Summary
One of he best fighting games to date - just stop the button mashing and start practicing!
The Good
When I played Soul Calibur for the first time I was absolutely stunned by it's graphics. Sure, all the reviews mentioned how great the game looked and the screenshots didn't look too shabby either, but they were nothing compared to what the game looked like in motion. Despite being released relatively early in the DC's short lifespan, SC remained one of the best-looking games for the console. The level of detail was simply amazing. With a very high polycount, fantastic textures, varied facial expressions and lavish costumes that were realistically moving and blowing in the wind, the characters looked as if they were taken out of a CG cutscene. However, the best part of the graphics are the smooth and realistic animations. Even todays fighting games cannot quite compete with SC's animations. Naturally, Virtua Fighter and Dead or Alive feature top-notch animations. However, Dead or Alive takes its action deliberately over the top, and there are quite a few moves that have obviously been "tweaked" a little. As for Virtua Fighter, there are too many moves that look a little awkward (like those crouch-dash-punch-attacks) and the motion capture actors were apparently not quite as skilled as those that worked on SC. (Maybe Sega intentionally didn't use moves that were all that spectacular to make the game feel more realistic, but that wouldn't be a very wise decision in my opinion. Oh and before you even get started, 99,9% of the moves seen in SC are perfectly realistic, although there are probably not too many people out there who can pull off these moves as perfectly and fluidly as they are seen in the game.). Even the animation in
SC 2 isn't quite as good as in its predecessor. While a lot of moves have obviously been reused, many of the new ones unfortunately fall into the flashy/show off category and don't have SC I's class.
The music is equally impressive. While it doesn't quite reach the quality and variety of Soul Edge, it's still much better than that of any other fighting game (which ,admittedly, isn't saying all that much). Creating melodies that are supposed to have an epic feel, match the characters' background stories and stage and ,at the same time, the fast action of the game isn't an easy task, but the composers have done an admirable job in this regard. Whether its Mitsurugi's heroic, gripping theme, the epic melody that plays in the Colosseum stage, the cheerful music that perfectly accompanies Xianghua's dancelike fighting style, or the bombastic theme that plays at Nightmare's stage (the ruins of a castle); all of the tracks manage to create a dense atmosphere that perfectly fits the stage you are fighting in and the enemy you are facing, which lends a sense of purpose to the battles and almost makes you feel the "history" of the places you are fighting in. The only drawback here is that the compositions feel a little too bombastic and overdone at times, but once you get used to that, you don't want to miss them.
So the technical aspects of the game are as good as anyone could want them to be, but what about the actual gameplay? Once I started focusing more on the actual game, I was immediately disappointed. I had only spent ten minutes in practice mode and didn't really know what I was doing and yet my character pulled off one amazing move after another, and I didn't have much trouble winning most of the matches. And so I did the only thing I could do: I put down the controller, turned off my console and wrote a whiny review about Soul Calibur being nothing but a simple button masher and ... no wait! That's not at all what I did! What I really did was realizing that I wasn't as good at the game as I should be and just went back to the training mode. Seriously though, it really annoys me to continuously see people calling this game a simple button masher. If you're telling me that you're an experienced player and got beaten by a beginner, then guess what: you are simply not as good as you think; and if somebody tells you that he could easily finish the game only with button-mashing, he's not telling you that he did so either on a low difficulty level or loosing roughly ten continues per fight. I'm not saying that button mashing isn't a problem of SC, but it's not nearly as bad as some people make it seem. I'll get back to this later. First, let's look at all the good parts of the gameplay.
The gameplay doesn't have very much in common with Soul Edge anymore. The control scheme is basically the same and attacks are still divided into horizontal and vertical attacks, but that's about it. It only takes four buttons to control your fighters. One button is used for horizontal attacks, one for vertical attacks, one for kicks and one for blocking. The difference between vertical and horizontal attacks is that vertical attacks can be sidestepped and therefor more effectively counterattacked. However, vertical attacks are usually faster,easier to use, and often hit high and medium (or medium and low) areas at the same time. Horizontal attacks on the other hand, cannot be sidestepped so that they can be used to attack if the enemy is not directly in front of your fighter, or to counterattack a sidestep attempt. But sidestepping is of course not the only way to avoid damage. There are three different ways to block an attack. Simply pressing the block button will just block the attack. Pressing the directional button towards your opponent while pressing the block button will leave him off guard for a moment, but is also more difficult to pull of since you have to anticipate the attack. Finally, if you press the directional button away from your opponent while blocking, you will block your enemy's attack and let him stumble aside, which gives an almost certain chance for a counter. Of course, this requires even better timing and is too slow for some attacks.
