One of the things that always astounds me about video gaming culture is brand loyalty. Nintendo fans have a reputation for being loyal almost to the point of obsession, which judging by the rampant sales of old school Nintendo franchises (although the fact these games are usually awesome helps) is certainly well earned. Is it any surprise then, that Soul Calibur II on the GC outsold both the PS2 and XBOX versions despite them being technically superior? The gamecube version of the game traded entirely on it’s bonus character Link despite the fact players were forced to play the game with the by most accounts ‘dodgy’ gamecube control pad. I for one quite liked the old purple box’s pad but I’m the first to admit it wasn’t designed with fighting games in mind, it worked fine with games like Super Smash Bros Melee sure, but Melee was a game that had every special move mapped to one button. I dread to think what playing SCII on the game cube was like. It’d be like trying to play happy birthday on a keyboard imagined by Salvidor Dali.
So if a Legend of Zelda can sell a fighting game surely something much bigger, with a much more rabid fanbase could sell one even better. This was exactly what the developers at Namco had in mind when they phoned Lucas Arts one day and said “Guys. I have a fucking great idea!”
Actually I’m doing the game a disservice by going into detail about the whole star wars character thing first. Suffice to say, yes, Darth Vader, Yoda and a guy who holds his lightsaber backwards are in the game and yes, they’re on the cover art standing next to Siegfried and Nightmare looking all out of place and fanfiction-esque but the effect they have on the game outside of marketing is really quite minimal. If you like Star Wars they’re a nice bonus, and if you don’t then you’ve probably got to this page by accident. Porn is on the next site over.
So Soul Calibur IV, the latest chapter in Namco’s seminal 3d fighter series is here and I shouldn’t have to tell you that the fighting engine is rock solid. Under those nice shiny next-gen graphics is still the same old game at heart and time has been very kind to it, even if the developers haven’t.
Battles still play out in the same way. Characters can attack horizontally (!), vertically (!) or if they really want to mix shit up they can kick, which always seemed hilariously out of place on characters wielding an axe twice the size of their opponent but sometimes there’s nothing for it but a knee to the balls. The attack and defend system, although subtle, works to a great effect. Blocking an attack gives you the advantage meaning your character will be slightly quicker with their next attack than your opponent which thankfully makes the newbie staple of hammering the buttons like a spastic chimp a surefire way to lose the game. To stop the battles turning into turn based affairs with players taking turns to wail on each other’s defense every character has a very tricks up their sleeve. Is the opponent blocking immediately after attacking? Grab him/her and watch something painful happen to them. Conversely if you find yourself under constant attack, a well timed guard impact will leave your enemy vulnerable to a quick counter attack, a badly timed guard impact on the other hand will leave you wide open to an axe in the face and feeling like a complete pillock. This balanced, well designed system has served the series well over the years and even today there’s very few games that have anything near as balanced. Every method of attack and defense has something that trumps it and its a balance of twitch reflexes and long term strategy that separates the crappy players from the good. This iteration though, is a lot like a muffin. A delicious chocolate chip muffin that you just want to sink your teeth into but unfortunately, someone has given this muffin a less than delicious topping of cold lizard semen and called it innovation.
Preparing to Innovate!
A new addition to the series, or at least kind of new, is the Soul gauge which kind of acts like a mixture between the power bars of latter day street fighter games and the weapon gauge from Soul Blade on the PS1. Using one of the special skills (see below) or blocking heavy attacks will cause the gem (which looks like a mood crystal I might add) next to your life bar to change colour slowly from blue to red, likewise if your opponent guard impacts one of your attacks. When the crystal turns completely red your life bar will begin to flash and should you find yourself defending another attack or being guard impacted then there’ll be a bright flash and your character will stagger around like he/she has just guzzled a bottle of paint thinner leaving them open to all kinds of horrible attacks or, if your opponent is quick enough to mash the all of the face buttons on the pad, kill you instantly with a critical finish regardless of how much health you have.
Now this sounds worse than it is. To be honest the soul gauge system is far more useless than it is annoying. Chances are you’ll very rarely see a match end with a critical finish and you’ll never see a player who’s dominating the match fall victim to one of them providing he hasn’t been cursed by a voodoo priest or something. The system is just superfluous. it’s obviously designed to stop players from just holding down the guard button and turtling but the throw button is already the biggest threat to guarding players. The only thing the critical finish really does is distract a player and add another useless icon to the screen (there’s three now), I threw pleanty of sure-think matches by trying to get that last guard impact I needed for critical finish before I wised up.
