as they were originally intended. To be fair, Sonic and Knuckles also allowed the player to use Knuckles in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, something that would not have been possible had the game been released as a single cart, so it wasn't a total loss. It also contained about a zillion Special Stage levels that could be played independent of the main game by attaching something other than Sonic 2 or 3, although that was possible to include without lock-on.
- You could even write down the password given out after the special stage and use it when you locked-on Sonic The Hedgehog, making the game just packed with special stages (this feature was called Blue Sphere when Sonic Mega Collection came out, where the game was an actual unlockable.)
The .hack games are the most guilty of this. They are literally one game split across three or four parts, each full-priced, and with an incomplete story unless one buys the whole series. If you bought them at retail price in the US, it took 200 bucks to finish the first group and 120 to finish the second.
- And that isn't the half of it. Crack is Cheaper if you want the full story of .hack.
  - Even worse is that about half of .hack's story hasn't even made it out of Japan as BanDai has yet to license some of that material for release elsewhere and the fact that the fourth game, Quarantine, tends to be the most expensive product in the series with its used copies being the only ones not cheaper than its original retail price, online or offline.
Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga exists as a two-part game, with the second game continuing the story directly from the ending of the first.
The GBA game Golden Sun ends on a Cliffhanger, and its story continues in the sequel, Golden Sun: The Lost Age.
- In what is very unusual for a game on a console without memory cards, the series also provides a form of Old Save Bonus. At the end of Golden Sun, the player is given a series of passwords that can be entered into Golden Sun: The Lost Age either manually or electronically (via a link cable). If the player successfully enters the passwords, when the new characters in Golden Sun: The Lost Age eventually encounter the characters from the original game, the original characters will be as the player left them. This is required for 100% Completion, as many things in the first game are otherwise unaccessible in the second, and you need everything from both games in order to access the second game's Bonus Dungeon and its Bonus Boss.
  - The passwords in question also deserve mention as being easily the most difficult part of the game. The gold password, which transfers everything, is two-hundred and sixty characters long, with fifty characters for input, many of which are distressingly similar. There is little more agonising than buggering it up (and you will, repeatedly) and having to check each and every character for the single mistake you made.
  - If you have access to two GBA systems and a link cable, you can transfer the password that way, conveniently averting transcription errors.
The Boktai series was also going to do the whole intergame Password deal but just changed it to mere stat boosts, depending on what you did in the previous game (which was not included in Lunar Knights, being that Boktai 3 never made it here). Odd considering the fact that the password contains a whole lot of information about your game, from your name to how many enemies you felled, even to which weapon you liked to use the most.
Syberia was originally to be one standard adventure game. Due to a rushed timetable, it was released as two separate games that had identical gameplay and graphics, AND were half the length of an ordinary point-and-click adventure.
Persona 2 was released as two games, each of which told a relatively self-contained story that also paralleled and linked to the other. There was also an Old Save Bonus in the second that let you keep the money you'd deposited into the lucky cat in the Kuzunoha Detective Agency (Important for an unlockable), and what you'd selected for Tatsuya's name and in-battle nickname. ... Unfortunately, the first game never came to the US due to concerns about its use of guns and largely high-school-age mains in a time shortly after the Columbine shootings and the Old Save Bonus was similarly removed from the one that did come to the US.
Variation in The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, which are two totally different games that connect together to merge the two plots into one and provide an extra final boss and a "true ending".
- Originally, a third Oracle game was planned to complete a Triforce analogy, but connecting the games together proved too difficult and they scaled the number back to two.
  - Didn't stop them from giving out a code at the end of the "true ending" that could be used on the other game again giving you nothing but a few more items and another go for the same ending.
  - They were pretty much screwed by the math. There are two possible orders for playing two games, but six for three games.
Shenmue was originally going to be many chapters long, but the games that were released, Shenmue and Shenmue II, gave you chapters 1 and 3, 4 and 5 (chapter 2 was supposed to chronicle's Ryu's adventures on the boat ride between games). Shenmue II allowed you an Old Save Bonus if you transferred a save from the original game, but unless you were prepared, all of your ready money from the first game would be irrevocably stripped from you unless you swapped it all for capsule toys very, very quickly. Guide Dang It.
