GrafVonTirol
We can be heroes, just for one day
from a state of boredom
(4 Score & 7 Years Ago)
Relationship Status: Standing outside, playing "In Your Eyes" on the boombox
terumokou
Pitiable and Illegally Dumped Object
from In a bamboo forest full of bunnies, California
Since: Sep, 2013
Relationship Status: Mu
Total posts: 654

The only major benefit is that you can collect other True Cards, since you can only get one per playthrough (with the sole exception of Arma's, which you get for finishing all 100 floors of Lapis Ruins, so you can get that one after getting another True Card in the same run).
Also, I had a Fridge Brilliance moment with regards to the haggling mechanic: It's representative of the game industry as a whole in recent years. The intuitive and seemingly obvious strategy is to extract as much money from your customers immediately. This works in the short term, but it's entirely unsustainable in the long run and you're setting yourself up to fail in the later stages of the game. Yet at the same time, it's less than obvious what you did wrong in the first place. This is also the most common failure mode for micropayment games, most notably Zynga and later King, but also a depressingly large number of other companies.
Conversely, the winning strategy is to go for the long-term rewards that pay off passively, in the form of those heart speech bubbles that customers occasionally pop up and merchant EXP. Do well in those areas and the cash flow will come naturally later on. I call this the Nintendo strategy — say what you want about their hardware division, but when it comes to software, pretty much any Mario, Zelda, or Pokemon game could easily sell truckloads on name recognition alone. (Of course, in real life it's much harder to maintain the customer loyalty and much easier to destroy your own reputation, as demonstrated by Sega and Capcom.)
edited 15th Jan '15 1:03:52 PM by PoochyEXE
Extra 1: Poochy Ain't Stupid