First off, I made a dedicated blog to game impressions since I'll try doing them a bit more. Anyway, this one is for Soul Calibur V.
I had a run at it this weekend at a friend's house (who may or may not be an active GBAtemp user). I must say, I'm pretty unimpressed, even disappointed in the game.
I'm no expert at Soul Calibur so I won't go heavy on the minute fighting mechanics. If anything, from what I've seen in that department, it's basically still Soul Calibur. They didn't do any harm there.
Still, everything else feels very unpolished and mediocre. Soul Calibur can usually be one of the few dedicated fighters to present good single player content. I remember Soul Calibur II being fun in that department and apparently III and IV were also pretty good. For IV, you get a terrible story mode and Arcade from what I saw and a few other modes. Nothing exceptional.
Now on that story mode. God it looked terrible. I didn't play it but I saw a friend play most of it. The amount of characters you play as are pitifully limited. There's no character-exclusive story modes or anything. I mean of course the plot and voice acting are shit but its Soul Calibur, what did you expect?
The characters also seemed really uninteresting. V basically took a giant leap forward in time as though to differentiate itself from the other games. But in the end, plenty of characters return (Ivy, Cervantes, Siegfried, Nightmare, Mitsurugi, Hilde, Tira, Voldo, Astaroth, Raphael, and Algol apparently). Even then, most of the "new" characters are just successors to previous ones, like Natsu for Taki, Leixia for Xiangua, Xiba for Kilik, etc. So what's the point of this giant gap if little changed with the characters?
Also one thing I noticed was the amount of "random" characters. You have your standard "random fighting style" character in Edge Master, but then a dedicated random male style with Kilik (degraded from "bad ass with a staff" to "Charade all over again") and a random female style with Elysium. We have random selection options, why do we need these? And why do we need random gender-specific selections too?
Soul Calibur has also become known for its crossovers. People enjoyed II's set of Link/Heihachi/Spawn and some people hated IV's set of Yoda/Vadar/Starkiller, but in the end their cool crossovers. Ezio is a cool crossover. He fits the time period roughly so that's all cool, unlike the Star Wars characters. But I was expecting some type of involvement from him in the story mode. Instead he's just... there. No cutscene about him, no single player mission for him, he's just a random crossover. There's also Devil Jin's fighting style from Tekken but that's only for custom characters.
There's also a slightly annoying graphical glitch where a small portion of a character's skin will glitch across the screen. Basically it looks like you have strings attached to you at times. Nothing that hinders the gameplay but it just makes the game feel very unpolished
Overall, if I owned SCIV and I saw what I saw today, I'd see no reason for upgrading.
I had a run at it this weekend at a friend's house (who may or may not be an active GBAtemp user). I must say, I'm pretty unimpressed, even disappointed in the game.
I'm no expert at Soul Calibur so I won't go heavy on the minute fighting mechanics. If anything, from what I've seen in that department, it's basically still Soul Calibur. They didn't do any harm there.
Still, everything else feels very unpolished and mediocre. Soul Calibur can usually be one of the few dedicated fighters to present good single player content. I remember Soul Calibur II being fun in that department and apparently III and IV were also pretty good. For IV, you get a terrible story mode and Arcade from what I saw and a few other modes. Nothing exceptional.
Now on that story mode. God it looked terrible. I didn't play it but I saw a friend play most of it. The amount of characters you play as are pitifully limited. There's no character-exclusive story modes or anything. I mean of course the plot and voice acting are shit but its Soul Calibur, what did you expect?
The characters also seemed really uninteresting. V basically took a giant leap forward in time as though to differentiate itself from the other games. But in the end, plenty of characters return (Ivy, Cervantes, Siegfried, Nightmare, Mitsurugi, Hilde, Tira, Voldo, Astaroth, Raphael, and Algol apparently). Even then, most of the "new" characters are just successors to previous ones, like Natsu for Taki, Leixia for Xiangua, Xiba for Kilik, etc. So what's the point of this giant gap if little changed with the characters?
Also one thing I noticed was the amount of "random" characters. You have your standard "random fighting style" character in Edge Master, but then a dedicated random male style with Kilik (degraded from "bad ass with a staff" to "Charade all over again") and a random female style with Elysium. We have random selection options, why do we need these? And why do we need random gender-specific selections too?
Soul Calibur has also become known for its crossovers. People enjoyed II's set of Link/Heihachi/Spawn and some people hated IV's set of Yoda/Vadar/Starkiller, but in the end their cool crossovers. Ezio is a cool crossover. He fits the time period roughly so that's all cool, unlike the Star Wars characters. But I was expecting some type of involvement from him in the story mode. Instead he's just... there. No cutscene about him, no single player mission for him, he's just a random crossover. There's also Devil Jin's fighting style from Tekken but that's only for custom characters.
There's also a slightly annoying graphical glitch where a small portion of a character's skin will glitch across the screen. Basically it looks like you have strings attached to you at times. Nothing that hinders the gameplay but it just makes the game feel very unpolished
Overall, if I owned SCIV and I saw what I saw today, I'd see no reason for upgrading.
