Looked at a lot of reviews and it seems like the overall impressions is that it's good but old, (in the sense of going back to past as a rebirth of the original 2 Soul games) but the old works because those characters were fan favourites. Seem a bit thin on content but since Geralt is in it it has me interested in it. Anyone else still care for weapons based fighters? I have a feeling this will get ignored because it's not really doing enough new stuff. For example there is a character creator but why hasn't the SC games have a tag mode where you call in a different character to jump in like in the Tekken Tag games?
Will probably get this once I scrape some money but Blade Strangers is the one I am more interested in. It has that half naked girl from Code of Princess in it. And it's 2d like the old capcom fighting games. (think Street Fighter Alpha days when they made it all saturday morning cartoony)
review:
Accessibility is why soul calibur on the sega DC was appealing and if this is noob friendly, I am all for it. Dragonball FighterZ is an example of a game that doesn't sacrifice depth for easy access to the fun. Games need to be intuitive. The fighting game is a niche and for it to survive and not go the way of the VF series, companies need to be aware to not intimidate the newer younger players who want to play these games well but don't want to be raped hard in the learning stages of play. It's not the same as making a game "easy" just understanding the stages of how people learn to play a game. (if a player is doing extremely well against a CPU winning every round with full health, the game should give a player a rating that determines how much to push the difficulty slider up based on performance, and if they are getting raped too much, the difficulty slider is pushed down a bit until it reaches the sweet spot where they are not stunting their growth by fighting a dummy, but they are not being raped too hard which prevents them from learning basic shit. Then after they are confident and go online they can know why the win or lose based on what they learned in training modes and CPU sparring)
related:
Blade Strangers the other old looking game which recently came out (indie Street Fighter ): https://gamecritics.com/darren-forman/b ... rs-review/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
^this game should get sequel. It's a good idea and a great opportunity for indie devs to use it as a platform to advertise their game series to people who never heard of their game. As the roster grows it ends up becoming more and more popular because of how many people are in the series. They could put the girl from Bloodstained in the next title and add Shantae and MonsterBoy (spiritual sucessor to the wonderboy series). That will boost awareness for new franchises that are just starting or just add in characters from popular games (Steamworld Dig?) just to encourage fans of the games the character was featured in to try the game.
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." -Shigeru Miyamoto
The create a soul feature was namco's best feature in this series:
...And we can't even get clothing damage in street fighter.
-we got boob and butt physics
-sweat
-the ability to customise characters with create a soul
-tag systems in loads of popular series
-environments that could break open
..but no damage states. Some of the robot characters would really look cool in the damaged state. (eg in DB FighterZ the androids breaking apart and having sparks and missing covering after a few heavy attacks)
Mortal Kombat introduced Fatalities which are death moves that finish an opponent after you knock them out.
All clothing damage is, is the thing that happens in between the beginning of a fight and knocking the guy unconscious. How hard is that?
It's just the feature Vega had in Street Fighter 2 expanded upon. (ie how his claws could eventually detach.)
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." -Shigeru Miyamoto
So I ended up getting Soul Calibur VI. It's... ok.
The actual gameplay is fine and I'm looking forward to getting into it. It's very accessible- I've barely bothered with practice mode, and muscle memory is getting me through with most of the old cast. Ivy seems to be a bit easier to use again after they spread her moveset across 87 different stances in the previous games, which I'm all for. Grøe (new character) is pretty cool both in terms of moveset and design, and I haven't used him much yet but Geralt looks like he goes alright. Fits the setting far better than the Star Wars characters of yore. Music and sound are what you'd expect, with a generic but unintrusive orchestral score over cheesy battle cries and perverse screams. Visuals are by no means bad, but don't impress the way they probably should in 2018 when you're rendering two characters and a background onscreen. Importantly though, it feels like Soul Calibur. I still block and hop off the stage after a ring-out victory like it's 1999.
