EPTDeveloper: Project Soul
Publisher: Namco Bandai
ESRB Rating: T
Released: January 31st, 2012 [NA], February 2nd [Japan], February 3rd [EU]
Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360, PC
Version Reviewed: PS3
The latest entry in the Soul Calibur franchise sees the return of characters both new and old as is the tradition with any fighting game. The game welcomes back series staples like the hulking Nightmare and Asteroth, the always disturbing Voldo, and as always the existence of Ivy continues to be reluctantly tolerated. Joining the roster are Elysium who can use the fighting styles of the other female characters, the staff-wielding Xiba, Viola who uses a series of magical orbs that can be setup in multiple configurations to change combos up, and a slew of others. Rounding out the cast of 28 characters is the obligatory guest character, Ezio Auditore of Assassin’s Creed. Keeping Ezio company is Devil Jin, of Tekken fame, sort of. You can create a character using Devil Jin’s parts and fighting style, but more on that later.
Unfortunately Soul Calibur 5 continues the loathsome fighting game tradition of treating a handful of characters as carrots on a stick. At best the idea of spending large amounts of time unlocking characters is tedious. At worst it can break the balance of the game. Unlockable cosmetics? Fine. Unlockable characters? No. Just no. Why this continues to be an issue for fighting games I will never know.
What confounds me about this is that I don’t need compulsion mechanisms to keep me coming back to a fighting game. I’ve already purchased the game with the intent of playing the multiplayer over and over again for the competition. Barring me from using the characters that I want to use does not encourage me to grind and unlock them. It has the opposite effect. It engenders a false sense of replayability typical of a more shallow experience. It is an arbitrary implementation and serves to do nothing except to add tedium where none needed to exist.
The criteria for unlocking these characters are completely hidden. Some of them will be unlocked by completing the game’s mess of a story mode, but others require far less straight forward methods. These characters eventually unlock as you level up, but that requires a decent grind before all of them are available. The road to unlocking the full cast is not a short one either. I would level the same criticism at Marvel vs. Capcom 3, except the amount of time needed to get the unlockable characters in that game is trivial in comparison to Soul Calibur 5.
I’m going to stop harping on the unlockable characters here because that leads into my next point – the awful story through which you must play in order to obtain some of those characters. Normally I wouldn’t bother pointing out story related grievances in a fighting game because, let’s face it, it’s not a genre that focuses on narrative, and that’s perfectly OK. If I were to start judging fighting games based on the strength of their stories they would all get one point out of ten (the one is for it being a video game that presumably doesn’t burst into flames inside the disc tray). What is not OK is forcing players through a poorly written story full of the necessary, though no less inane, contrivances that keeps one moving from one fight to another. Except this one focuses on only two characters, the brother and sister duo Pyrhha and Patroklos. When you start gating off characters behind the conceit of a story in a fighting game (a lengthy one, relatively speaking, at that) than it deserves to be taken to task for its weak story. Also, any defense of this game’s story becomes irrelevant when you step back and recognize that this is the same game that featured appearances by Yoda, Darth Vader, and Link.
On a more positive note the character creation system is back and more powerful than ever. Virtually any character you imagine can be translated onto the screen with some creativity and the willingness to unlock some cosmetic items. Created characters can be given the attributes of any character from the main roster which means any character you create can be used viably, and they’re all usable online and offline.
And now for the main course. At the risk of invoking buzz words, the game is remarkably accessible while remaining nuanced – more so than any previous iteration in the series at least. The button layout and notation for the moves deviates from the standard established by most fighting games, including 3D ones, and that may confuse newcomers, but there’s no way to tell for sure except to look up some of the moves. Newcomers will enjoy a reasonable degree of success against lower-skilled opponents just by mashing buttons. While this is somewhat true of other fighters, it is especially true of SC5 whose core mechanics prevent this kind of tactic from being too harshly punished early on in a player’s career.
More skilled opponents, on the other hand, will be able to harshly punish the aforementioned button mashing. This is largely in part to the new meter system along with ‘just guard.’ The new meter, now a staple of nearly all fighting games, allows for Street Fighter 4-style super attacks to be performed, and these moves are invulnerable sequences, making them a viable reaction-based punish in any situation. Just guard functions similarly to the parry system from 3rd Strike where tapping the block button the instant before an attack lands leaves you at a frame advantage allowing you to punish any attack including those that would ordinarily be safe. Just guard feels somewhat easier to execute than its 3rd Strike counter-part, and it’s less risky because tapping the button that you would normally hold down to block and holding the stick in the opposite direction from how you would normally block are inherently different, but it’s still both difficult and satisfying to shut down your opponent's offense with this mechanic.
Further uses for the meter include brave edges, powered up special moves similar to Street Fighter’s ex moves, and the guard impact which functions almost identically to just guard. This raises the question of ‘why waste time implementing redundant systems?’ Unfortunately I can’t provide an answer. It seems anomalous.
The problem is that the systems are not particularly unique. Soul Calibur 5 lifts most of its mechanics from other fighting games which have enjoyed more success in recent years. Either that or it rehashes ideas that other fighting games have since lifted from the older Soul Calibur games except that those other fighting games, Blazblue for instance, have since proven to have a better mastery of those mechanics and their own personal flavors to boot. The only thing that serves to set the game apart from its competition, mechanically anyway, is that it brings these appropriated mechanics to a 3D fighting space. For the most part though, any personality this game has is confined to its characters. The saving grace here is that the developers did not bungle the implementation. Everything works as well as it needs to work.
This game is also already suffering from at least one severe bug in which tapping up and holding block while being attacked will cause the game to detect whether or not your opponent is hitting low, which would normally require you to manually jump or block low, or high. If the opponent is hitting high you will block it while standing as per usual, and if he is hitting you low you will jump over the low attack automatically.
Before wrapping up there is still the sizable matter of the online mode to tackle. Aside from the trifling issues of tacky fonts and poor presentation, I actually hold SC5′s online modes in high regard not for their ambition, but for the top-notch implementation of a limited number of ideas. The spectator window while waiting in a lobby can be full-screened or windowed to utilize the lobby’s other features, and the net code is also quite good. Playing a fighting game online is rarely preferable to having somebody right next to you, but it’s nice to know that the developers put a lot of effort into making online play feel smooth.
For the most part, the game does what it sets out to do reasonably well with a few major headaches involved. It surpasses its predecessor by leaps and bounds, but the more refined fighters, such as Street Fighter and Marvel, will continue to tower above it. The problem is that what it lacks in unique or refined systems, it fails to make up for in other interesting ways. To parallel this to Mortal Kombat 9 again, MK9 was regarded as having solid competitive systems and an incredibly fun challenge tower full of unique mini-games that supplemented that solid foundation. The combo breaker mechanic was tied to the same meter that allowed for supers and ex moves which gave depth to the game. Though it wasn’t revolutionary, it was evolutionary. Soul Calibur 5 possesses neither of those qualities, and while it does have a solid foundation, it also lacks the supplemental features of its contemporaries.
As a competitive fighter, Soul Calibur 5 is hedging on the lower end of ‘above average,’ but not by much. As a holistic package, though, it’s far less impressive. None of those fairly solid systems are supplemented by anything even remotely unique, and anything that isn’t the multiplayer or create-a-character is not even worth exploring.
Soul Calibur 5 might resuscitate a franchise in dire straits by virtue of its competitive multiplayer, and this is the most important facet of a fighting game, but the overall experience is still a bit hollow.
6.5 / 10
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Disclaimer: This is a cross-post from my personal blog on wordpress. Don't want anyone thinking I just ripped this (or my other blog posts here) off of some random blog. =P
