Players will probably spend half their time playing online and the other half just creating characters
I ended up picking up Soulcalibur IV last Thursday and sank several hours into it this past weekend. The thing about fighting games are that they’re simple enough in content that I can write a review for them without “completing” everything in the game. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I would get the game or not because I wasn’t quite happy with the single player feature. Against my better judgment (I guess the hype and advertising got to me), I ended up picking up the game and have been disappointed. For those of you that are more competitive with fighting games, you’ll appreciate the online play but I think I’ve turned into a casual fighting game fan at best. There isn’t enough for me to do in the long run with the game but maybe play it online against my brother from time to time. Still, worth a look if you’re interested but check out my review to be sure.
The Good:
- excellent presentation
- functional online play
- character customization system
The Bad:
- not enough of an update to feel like a true sequel
- boring bare-bones single player
- character customization system feels comprehensive yet constrained at the same time
Intro
The Soulcalibur series has been around for a while, with Soulcalibur IV actually being the fifth game in the series. The original game, Soul Edge, was released in 1996 in arcades and on the Playstation 1 the following year. Its sequel, Soulcalibur, was released in Arcades in 1998 and as a Dreamcast launch title in 1999, where it became very popular and one of the main reasons people loved the Dreamcast to this day. Soulcalibur II was released in arcades in 2002, followed in 2003 by releases on all three major consoles at the time: the PS2, the Xbox, and the Gamecube. Soulcalibur II was very popular, not just because of how well balanced the game was, but because each of the console releases had their own unique character. The PS2 had Heihachi Mishima from Tekken, the Xbox had Spawn, and the Gamecube had Link from Zelda. If I remember correctly, the Gamecube version went on to sell the most copies of the three versions, a rarity for any multiplatform games released at the time and it was all due to the inclusion of Link.
While Soulcalibur II was very successful on the competitive scene and on all the major consoles, Soulcalibur III was released two years later in 2005 for only the PS2, skipping the arcade altogether. Instead, Soulcalibur III featured several interestingly unique (yet flawed) single player modes, and a broken fighting system. Fans weren’t happy with the game, and even when the rebalanced game was released in Arcades after the PS2 version, the damage was already done. It looks like with Soulcalibur IV, the developers have gone back to trying to balance the game like Soulcalibur II, and fans tend to agree that it is a much welcome “return” to the glorious days of Soulcalibur.
The Apprentice holds his light-saber assassin style (and bears a striking resemblence to Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller)
Storyline and Premise
The storyline for fighting games tends to be very minor, as it’s really just a collection of different characters that fight each other. At the heart of the Soulcalibur storyline (and consequently, Soulcalibur IV) is the pursuit of the powerful sword, Soul Edge. It appears that all of the characters are either pursuing or protecting the sword in some manner and they cross paths for various reasons. Needless to say, the storyline is not important. What is notable is that while Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and Dead or Alive fight amongst themselves to determine which is the best 3D weapon-less fighter, Soulcalibur sits alone as the only notable 3D weapons based fighter.
1-on-1 fighting games are more fitting for arcades (and are where most of them originated) due to the ability to sink quarters and take on random opponents. In order to make the console ports more fun, Soulcalibur games in the past often had entertaining single-player modes where you could generally earn money to unlock artwork and weapons. With Soulcalibur IV as the first iteration in the series to support online play, it looks like the developers decided not to focus on making enjoyable single player modes in Soulcalibur IV due to its notable online play (a more Western developer mentality of “forget about single player stuff since players will spend most of their time online!”). Whether that is an adequate substitution or not is generally up to the player.
One of the disappointing things to the game is that there are really only two new authentic Soulcalibur characters if you don’t count Yoda and the Apprentice. (While I think Yoda and the Apprentice are gimmicky, I do appreciate there being a Star Wars stage with the track “Duel of the Fates” playing. Epic stuff.) And of the two new authentic characters, one of them is the boss of the game! During the previews for the game, it looked like there were five new characters that were designed by guest artists which made the roster seem a lot more significant, but these guest artist characters just use the movesets from existing characters. In previous games, there have generally been 5-8 new characters introduced in each iteration, so it’s disappointing that it still feels like playing Soulcalibur II, albeit in HD. There were a ton of characters left out from previous iterations, which adds to the disappointment as well.