Every character has of course also a couple of throws. There are standard throws for which you only have to press two or three buttons simultaneously, as well as more powerful throws for which you have to perform more difficult button combinations. Furthermore, the standard throws turn out different depending on whether you approach your opponent from the front, the back, the left side or the right side. All this adds up to a surprisingly large number of throws, considering that this is a weapon based fighting game. Throws can be avoided by using the same button combination as the attacker. Although you have to be pretty fast if you want to successfully avoid a throw. Throws are very well-implemented in the game. They can deal a lot of damage but are also relatively difficult to pull of. The danger here is of course that they can be either too powerful or too difficult to perform. Thankfully, Namco has found the perfect middle ground in this regard. Throws are difficult enough to pull of to prevent them from being used too often, but are always a strategical possibility and can inflict quite a bit of damage when used at the right moment.
Another of SC's key features is the 8 way run system. This sounds suspiciously like a pointless marketing term for something that isn't very innovative, or something doesn't have any significant impact on the gameplay. Fortunately, this is not the case. The 8 way run system lets your character walk freely in any direction if you keep pressing the directional button (tapping the directional button is used for jumps, crouches and sidesteps). While that doesn't sound particularly impressive, the point is that it actually works (something that can not be said about other games that tried something similar) and that it enriches the gameplay in several ways. It does not only make the fights feel more realistic, it also lets you change the distance to your enemy much easier (and more subtle than in other games), and distance is an important factor in SC's gameplay, considering all the different weapon types with different ranges. Furthermore, additional moves can be executed while your character is moving and once you have learned their nuances, it becomes clear that almost all of them have a strategical purpose and are not just there to merely increase the number of moves.
The number of moves, by the way, is pretty impressive. I don't think that any game has surpassed the sheer number of moves present in SC, let alone their quality. What's even more impressive, is how these moves can be combined. Some criticize Namco for making combos too easy because you can link so many different moves so easily. That's nonsense. Namco didn't make linking moves easy to make the game more accessible, they simply made it extremely realistic. Combos in SC don't work as combos in most other games. In most games, combos are certain sequences of moves that can be executed particularly fast and fluidly because the designer's have decided to put them together to a combo. If you try to combine other moves, this may work more or less well but in most cases, it does not reach the same speed and fluidity of the predetermined combos. In SC, you can combine almost all moves just as you like, as long as it makes sense. That is, how fast one move follows another depends on how difficult it would be to combine these moves in reality. If you combine moves in a realistic way, you'll see that your combinations work just as well as those that are already given in the move-list. Yes, there are several combos already described in the move-list, but once you improve your knowledge of a character, you'll see that there are many additional "combos" and variations yet to be found.
So the basic system in SC already lays the groundwork for a pretty solid fighter, but where the game truly shines is, as I have already mentioned, in its large variety of moves and the excellent implementation of various fighting stiles. I can't stress this point enough, because if you truly want to appreciate the games complexity you have to really master a character, which can easily take up a few weeks. Simply memorizing all the moves (which is difficult enough to begin with) isn't enough. Only once you have learned which moves to use in which situation and once you do so intuitively, SC really becomes interesting. This is of course true for every decent fighting game, but in SC there is just so much more to be discovered than in other games. Even when you have mastered a character you will still discover a different usage for a move every now and then. This is again thanks to the excellent implementation of numerous moves that should delight any martial arts enthusiast.
The cast of characters is large, varied and amazingly well-balanced. The character design is the best I have seen in any fighting game. There are of course a couple of stereotypes such as the Samurai, the Barbarian or the Knight, but the majority of characters is truly original and even the more stereotypical characters are very well-designed, and it never feels as if a character has been put in the game just for the sake of it. Most of the characters come from Asian countries wielding typical weapons such as a Katana (Mitsurugi, Yoshimitsu), a staff (Kilik), a chinese sword (Hwang, Xianghua), a Naginata (Seung Mina), Nunchakkos (Maxi)and others. But there are also more exotic characters, for example Cervantes (a pirate), Siegfried (a knight), Ivy, (the "Domina") with a cool sword that can be turned into a whip; and of course Voldo, who is one of the sickest characters ever to be featured in a video game. Nevertheless, all of the characters fit well in with the game's atmosphere and none of them feels out of place. More importantly, they are also balanced very well, as any character can beat any other character. Determining which character is particularly weak or strong is pretty much impossible and how well you perform with a given character is more dependent on your knowledge of that character than anything.
