Dead or Alive 5 Last Round - Character and Story Unlocking
What is the best (cheapest?) way to unlock all the characters along with story mode.
I tried looking through the DLC, but there's just so much there (mainly costumes).
Solution 1:
Using the xbox live website which is easier to navigate than the store on your xbox one I looked at the individual DLCs and which bundles they were included in. In particular I first looked at the story mode DLC (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/dead-or-alive-5-last-round-story-mode/c421fnkh1187). This costs £12 (I'm british and using UK currency but I assume the ratios of costs are currency independent so what is true in GBP will be true in other currencies).
It is included in one bundle which is DoA5LR Full Game (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/dead-or-alive-5-last-round-full-game/c0sn83qxpl00). This bundle costs £32 and includes the story mode and all characters (I think).
You then need to look at how to get the characters. Taking Bayman as an example who appears in realtively few DLC bundles...
Bayman on his own costs £3.20. This is one tenth of the cost of the full game. The characters are all the same price (though one seems to be free at the moment - more discussion on this later). Since there are more than 10 characters buying all the character DLCs individually will be more expensive than the full game pack which I believe includes all characters.
Bayman is also available in two bundles. One is the Core Fighters 30 character set which costs £28.34 (with gold). However this + story mode is more than the full game bundle. Likewise he is available in a male character pack but this + female character pack is, as you might expect, more than the 30 character pack and thus also worse value than the full game pack.
So in summary I believe the best way for you to get the story mode and all characters right now is the Full game pack linked above.
One final thing to note though is that currently Kokoro is free with Gold for a limited time (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/dead-or-alive-5-last-round-character-kokoro/bvlzm1pfwp93 ). It may be that they are doing some kind of rotating free character thing so it may be that you can get all characters if you are patient enough to do it that way which would then leave just the story mode to get. I don't know if this is the case though or whether the free ones become unavailable after there free trial is up (though with most Free with gold stuff you can keep using it for free after the offer period). This would of course take a long time to get all the characters, even if they do offer them all up this way so while cheaper may not be as practical.
Solution 2:
Thanks for this Chris, also in the UK and unable to sleep, so tried looking into this further too (I'll regret this in a couple hours when the kids wake up).
Found three links which helped:
https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/835976-dead-or-alive-5-last-round/74607305
http://teamninja-studio.com/doa5/lastround/us/ftp.html
https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/835976-dead-or-alive-5-last-round/74673418
I'll not going into detail as your answer does that nicely - and for that I'll mark your answer as the correct one, thank you so much for your help. :)
In summary:
The Retail version of the game includes 34 characters, story mode, and a few very minor bonus things (music etc)
Core fighters includes 4 basic characters plus temporarily unlocks 2 characters every fortnight
You can buy the 30 additional characters separately, and you can buy the Story Mode separately. If you want both they include (marginally) less than the retail game, but cost more (unless there is a deal on in the future)
Xbox Live Gold occasionally gives you a free character (Chris is right above and I have already downloaded Koruko, but I don't know why or if all will eventually be available)
There are at least 2 characters that ARE NOT included above and can only be bought as DLC - Mai and Naotora
There is also one stage that needs to be bought to have the complete set - Attack on Titan - tho this is really out of scope from my original question
Don't even get me started on the costumes!
In conclusion, I'll debate buying the DLC characters at some point and will look out for a deal on the retail version (although it sounds like story mode isn't much cop, so if the 30 character pack drops well below the retail version I'd probably just get that, but for a couple quid it hardly seems worth it in case I ever fancy playing through the story).
Thanks again. :)