The skill system is another new addition that sounds great on paper but doesn’t really work out in game. Each character has a group of attributes that are effected by their equipped gear and these attributes allow them to equip certain skills. It’s a nice idea in theory and allows for a kind of RPG like character customization which coupled with the fact you can level up character styles by playing as them and thus unlock better skills, makes for a very interesting idea. Sadly however the skills available tend to vary between balance breaking random chance bonuses, absolute uselessness or game destroying cheapness.
Invisibility for example, is a skill Taki comes pre equipped with. When you hit the taunt button (or ABK as it’s mapped in game) she’ll quickly become invisible to both you and your opponent. This sounds awesome but what it means is you can’t tell where Taki is, the range of her attacks and nor can you time your combos correctly, coupled with the fact the A.I always knows where you are and player controlled characters autoface your character when they attack anyway kind of makes the move redundant. Plus using the skill uses up part of the soul gauge, increasing the risks of you being killed by a critical finish. It’s hardly a special move if all it does it make you worse off than you were before.
On the other end of the spectrum are abilities like HP burst which gives your character a big old bunch of healing right then and there which comes in handy regardless what type of character you’re playing. Some of the skills are automatic and activate in a certain situation. ‘Throw cancel’ is probably the cheapest of these as it renders 90% of your opponent’s throws completely useless. See how this might break the delicate balanced I was talking about earlier? Oh and there’s a skill that automatically stops you from being knocked out of the ring. Which is bullshit.
The most annoying set of skills however, are the ever present random chance attacks. With ‘auto unblockable B’ equipped every so often your opponent’s vertical attack won’t just bounce of your defense as it should, instead it’ll come smashing through your guard like your sword is made of toothpicks and crush your skull like a watermelon. It’s the fighting game equivalent of the Blue shell, there’s no defense against it and all it does is take the outcome of the game out of the player’s hands and puts it into the cold calculating claws of your 360 which doesn’t give a toss if you’re the better player or not. This is hardly a step forward.
shit dude, i just pressed Y
It’s not all bad though! Another new game mechanic is multiple character battles which we’ve been waiting for with baited breath ever since Dead or Alive 2 did it on the Dreamcast about a hundred years ago. The switching mechanic is solid, but not spectacular. A quick press of a button and your character is replaced with your second, third or even fourth choice with only a brief flash of light to signal the switch. There’s no hopping back and forth from the edges of the screen and no dual throws or specific combos for pairs of characters. The amount of switches you’ll be making is governed by yet another power bar, this time on the bottom of the screen. The bar does refill but at a fairly slow rate so you’ll be using the switch more to heal wounded characters than you will to perform combos with multiple characters like you could in Dead or Alive. Still, it’s a welcome addition which adds a lot more depth to an already deep game.
It’s worth nothing that all of these new mechanics are mapped to the shoulder buttons which hamperes the control somewhat. Most Soul Calibur players end up adding throw commands to the shoulder buttons and use the actual face commands for things like taunt and Soul Charge (X Y and B on the 360 controller). Namco however didn’t see fit to add an actual face button command for switching characters meaning one of your shoulder buttons will need to be set to switch character which is aggrivating when you’re playing without a team and could really do with that extra button real estate.
Single player has never been the point of the series but the original game had a relatively strong single player campaign. Like the games before it SCIV doesn’t quite live up to the original but it’s certainly a step forward from the single player in SCII and III. The usual Arcade mode has been replaced with ‘Story mode’, which, after a particularly badly translated text splash screen, pits you against five stages of three or four enemies each. Generally you’ll be outnumbered and taking on multiple enemies with a single life bar. Thankfully usually only one of your opponents will have a decent skill set, most of the other opponents you face off against will be henchmen thrown together in the character creator. The stages can get incredibly frustrating though and you will especially come to dream stage 4 which usually requires you to take on Siegfried, Nightmare and Zasalamel with one life bar. The story is throw away of course, the same convoluted fluff they felt necessary to bog the last three games down with but thankfully the unskipable quick time events cum cutscenes that made SCIII’s story mode such a chore have been dropped in favor of repetitive but thankfully skippable CGI cutscenes.
Story/Arcade mode was never the main draw of Soul Calibur Single player though and there’s always been an extra mode that proves far more satisfying than the regular trudge to the last boss. Soul Calibur III was probably the weakest example of this when it tried bravely to inject a kind of limited RTS vibe into the storyline. It didn’t work at all and thankfully that particular mechanic has been dropped in favour of the much more streamlined ‘Tower of lost souls’ mode.