The Xenosaga series' first two games were supposed to be the same installment. It just got worse when it was noted that it would only be a trilogy instead of six installments.
To some controversy, Blizzard Entertainment announced that Starcraft II will be one game for, some cynics say, the price of three. More accurately, the initial release will contain the Terran single-player campaign, supposedly long enough to surpass the original StarCraft. This release will also include full multiplayer capability for all three factions. The first Expansion Pack will be the Zerg single-player campaign (again, intended to be about as long as the original StarCraft by itself,) supposedly including new units for all factions and "RPG Elements." The second expansion pack will be the Protoss single-player campaign, also including new units for all factions and "diplomatic elements." A single main story will run through all three installments, requiring players to buy the other packs if they want to finish the story or play their favorite race outside of multiplayer. Blizzard have claimed they are doing this to get the initial release out quicker, as well as to tell the story properly; others find this difficult to believe. As of the moment, Blizzard has claimed that the second and third games are considered expansion packs and will likely be priced as such.
- Complaints about this have lowered a lot since the game's release, as their talk about the size of the campaign turned out to be true.
There's an interesting subversion in The World Ends with You. The Gatito pins mostly require that they're in sets in order to either function or work at full power. You can buy precisely one pin out of any given set, and which one is random and is specific to the DS you're playing with. You can Mingle with other players, which allows you to purchase from a special shop any pin they have equipped-thus, you can get these pin sets by "trading" with other players. Of course, the subversion comes from the fact that this isn't mandatory-all of the pins in question are available as extremely rare drops from various bosses. Of course, to collect the insanely powerful Darklit Planets set, unless you're lucky, you'll have to tackle the Bonus Boss on the highest difficulty... have fun!
Final Fantasy IV: The After Years deserves special mention. The game itself sells for 800 Wii Points (i.e., $8 U.S.), but that only includes the first three "chapters". if you want to actually play the entire game, you'll end up spending $37 total for the other ten installments. So it's more like "One Game For The Price Of Almost One But Seperated Into A Bunch Of Cliffhangers".
- Although The After Years and Final Fantasy IV are being released as a PSP compilation, so this game inverts it as well. Two games for the price of one.
Animal Crossing starts each town with only one out of five kinds of fruit on the trees; the easiest way to get other kinds of fruit is to visit another player's town. In fact, the first two AC games required someone from another town to buy or sell something in your town's Nookway store in order to get Nookington's. Thankfully, AC 3 did away with this, probably because of the game-imposed limitation of one town per console (unlike the first AC) and the practical limitation of one console per family.
The Gran Turismo Prologue games (4 and 5) were essentially extended demos of the perpetually delayed full games. Mercifully, they were priced accordingly and also featured additional bonus content.
Inherent in the release of the episodic expansions to Half-Life 2. Valve was originally going to work on Half-Life 3 next, but decided to release lots of small episodes in sequence instead of waiting several years for another game, keeping up the momentum of consumer interest.
- However, this led to Valve suffering from Hype Backlash due to the release schedules getting more and more drawn out.
- It has been pointed out that episodic releases would work great, if Valve weren't perfectionists that had to get every little thing just right.
- On the other side, knowing that trend you could say it is working out great. We have 2/3rds of a game that otherwise wouldn't have been playable until our (if in your twenties) grandchildren were gamers.
Tomb Raider Legend and Underworld. Both are rather short, with a Cliffhanger between. Then there's the Expansion Pack to Underworld.
- An Xbox 360 exclusive expansion pack, no less. Marvelous.
Tokimeki Memorial Pocket, the Updated Rerelease of Tokimeki Memorial : Forever With You on Game Boy Color, has two versions : the Sports one, subtitled "Koutei no Photograph" (Campus' Photograph), and the Culture one, subtitled "Komorebi no Melody" (Melody of the Sunlight Filtering Through The Tree). They're the same game, aside from the fact the cast is divided in half between the two versions (including the three new characters), the clubs are divided between the two versions depending their nature (Sport-type or Culture-type), and an additional club visiting sequence in the prologue. As far as the character repartition go :
- Shiori, Rei, Miharu, and Yoshio are in both versions ;
- Saki, Yukari, Nozomi and Megumi, along with new characters Patricia and Naomi, are in the Sports Version ;
- Ayako, Yumi, Mio, Mira, Yuko, Yuina, along with new character Kyoko, are in the Culture Version.
