First, I?ll answer a question relating to where I was last month.
Suffering. I had to take a break from reviewing after DearS and Hoshigami, but I?m back and will be reviewing the good items I find later on.
Now I?ll answer the question you?re thinking of right now.
No. You shouldn?t fuck the waitress.
Now I?ll answer a relevant question.
No. Soul Calibur V is not worth it. It?s a rental item AT BEST, maybe worth $20 if you?re really looking to expand your fighting game collection, but speaking as someone who checked it out as a fan of the previous games, SoulCalibur V is the worst Soul Calibur game I?ve played.
But is that really a surprise to anyone? I mean, look at the fucking ad they ran:
Seriously. They weren?t even pretending to give an effort. First fighting game of 2012 when it should have been the first fighting game of 2013 at best or maybe a holiday release in 2013, the game is only half-finished. The story mode? The area where Soul Calibur stood out in having a story for a fighting game that was actually kind of enjoyable? Guess what? That?s gone. There is a story mode that lasts roughly two hours that covers the story of two characters, the children of the original Soul Edge champion Sophitia named Patrokolus and Pyrrah, and that?s about it. There is no telling who any of the characters are because I can?t even find the fucking in-game profiles.
But, let?s get into things. SoulCalibur V (And yes, stupidly that is how it?s spelled) is the sixth game of the Soul Calibur series since a lot of people forget the original title was Soul Edge, Soul Calibur was the second game. Kind of like how no one remembers Metal Gear Solid 3 was the fifth game in the series counting the original two Metal Gear games, the numerical values reset after it went into 3D with Metal Gear Solid. Anyway, Soul Calibur is a 3D fighting game franchise that relied on weapons combat rather than martial arts abilities. It?s main competitor is probably Tekken which I don?t play, but what I can tell you is that the game was always a little flawed in the fine details but the core mechanics tended to be solid.
The real trademark of Soul Calibur is the bizarre guest characters, a ritual that began with Soul Calibur II, and the absurdly over designed characters who just look totally fucking ridiculous. Not that I really had a problem with that, the fact that the story was decent if a little to thinly spread earned a lot of points with me obviously.
The previous game was Soul Calibur IV and it?s biggest problem was that the character creation was way too stat based, you couldn?t send a teenage girl out to battle in her underwear with twin katars because her armor rating and health rating would be in the crapper. There were also problems in that the story elements were beginning to show their age and show that the franchise has been going on for too long, and that the core gameplay had a major problem with almost every single character regardless of difficulty being vulnerable to throw attack spamming.
People also thought the guest stars were a problem, but I think I was one of very few people in America who spotted the really weird one. Star Wars characters? No, not that surprising. Yeah Yoda was a cheap fucking character and Darth Vader was surprisingly weak and no one wants to remember The Force Unleashed, but the really weird cameo was Angol Fear. Don?t know who that is? Not surprised, this is only one I knew through my love of Lucky Star because I love Konata Izumi as a character and secretly want to fuck her teacher.
Angol Fear is related to a character from a manga and anime series called Keroro Gunsou, the English title is Sgt. Frog.
No seriously. It?s a series about a group of alien amphibians who are sent to Earth to conquer it but wind up becoming it?s guardians when they get hooked on the pop-culture. If I remember right Nickolodeon did a rip-off show of that, but that?s also something we try to forget about since Nickolodeon hasn?t been good in over a decade, if it was ever good.
This time around the guest character kind of makes sense. Ezio Fucking Auditore in his Assassin?s Creed: Brotherhood incarnation pops up in this game. Don?t ask why when the title of the story mode is 1602 A.D mode and Ezio was born in the mid 1400s, though the devoted Soul Calibur Wikia insists there are in-game profiles, I never found the fucking things in the actual game and was lost.
On other good notes, the game looks nice, trying to compete directly with the absurdly detailed backgrounds of Mortal Kombat?s 2011 release. The game is rated T so obviously they couldn?t get away with the cosmetic damage of Mortal Kombat and the whole spine-ripping thing, but it does have a strange mechanic where a chunk of your opponents armor breaks off if you finish a round using a power attack. Usually this isn?t always apparent, with characters like Ivy and Patrokolus it only breaks their shoulder armor, but sometimes it does cause male characters to lose their shirts or female characters to lose a cloak or jacket, so obviously it adds a bit of fan service to the violence.