To top it all of, SC features a plethora of game modes and extras. Apart from the usual arcade, vs. and survival-modes, the most interesting game mode is of course the Edge Master Mode. Travelling over a world map, you fight in different missions that usually present you with an unusual challenge. Sometimes you are poisoned and have to defeat your enemy before dying of the poison that slowly diminishes your health bar. Sometimes you can get rid of the poison and poison your enemy by hitting him (and vice versa). In one mission you loose energy when you don't move and sink too deep into the sand. Sometimes you can only hurt your enemy with certain attacks (throws or mid-air combos for example). And sometimes you just have to defeat several enemies in a row without loosing a round yourself. For completed missions you receive points that can be used to buy artworks (there are about 400 artworks if I remember correctly) that may unlock all sorts of extras ranging from different costumes to new missions to secret characters. (Among the coolest unlock-able extras are the Martial Arts Demonstrations for every character). This is a highly motivating way of unlocking extras, although some might complain about the randomness, since you never know beforehand whether an artwork will unlock something or not. What's more, there are even secret "invisible" missions on the world map and once you have finished all missions you can repeat them on an especially high difficulty level. Unlike what some people might say, the Edge Master Mode is not where most of the game time is spent. It can be completed in a couple of days without having to master a character first (although that helps, and some of the difficult mission are nearly impossible without slightly advanced knowledge of the game), but it's nevertheless a great extra.
The Bad
I have already mentioned that that button mashing is not nearly as much of a problem as some people make it appear. If you play the game only by button mashing, it's not going to be a very entertaining experience, but you might just be successful with it; at least on lower difficult settings or against not very advanced human opponents. If you try it on one of the higher difficulty levels though, you will loose lots and lots of continues, and while you might eventually finish the game, it will take quite a while and won't be any fun; so it's quite pointless to do this (and it's even more pointless to complain about it just because you're unwilling to practice a little!). If you try that strategy against a human player who actually knows what he is doing, you will get smashed within seconds.
It's still tempting though, especially for inexperienced players, to resort button mashing, and it works too often (even on the lowest "hard"-level) so that it is easy to dismiss the game as a simplistic button masher before really getting into it.
Another problem is the fact that there are some move combinations that hardly ever get counterattacked by the CPU. They are few and far in between and they aren't guaranteed to deal any damage, but since they are rarely counterattacked, using them continuously can give you an easy victory at times. But as with button mashing, they are in no way guaranteed to let you win the match (when fighting against a human opponent they are no more useful than other combinations) and resisting the urge to use them makes the game much more enjoyable.
Finally, the difficulty level is too low. It will take some time until you can easily beat the highest difficulty level without "cheating", and mastering several characters will keep you busy for quite a while, but once you have really mastered a character, you'll have to fight against other human players if you want a real challenge.
The Bottom Line
Soul Calibur is undoubtedly one of the best fighting games we've had so far. And in terms of realistic moves, it is still unsurpassed. Yeah, I know what some of you are thinking, those extremely unrealistic, overdone "super-moves", the whole arcadish presentation with all those unnecessary FX and whatnot; but some special effects do not take away from the overall realism of the game and there are only a couple of super-moves for each character. They are not all that useful and you can easily ignore them. The majority of the moves are perfectly realistic and they are implemented better than in any other fighting game. While other fighting games feature realistic moves as well, you can always feel how they are forced to fit into certain game mechanics and in no game do they feel as realistic and "natural" as in SC (not even in
SC 2, unfortunately).
The only fighting game that plays in the same league is
Virtua Fighter 4. And while VF4 is even superior to SC in some regards, I still prefer SC. The A.I. in VF 4 is probably the biggest advantage over SC. I have already mentioned that SC isn't challenging enough in the long run. VF 4 ,on the other hand, does not only manage to stay challenging for a very long time, there are even lots of different A.I. patterns for different enemies and the A.I. even adapts to your fighting style so that you are forced to use varied strategies. And of course, button mashing is completely useless. The basic game mechanics of VF 4 are also a little more complex than in SC, although much of what works in VF 4 also works in SC and they are not that much more complex than some VF-fan-boys might claim (no offense, VF 4 is a great game!).
The biggest problem of VF 4 is perhaps that its a little too unforgiving and inflexible about its mechanics. When first playing SC, it seems that you can do whatever you want to win and that it doesn't make much of a difference which moves you use. But after a while you discover that certain moves can be used in many unique ways, e.g. a certain low kick, is not only effective to counterattack high attacks but that it can also counterattack a certain special attack that other low kicks can't, that is, most moves can be used in very different (realistic) ways and thereby go beyond the initial restrictions of the game mechanics.
To some extend, this is of course also true for other fighting games, but again, in SC there are simply a lot more nuances to most of the moves. In this regard, SC is the most realistic fighting game to date, (despite its overall arcadish presentation and a couple of super-moves). The moves themselves are more realistic then in any other fighting game, but it's their incredibly realistic and flexible implementation into the game mechanics that make SC such a great game. It's also the reason why I prefer SC over any other fighting game, even if they have a better A.I. or slightly more complex
basic mechanics; and if you are interested in martial arts, or practice martial arts yourself, you'll probably agree with me.