Block too much in Soucalibur IV and your armor will break into flimsy pieces of paper!
Gameplay Mechanics
Combat
The combat in the game is 3D and most levels generally have “ring outs”. While the game is 3D and you can sidestep, the sidestepping is slow and awkward unlike in Virtua Fighter 5. There’s four buttons – block, horizontal attack, vertical attack, and kick. Each fighter makes use of specific button combinations for their movesets, but there are universal moves for everyone. For example, performing a “Guard Impact” is sort of a counter to a hit. If an opponent attacks you high and you can anticipate it, hitting forward and block at the same time will not only block the attack, it will stun your opponent, creating an opening.
New to Soulcalibur IV is the concept of a Soul Gauge and Critical Finish. Basically, each player has a Soul Gauge that decreases if they continue to keep blocking. If they continue to block and attacks land in the same area, it’s possible for the armor in that area (high, medium, or low), will break and the character will take more damage in that area. Once one of the armor parts is broken, the Soul Gauge can move to red and flash red if the player continuously blocks. After enough blocks, the character will be affected with a Soul Break, a small window of opportunity for the attacker to finish off the player and end the round instantly. The implementation of the Soul Gauge and Critical Finish may have been added to reduce the tendency for turtling.
Modes
- Story
Unlike previous Soulcalibur games where the story mode is generally a lengthy campaign, the Story mode in Soulcalibur IV is over in about 10 minutes after five stages for each character. There’s practically no storyline in the beginning except for a scrolling “Star Wars style” block of text and when you beat the boss of the game, there’s just a cutscene of how the character reacts to the Soul Edge. It’s quite boring and a letdown. The only other unique thing about the “Story mode” is that it makes use of skills and stats from the character customization (which will be explained below).
- Arcade
This is a straightforward 8-stage mode where you go 1v1 in a 2 out of 3 round match against AI opponents with no storyline or ending. This mode does not make use of the character customization skills and stats, and is intended to be Soulcalibur IV at the purest level.
- Tower of Lost Souls
The Tower of Lost Souls is the last main single player mode in the game, revolving around ascending 40 or so floors in the tower to unlock various clothing items for character customization. To make the mode unique from the Story and Arcade modes, each level of the tower imposes unique restraints on the player such as: execute a 10-hit combo, perform more than 4 counter hits, etc. It’s annoying and to me it feels like artificial depth that I’m being forced to fight in a certain way (and not really a fun way either). It also uses skills and stats from the character customization.
- Versus
It’s the normal Versus mode but sadly, it lacks in the ability to create teams like previous Namco games. Team Battle was such a fun mode to play with friends because you never had to worry about reloading. Both players choose all of the characters for their team, and when one of your characters loses in the middle of the fight, the next guy in the team would jump out. This allowed players to utilize a plethora of a characters without being forced to go back to the character select screen after every match. Unfortunately, Namco decided not to add this mode in so we are stuck with the standard 1 on 1.
- Training
This mode is pretty self explanatory: choose the character you want to train with and train away. The main issue I have with the training mode in Soulcalibur IV is that you can’t go through a whole “Simon Says” style training approach of seeing the AI do the move, and then you do the same moves to follow. In the “Simon Says” mode, after you successfully copy a move, the next move in the character’s list gets demonstrated. There’s none of this in the Soulcalibur IV training mode. You simply have to load up the character’s move list every time you want to learn a new move.
Character Customization
The character customization system in the game is so pronounced that I feel like it’s practically half the game. While there are people that love making their own characters, I can’t sit for hours trying on different clothes and outfits since it’s just not my cup of tea. I’ll admit though that it works pretty well but it is marred by some silly “balance concepts”.
Basically, you can take a female or male model and choose any preset character in the game to model your moveset after. So for example, if I wanted to make a female samurai character, I would create a female and model her after Mitsurugi, the most standard samurai character in the game. She would have all of his moves, but then it would be up to you to choose her clothing, the color of her clothing, face, hair, and weapon (but still has to be a weapon based off of Mitsurugi’s sword). The number of faces and hairstyles is lacking, but there are plenty of clothes items that get unlocked through either purchases with the in-game currency or your progress in the game. As you unlock more Achievements in the game, more clothing gets unlocked and the clothing is wearable by any character.
