Final Fantasy XIII-2: the Ending. *SPOILER WARNING*

[Dr. Ivo Robotnik]

I'm making this thread to see if there's anyone else on the forums who's bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 and played it to the end.

I've repeatedly spouted my utter hatred of Final Fantasy XIII and it's astonishingly stupid design choices over the board, so I wasn't really planning on getting it. However, at one point I had my PS3 online and thought "oh right, there's a demo for this thing. Fine then, I'll check it out."

I nearly burst into tears when I first opened the map of the area the demo played in to find that it had an honest-to-god multiple direction approach. I wasn't stuck in some corridor! Then I found that they'd removed the astonishingly dim weapons upgrade system. What's more, if your party leader's HP reaches 0, you don't auto-game over anymore.

And so on. I realised they'd actually listened to the fans, and fixed many of the issues with the original. While I'm still not a fan of the auto-battle spamming combat system, I found I was actually enjoying myself. So, when I found the game on sale in my usual game-store, I thought 'oh fuck it then, guess I really am a bloody fanboy', picked it up, and proceeded to actually quite enjoy the experience. Sure, it's not 5-star material, but it was pretty good, and I had fun, so when you get right down to it, what more could I want?

Well, an actual bloody ENDING would have been nice!

Here we come to the part where the Spoiler Warning applies. I finished the game, killed the final boss (easy though the fight was), to find the joyous ending.

Spoiler warning:

However, suddenly dark chaos erupts everywhere, the entire world is covered in it, and one of the main characters apparently kicks the proverbial bucket.

So, actually on the edge of my seat for once, for the first time in ages in a Final Fantasy game, what happens next? What happens next!?

"To be continued"

OH FUCK RIGHT THE HELL OFF SQUARE ENIX!

Is there some super-secret ending out there somewhere that does conclude the bloody story? Are they planning to release the actual ending through DLC? Or are they just gearing up for XIII-3?

Most importantly, am I the only one singularly disgusted by this kind of bullshit? I don't want - nor intend - to pay extra to actually complete the game I'd already bloody well bought. If it's for part XIII-3, it's as if I were playing some kind of soap opera, where it always ends on a bloody cliffhanger. At least XIII had the dignity to try to conclude it's main story before moving on to the next part. The same holds true for X and X-2, atrocious though X-2 was. This one just bold-facedly cuts it off mid-cinematic to go "hah, buy more shit you consumerist moron!"

Has anyone else run into this? Feel free to share your thoughts, because that kind of ending just turned the entire game into a caricature for me.

EDIT: Added the spoilery bits into a spoiler tag, just to avoid any and all chance of complaints about spoilers