Story mode is a real slog. Terrible voice acting (switching to Japanese should be the first thing you do in this game), and roughly a 4:2:1 ratio of 'story'/loading/gameplay. If you enjoy reading text, viewing still images, and consider "..." and "..!" to be meaningful dialogue, this is the mode for you. The art's good, but if you were given the assets you could make exactly the same thing in Powerpoint in 15 minutes. The way the content is structured is at least interesting- you've got a main timeline made up of various encounters that follows the main story, plus each character has their own timeline showing different aspects of their story. These interweave- so for example, Mitsurugi turns up briefly during the main story, but in his own you see the events leading up to and after that meeting. Nice idea. But my God it's a grind, I honestly don't know if I'll ever finish all of them.
Plot-wise every encounter is the same. Run into character during your travels. Fight them. If they're a "good guy", they were just testing you, good job, you're awesome. We're all friends now, but not such good friends that I'm going to join you and actually help despite us having the same goal. Good luck on your travels. If they're a "bad guy", upon defeat they either make a snarky remark and live to fight another day or simply don't give a shit and let you continue on your quest. I get that plot options are limited when the story has to facilitate multiple one on one fights, but fuck me it's contrived. Moving along.
Character creation mode has been getting a lot of what little attention this game received, and while I applaud those in the community that have come up with some crazy designs, the editor itself is pretty basic. Most gear is available from the get go, but the more "out there" items (like the horse head required to make Sarah Jessica Parker characters) and anything remotely fan-servicey have to be unlocked. The points required to unlock these items are accrued at a painfully slow rate- if you can absolutely smash Arcade mode (in terms of time), it's still going to take three full completions to unlock a single item. I'll get my horse head, but after that... we'll see. Winning ranked online matches is faster, but I've never played a fighting game online that has responsive controls (at least with our shitbox Internet), and I don't expect this to be the game that changes that. I think it would have been better to make items cheaper (or rewards greater), but lock more of them at the start. You use a created character for Libra of Souls mode, but I haven't really played much of it yet. It seems like story mode but with a map, modifiers and a food system. Perhaps it'll give single player some legs, but the stop-start nature of it isn't winning me over.
This game suffers from being a modern fighting game. There is a grand total of one unlockable character (Soul Edge, yawn), and the rest are DLC. I considered holding off for a more complete version of the game later next year, but let's be honest, it's probably not popular enough to get a GOTY edition. In fact I got this so stupidly cheap that I was actually open to the idea of getting the season pass... but it's super confusing. Tira is the first character, and costs $7.55 separately. You also get a bit of extra content for the story mode, but I don't expect that's anything to write home about. The season pass lists three characters in total and two creation packs (presumably more lizard dicks), and costs $44.95, suggesting the two lizard dick packs are worth $22.30, or $11.15 each. These aren't available separately yet, but it's hard to imagine that sort of content being priced higher than fully fledged characters. In other words, it's not clear whether the season pass is cheaper or even the same price as buying everything individually, so I'm disinclined to purchase it. But it might be cheaper, so I'm not going to start buying individual characters yet either. Pro-tip Namco Bandai, don't make fun things confusing to buy.
TL;DR: I'm enjoying this but it feels a bit bare-bones- that might just be fighting games though. It's strong on the nostalgia, from the bombastic announcer right through to baldnoshoulders in the end credits. I'm yet to have a good local multiplayer sesh and have only dipped my toe into Libra of Souls mode, but from initial impressions I'd give it a 6/10 so far.
The gameplay core is fine. It just suffer from the bare bones problem that SFV had at launch. It's the perfect game to EBRent to know whether it's worth it because arcade fighters generally you can tell if you'll like or hate it within a few hours of play. Tekken is NamcoBandai main series.
"A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." -Shigeru Miyamoto
Very fun write-up Gamma. Totally agree with all of it.
I remember how Soul Calibur on DC was visually hot stuff. It made Virtua Fighter 3 look bad, it made itself look bad, it was that good. I didn't see the arcade version of Soul Calibur for about a year after the DC release and boy was that a surprise.