In the ‘Tower of Lost Souls’ mode the player is tasked with either ascending the tower floor by floor, usually fighting two or three enemies per floor usually under certain special conditions, until you reach the top, or descending into the dungeons which acts as a kind of survival mode. Some of the enemies you fight in the dungeon are hilarious so it’s well worth the effort, I hadn’t gone 5 floors before I met a woman dressed in a cat fur suit who proceeded to totally ruin my shit with a corndog on a stick. The best part of the tower though is that each floor will grant you a treasure chest, usually containing an item for character cutomization, art work, weapons and other bonuses, if you fufil certain secret conditions. Once you’ve completed a floor the next time you play it a small riddle or hint will appear at the start of the match. Some are very easy to figure out, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you have to do when ‘Lure them into the abyss’ appears on screen, but some are incredibly cryptic and will take determination and a little luck to unlock.
Unfortunately there is one little flaw with the treasure chest system and it’s one I can’t figure out for the life of me. For a reason known only to the staff at Namco you can’t tackle the floors one at a time to get the treasure chests. They always comes in groups and you’ll quickly go from two or three floors at a time to four or six. Some of the criteria can be incredibly hard to meet, such as finishing a fight with a perfect or using kicks only and there’s nothing worse than having to fight six guys to get to the point where you can try again. What’s worse is if you finally do manage to unlock the chest and then die on one of the subsequent floors in which case you don’t get the item, a design choice that borders on sadism.
That being said you will keep coming crawling back to the tower of lost souls if only because the character customization system is absolutely perfect.
While soul calibur III allowed you to customize characters and create new ones with badly cobbled together move lists that kind of played like cabbage patch babies versions of the main characters Soul Calibur IV gives you a much more versatile character editor. You can, if the mood takes you, create a character that looks exactly like Rock, then give him Talim’s movelist, creating a horrifying man child. Or you can give Siegfried a giant purple afro and a pink shirt. You can (get this) make Ivy’s tit’s even bigger. The possibilities aren’t endless exactly but there’s a lot you can do.
Regular characters can have their equipment switched in and out and you can change their hair colour and eyebrow colour but the real meat of the editor lies in character creation. You can select all the usual variables, skin colour, hair colour, eye colour etc etc but you can also change your character’s bodytype by moving points around a scale, you can’t make a huge fat guy but there is some degree of freedom. The system is streamlined and easy to use but lacks the depth of something like Oblivion. You won’t spend hours trying to find the right width for your character’s eyebrows but you will spend a few hours picking out pants for him.
All of the clothing in the game, including that worn by non custom characters can be bought and applied to your own characters. Like siegfried’s breastplate and Nightmare’s shoulder pads? You can use them both together. You can then switch the colour and shine of each item until you finally have the neon green Disco knight of your dreams.
One small problem this system has though is that your item selection affects your character attributes in a lot of modes. Sure that breastplate may look awesome but it won’t allow you to equip the skill you want. Sometimes you’re going to have to make a choice between the skills you want and the look you want. Sometimes a man just has to wear pantyhose to get that healing skill. You can still use your characters in regular mode though so I would suggest keeping two groups of custom characters, one group that look exactly how you want them for regular play and another with a varied skill set for special play.
Multiplayer is a mixed bag. The same awesome Soul calibur fun is there to be had but it’s hidden under the same slimy film of weird design decisions that single player is.
Obviously a lot of work has gone in the Live service and it’s good, very good for an online fighter. But to be honest fighting games really do not work over the internet. Sure you can sometimes get a semi decent game but there’s always going to be just enough lag to make high level players rip out their hair in frustration. For that reason I avoided Live play in favor of playing with a real person in meatspace. Which is unfortunate because Namco seems to have forgotten about us people who actually have friends.
The versus menu consists of two options. Versus and special versus. Yeah I know, where the fuck is team battle? Why can’t I play tournament mode? Why can’t we fight with more than one character at a time? These modes should be in there from the get go, I don’t want to have to play the single player campaign on hard and meet a bunch of criteria that in some cases border on the impossible to unlock game modes that were available from the start in the earlier games.
Special versus which is just like regular versus but with customizable equipment and skill effects, suffers from the same problems I talked about earlier, namely balance destroying skills.
It doesn’t help that Namco seem to have gone out of their way to make selecting and editing a custom character as difficult as possible.
The only way to customize a character is to go into the character creator (which is a separate menu) and create a character through there. You then have to save said character to your roster and select him in versus. You can’t for example, select Siegfried and select a different sword for him as you could in the earlier games, you have to actually create and save a version of Siegfried with that sword. Since you can’t rename main characters either you’ll have to rely on the pictures and your memory to figure out which custom characters have what attributes. It’s an incredibly roundabout and frustrating way of doing something that should be incredibly simple.