Fable II had a little quirk which meant that in order to acheive 100% completion on it, you also had to buy the Xbox Live Arcade game entitled "Fable II Pub Games" which basically used a relatively obscure gameplay mechanic of Fable II to give the player otherwise unobtainable items which were then transferable to the main game. It was fixed to a degree when they released the DLC See The Future, which allowed players to obtain the items via an in-game store tacked on with the DLC, but the DLC cost something like 400 microsoft points, so the player still wound up paying.
Non-game-example: SMBC's take on Science publishing.
DLC in general. While there certainly are some good DLC, most of time it seems something that should be in the game to begin with.
- Especially annoying when it is on the disc to begin with and your money simply unlocks it. Beautiful Katamari and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 are both examples of this. In the case of Bad Company 2, and other recent EA games, you get a code to unlock the additional content. However, this is not much help if you've bought it second hand.
- Which is why they include the exclusive content code - to dissuade people from buying second-hand.
Deathspank was a single game that was very obviously split into two parts (the "sequel" was announced and released two months after the first installment) so that EA could charge people $30 for a downloadable title (the industry standard averages at about $10; $15 for high-profile games.)
The contents of the 2004 PC and PS2 compilation Atari Anthology was split into two different volume Atari Greatest Hits compilations - featuring arcade games and 30 something 2600 games each - for the DS (they even came out at different times, Volume 1 in late 2010, and Volume 2 in early 2011), despite the fact that 2600 games take up only, at most, 8KB of memory (most only came in around 2KB), and the faithful arcade ports aren't very space consuming either.
- The 18 arcade games split amongst the two DS games are the same as featured in Atari Anthology, but there are about a dozen 2600 games that appear only on the DS games, like the previously unreleased prototype of the 2600 version of Tempest.
Shining Force III followed one overarching story from the viewpoints of three different protagonists, and each protagonist had his own game. You had to play all three to see the beginning, middle and end of the plot. This led to much confusion in the west, given that only the first game was given an English version.
The Simulation Game Daiva had seven different versions released on seven different platforms (all major Japanese 8-bit computers plus Famicom and PC98), each following the same story from a different viewpoint.

Examples outside of games and gaming

Not a game example, but similar to the StarCraft II situation: the final book of the Wheel of Time series has been announced to actually be three books. To be fair, fans of the series, who are aware of just how many Kudzu Plot threads were left dangling by Book 11 (namely, umm, all of them), aren't surprised by the idea that they can't all be wrapped up in only 1,000 pages.
- It was actually much worse than that. Robert Jordan originally thought he could do the whole series in three books. Tor, knowing that he tended to underestimate the length of his books, gave him a contract for six. By the time he passed away, the series had gone up to eleven books, and he had sworn to fit everything into the twelfth book even if they had to invent a new book binding—which makes the splitting of the final book when Sanderson took it over even more ironic.
- Similarly, the final book of Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn was so big they couldn't bind it as a single paperback- it was released in two books.
Harry Potter's 7th book's movie version spans two movies.
- The 4th book of The Twilight Saga is also getting this treatment.
- The Harry Potter movie series would have started this as early as the fourth installment, but the director insisted he could fit everything into a single movie.
Fictional, action figure version: Johnny Longtorso, the Man Who Comes In Pieces.
- Build A Figure toys released in many action figure lines including Star Wars, Marvel Legends and DC Universe Classics are essentially a real-life version: pieces of a figure that come packed in with other figures, usually requiring you to buy 6 to 8 different toys to complete - the ones in Star Wars are just additional droids, but both of the superhero lines usually feature more important characters.
  - Of note, these are also usually extra large figures that would cost at least double what the normal figures would if sold on their own.

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Examples

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