The “silly” balance concept in the game is that there is an RPG-like skill system mode in the game that is utilized when you play either the Story mode or the Tower of Lost Souls mode. In those modes, the character that you are using has various attributes that are affected by what he/she is wearing. You are able to assign up to four different active or passive skills to a player, such as “life leech on block”, “reduced ring out chance”, etc. but each skill costs a certain number of one of five attribute points that can only be increased by wearing the right gear. It’s so stupid that you have to dress like the biggest fool wearing all mismatching gear in order to maximize your attribute points because if you try to just pick what looks good, you’ll get almost no attribute points to spend on the skills. Why Namco did that is beyond me. Fortunately, the Arcade mode doesn’t make use of attribute points or skills, so you can simply make an enjoyable character and play the pure form of the game.
Experience/Money system
There is a universal experience system and money system in the game that you earn from simply playing. The more you play with a character, the more the character “levels” up and maxes out at level 9. Maxing out at the top level allows you access to more clothing to buy and skills to equip. The money system works by rewarding you with money every time you beat the Story mode or the Arcade mode. The money can be used to unlock characters, weapons, clothing, character art, etc.
Players can put their custom characters to battle online
Online play
Online play in the game works well but not without its faults. For online play, you have the option of playing either Ranked or Unranked as well as pure mode or character creation mode. There are a couple more options available for Unranked that make it quite fun for friends to play. One is the ability for rematches at the end of a fight (something not available for Ranked), and other the inclusion of 4-player rooms like Dead or Alive 4. This allows four players to chat while two fight at a time and the other two watch. The 4-player rooms do not exist for Ranked due to lag.
And for Soulcalibur IV, lag can be a problem. Namco sort of fixed this with a patch at release which would allow players to see the connection speed of each player that was hosting a room. 5 is the fastest and 1 is the slowest. I tried a 4-speed connection host to begin with, and there was a noticeable half second of lag where I was unable to Guard Impact. I’d say that at 4-speed the game is simplified to quick attacks since players aren’t able to really block as effectively. I also tried a 5-speed match, and that flowed very well. I was not able to note any lag, but then again, I’m not as technical a fighting game player as arcade players.
Hilde, a lance based fighter, is the only new character in the game besides the boss.
Achievement System
The Achievement System in Soulcalibur IV works out well for what the game provides (which is to say, not a lot on the single player front). There’s Achievements for beating the game on Story mode, Arcade mode, the Tower of Lost Souls Mode, and online. Thankfully, only 100 of the 1000 points are for online play, and even then those 100 points aren’t too difficult. The rest of the Achievements generally revolve around pulling notable moves in the game a certain number of times such as 100 First Attacks or 100 Guard Impacts. Pretty boring Achievements, but they are ones that will come in time when playing the game.
This new female elf character looks to be a cool edition, but sadly she’s just using a pre-existing moveset
Final Thoughts
There’s no real way around it – I am disappointed with Soulcalibur IV. The problem may lie more with my own struggle to enjoy fighting games these days than with the game itself though. I was hoping for a glorified single player mode with RPG-like elements that all of the previous Soulcalibur games had, but it looks like Soulcalibur IV has replaced that with an extensive character creation mode. And multiplayer works pretty well but the only problem is I feel somewhat uncomfortable playing 1on1 with a stranger. Am I supposed to talk to this person? And how long do I stay for before I have enough?
I give the game a B. The game is polished but it’s lacking too much in innovation for a sequel. With one new character and one boss character, it practically plays like previous games but with online and the removal of a fun single player component. For some people, the online may be enough of a reason to get the game, but I’m not that interested in online myself.
If there was more of a progressive campaign mode like Soulcalibur 1 or Virtua Fighter 5’s Arcade mode, this game would have scored higher for me. It would not only be a polished looking game, but comprehensive in its ability to be everything to everyone. It was so close too. The more competitive fighting game fans will appreciate the online modes and the guys that just want to play dress up can spend hours on the character creation mode. But what about the hardcore single-player gamer? Is there no place for him anymore in Soulcalibur?
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