The frustration is then doubled by the fact someone on a different profile can’t select their own custom characters. If you go round a friend’s house with your memory card, chock a block with versions of Astaroth in a tutu you can’t actually load any of those characters in Versus mode. Only one person can be logged in at a time meaning you’re completely at the mercy of the host and his custom characters because you won’t have the faintest idea whether or not the version of Maxi you selected is wearing totally bad ass underpants of strength plus 10 or the women’s tights of fail which halves his health (I’m not making this up)
Regular versus, though, is the shiz.
The new additions to the character roster are generally not worth the effort with a few exceptions. Hilde in particular is the standout addition. Her attacks are a kind of half way point between Killik and Seung Mina’s long range verticals and sophitia style short horizontals. She controls well and makes a satisfying counterpoint to the rest of the female cast because not only are her tits not hanging out she is actually one of the most heavily armored characters in the game.
Note to developers. Chicks are just as hot in clothes as they are out of them
Sadly the rest of the character additions are almost uniformly mediocre.
Yoda, the token character for the 360 version is an annoying mix of shittiness and cheapness. He’s so slow on the ground any character with a big swooping low attack is going to wipe the floor with him before he even gets close but should he manage to close the distance without getting his little green ass nailed to the floor, his annoying habit of staying so low you can’t hit him coupled with the fact he can’t be thrown makes him an incredibly aggravating opponent.. He plays a lot like Gon in Tekken 3. An interesting diversion but ultimately lacking in long term appeal.
Long time background character Amy is reborn as a kind of teenage renaissance goth who plays like palette swap of Raphael who himself is very close to Xianghua in terms of his movelist. She really begs the question ‘Why?’ we tolerated Raphael even though he was essentially Xianghua in a waistcoat because the series was conspicuously missing a fencer character. Do we really need another almost identical character, particularly one with victory quotes such as “Sigh” and “Words of a loser mean nothing?”? I don’t think we do.
The ‘bonus’ characters, all designed by relatively famous manga and anime artists are all dragged kicking and screaming from the big book of anime cliches. It doesn’t help that they’re all simply palette swaps of other characters. Oh and one of them is a fencer character. Putting the total number of fencer characters that control exactly the god damn same at 4. Christ.
The new boss character, touted as ‘the strongest soul calibur boss ever’, looks, acts and plays a lot like a bad anime villain. He floats around the map, firing bubbles at your out of his gun arm and occasionally stabbing you in the face with attacks that cleave your life bar in half. He’d be far more at home, I think in a 2d fighting game where character who summon thrones out of mid air and fire lasers out of their eyes are far more common. In Soul Calibur, he just seems out of place.
Older characters suffer from a slightly sub par art direction as well. The design team obviously took more interest in certain characters (read: female) over others. While the female characters are all sporting well designed if bordering on hookeresque skimpy costumes many of the old series staples have either no updates at all or are sporting the latest line in half assed design. Astaroth in particular looks like a gundam and he’s wielding an axe that looks like a mound of horseshit held together with strawberry jam. Even Voldo, once the series’ most varied and unique character is saddled with rehashed costumes from the last two games. It’s really just not good enough.
Not shown: Astaroth firing laser beams from his chest and turning into an aeroplane
Now it may sound like I’m giving this game a bad review. I’m not. I’ve gone into more detail about the bad parts of the game than the good sure, but I don’t really need to go into the good. If you’ve ever played a soul calibur game or if you’ve ever read a review of one then you know what’s good about this game. Tight controls, varied characters and deep combat, it’s all there but it’s unfortunate that the majority of the new content simply doesn’t mesh with the game or suffers from big design flaws. The robust character creator and updated graphics generally aren’t worth the price of admission for someone who isn’t a raving fan of the series. If you’re still playing Soul Calibur III multiplayer with your mates or if you’re not because you can’t stand all the jaggies on your HDTV I heartily recommend the upgrade, if only for the updated graphics and (if you can stand it) live play. If on the other hand you’ve burnt out on the series or you’re looking for something new in the single player department, I’d advise saving your cash.
Pros:
*Fantastic Graphics
*Core gameplay is still great
*Character customization is limitless and fun
*Local multiplayer although crippled, is still great
Cons
*Some bizarre design choices
*Very few actually new characters
*Still a lacking single player experience
*Character design is lopsided and generally not on par with the previous games.