Now it's exactly as you said... for a series that was once near the cutting edge, two characters and a background in 2018 should be jaw-dropping. But some of them look a bit funny tbh.
And DC Soul Calibur was jammed with modes and content. I have never, and probably will never, seen the words "season pass" and not immediately been turned off by the feeling of wallet-manipulating BS.
Importantly though, it feels like Soul Calibur. I still block and hop off the stage after a ring-out victory like it's 1999.
The Deluxe Edition of this is on sale for cheap on PlayStation, $22 until the end of the month.
After what feels like an inordinate amount of research to figure out what's actually included in the purchase, it seems like you get the base game + Season Pass 1, which in turn contains DLC packs 1-5, which is Tira, 2B, Amy, Cassandra, and Character Creation Sets A and B. Apparently it's too difficult to put those words in the description of the product. There has since been a Season Pass 2 containing another four characters and more creation stuff, and I think that covers all of the available DLC, with no word from Bamco whether they're done releasing content for it one way or the other.
Kind of tempted because it'd be nice to not need the disc, I presume it'd load significantly faster, and it's half the price of the Season Pass on its own which softens the blow of the double-dip... but will I actually play it?
Anyway, there it is. Good deal if you're interested.
So the extra characters are DLC? Damn. I had been assuming unlockable... stupidly, in hindsight. I forget it's 2022.
God damn modern gaming. How is every Soul Calibur worse than the first one.
The only character you can unlock is Soul Edge, and I can't remember the requirements.
You can forget about downloading other people's created characters too- setting aside the poor design (it selects an uploaded character entirely at random, and your only agency is to save or not save then skip to the "next" one), you can't download them if they're wearing any of the gear from DLCs you don't own. Surprise surprise, they are all wearing gear from the DLCs. I ended up getting that Deluxe Edition I mentioned above and I still haven't been able to save a single custom character that someone else has made. Boo-urns. At least 2B and Tira are cool.
I have fun with it playing locally with friends on the odd occasion, but yeah... I'd say my 6/10 was pretty on point, if not slightly generous. Hopefully you can squeeze some fun out of it.
Been playing it a fair bit actually. The core is pretty much as good as ever and they were always great fighting games. But the overall package is buzzkill after buzzkill. Arcade, Soul Chronicle, and Libra of Soul all have problems big enough to ruin the modes for me. All of them deter you from wanting to play them again.
Arcade
Even the simplicity of delivering an Arcade mode is busted, in that there really isn't one. There's a Time Attack mode that's called Arcade mode, with the same 8 enemies every time, no boss, no end scene, no options. This is worse than it sounds, as it means there isn't any good option for continued offline play. Want to smash out some offline play against the AI? Get ready for the same 8 enemies and nothing else, every time. Super disappointing. I've about done all I want with the 2 story modes so I'm wondering what they expected players to do for a solo fix. Just keep manually selecting enemies every single match in Verses mode?
Soul Chronicle
Bad because contrived story; you've already said it. Dumb also that the intro is more fun than the actual events you go through.
Libra of Soul
This had potential, but despite 2 separate playthroughs played very differently, I still couldn't get the mode to thrive in the way it was apparently meant to. It looks they only went through the motions of creating an RPG-esque mode, but no-one wanted to (was paid to) make sure it actually worked decently.
In both runs I never used food, never used mercenaries, and never saw anything in a shop remotely close to the stuff I was finding everywhere for free. I'd have thought maybe the quest-heavy run would level up towns enough to compete, but nope. Difficulty is random and levels mean little; in my first run, no side-quests, I beat the level 50 Azwel without effort on a level 32 character with a level 1 weapon, but then could not pass a level 34 pair of enemies 5 minutes later despite hours of sweating it out. The quest-heavy run was unsurprisingly easy everywhere unless I went on long expeditions of no life resets.
But it was the slow pace of delivery in LoS that really killed it. The text, the slides, the fades, the waiting, especially for such silly contrived story pieces, is just insufferable. This is the worst bit by far. Gamma you weren't wrong about the "...". What irritates me greatly is that when they happen I'm already sitting around wishing the game would say anything interesting and say everything faster. Ugh. Literally. let. me. read. faster. I'm. not. 6.... even when spamming the "Next" button. Then you give up and spam the "Skip" option instead, but it's still 14 god damn little sequences of UI or loading or dots marking themselves on the map or icons changing and... ughhh. It is such a damn chore.
Just a disappointing mode overall. Had potential, but winds up just being hours of irritating pace through another lame contrived story, all on top of a structure that was meant to be playful but isn't.
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Some core gameplay comments:
The actual core fighting is still great. Ring outs are so much harder than they used to be, which I don't prefer personally but I imagine others do. (The slippery stages are complete BS though; I don't see how they can be fun for anyone.)
Reversal Edge
The only complaint I can make with the core gameplay is all the Reversal Edge business. Critical Edges already pause the action like ults in Street Fighter, and that's enough. But now Reversal Edges do too and they're even more prolific just on their own, and they're happening in addition to all the CEs. I don't mind the concept but I do mind all the pausing, and when I say "I don't mind the concept" what I really mean is "I like Focus Attacks in SFIV".
Soul Gauge & Resist Impacts
Connected to this, gameplay around the Soul Gauge seems kinda weak too imho. The Soul Gauge is affected by Reversal Edges and round losses 10x more than anything else, so it's more of a "Did you Reversal Edge?" gauge. Every NPC battle that comes with some soul-gauge-related rule basically means "Use Reversal Edge a lot". To my very, very casual skill set it also makes Resist Impacts feel worthless. Yeah the gauge is easy to fill, but drop half of it for 1 gamble at 1 situational parry? Rough, and never used it. So I felt like the Soul Gauge really fails compared to the balance and playful choices behind SFIV's focus attacks and meter.
Guard Impacts
Along similar lines, Guard Impacts have taken a bit of a back seat. Not a big deal; I'm happy that they are still what they are and weren't butchered into being something else. You know, what I would have done is automatically make all Guard Impacts function as Resist Impacts - at no gauge cost - as long as you actually had half a gauge. I'd prefer that. Ok clearly going on a tangent now.
One thing I do want to say though; muscle memory with Guard Parries is still wrecking me. Turns out I would Guard Parry a lot in DC Soul Calibur, and 24 years later my hands are still trying to do so, all the time. Can we just bring back Guard Parries please? Ditch Resist Impacts, bring back Guard Parries. Just so my muscle memory can cool it.
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I really miss the old DC game, especially thanks to the position I'm in now where I don't really know how I'm supposed to keep playing if I just want to play more offline. Two really fun survival modes. Team Battle mode where you could fight with unbalanced teams. A Time Attack mode that was its own thing while Arcade mode let you toy with the settings and RNG. (We had a little challenge on ODWF; I beat Arcade mode in something like 53 seconds with Astaroth back then.) And unlocking things piece by piece, by surprise, in Mission Battle mode was awesome. So much of Soul Calibur VI sucks in comparison.
The character creator is alright but doesn't nearly make up for all the losses imo. And yes, I noticed the issue with not-downloading others' creations.
I'd even just do more runs of Libra of Soul if it wasn't a massive, massive headache of skipping dialog only to slowboat to a new part of the map, skip more dialog, more interface slowdown, more loading, more transitions. God damn.
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I'd probably give it a 7.5 overall. 9/10 core but no matter what you do there's always some large, poor design decision bringing disappointment to the experience.
Oh then dock it a bit more for this DLC bs. Half the last game's characters, for expensive microtransactions in a premium cost game. Yeah nah.
So I'll give it a 7.
Clearly ranting here. Sorry for that wall of waffle, hence the titles and such trying to make it a little more readable.
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