Gameplay wise it?s no longer possible to beat the entire game just by spamming throw. Why? Well a couple of characters have really weak throws. You can still beat basically every single enemy with throw attacks, but the final Nightmare boss fight in the arcade mode is too aggressive for throwing to work. There is also a new system called ?Just Guard? replacing the old Guard Impact system. If you press the guard button right as you?re about to be hit, your character totally deflects the blow and no damage is taken, and this applies to normally unblockable attacks. Why was this system added? Well, I never confirmed this because I play more aggressively, but according to the Angry Joe review you lose the ability to block if you spam it too much in battle. It?s kind of preferable to the weird armor-segment breaking-soul-gague-soul-crush-critical finisher thing in Soul Calibur IV, but I still prefer the deflecting ability of Guard Impacts from III to the Just Guard of V.
But, now it?s time we get to the bad. The story mode only focuses on two characters, like I said earlier, and even in what little exposition we get there are some major questions that go totally unanswered. The top five gripes I had (Out of roughly three dozen) were these:
5. Kilik and Xianguah apparently never got together, so we have no idea who the unlucky bastard who knocked her up is. This becomes clear when Kilik doesn?t recognize Xianguah?s daughter (Or maybe he did knock her up and Xianguah wound up with someone else anyway due to sexual frustration), but what is never clear is why she possesses Kilik?s amulet, why she?s with Maxi, and why some random kid has Kilik?s staff, the Kali-Yuga, when they?re all supposed to be sacred treasures you?d think Kilik and Xianguah would guard a little more closely.
4. It?s completely random which characters are still around and which ones were replaced with clones, and sometimes the identity of the clones is more than a little idiotic. Taki, a female ninja and a major character in the game, is gone. Officially, it was because it didn?t make sense for a 50 year old to still be an assassin (A claim undermined by Ezio who is the same age as Taki ignoring the time leap). For some reason though, Hilde is still there, no explanation as to why, Mitsirugi is still around even though he is even older than Taki if I remember right, Astaroth is still around, Yoshimizu is still around, Tira is still around even though both Yoshimizu and Taki would have been hunting her for various reasons, and Cervantes is not only back, but it looks like he came back to life. There are other returning characters, but I knew they?d be coming back because they?re unaging for some contrived reason.
3. Remember the detail above about the identity of the clones? Okay, it shouldn?t surprise you Patrokolus uses the fighting style of Cassandra, his aunt. They keep saying it?s his mother?s fighting style, but that went to Pyrrah. You can tell the two styles apart by Sophitia?s tendency towards ball kicking and snapping necks with her vagina. But later on Patrokolus switches to using the fighting style of Setsuka, a woman from Japan who used a strike-from-the-draw fighting style using a dagger hidden in an umbrella. Why does Patrokolus know that style? Come to think of it, if Cassandra trained him, where the fuck was she? And why did Pyrrah have her mothers shield?
2. This is a major gripe for me. Sophitia is dead. She was the one who set in motion all Soul Calibur games when she originally destroyed Soul Edge, but now the writers just casually killed her off. The implication is that some random possessed human killed her. I?m calling bullshit that the only character willing to go for the balls was brought down by some random demon. Her children are the major focus, but both of them are idiots and there is no way to explain why Pyrrah is even still alive with how psychotic Tira is.
1. There is no individual arcade story, the ONLY story we get is through the story campaign, no other characters have any real identity.
There are a lot of other problems, but they all stem from the big gripe. Since there is no arcade story mode with individual character endings and no in-game profiles, anyone who hasn?t played previous Soul Calibur games will be totally lost. There were two new characters, actually new characters with new fighting styles, but one of them totally sucks and we have no idea who either of them are. Also, a few characters are curiously AWOL. Zasalamel, an immortal who uses a scythe in battle, is gone even though you?d think the continued existence of the Malfested and the fact that Siegfried lost the ability to wield Soul Calibur would be kind of a big deal to him. The Korean characters Sueng-Mina and Yunseung are both gone and have no clones replacing them even though they were both in their teens during IV, Talim, the wind priestess is also gone and you?ve got no double tonfa character even though she?d only be in her early thirties in this game.
Okay, I?m bringing the rant to an end. SoulCalibur V has some minor gameplay improvements but has countless fuck-ups that give the overwhelming impression the game was rushed out at least one year before it was finished. FMVs are randomly swapped with really crappy still images, and a lot of important content is missing. I can?t recommend it to someone who isn?t already a fan of Soul Calibur since even the PS2 titles are better than this one, and would only recommend diehard Soul Calibur fans buy it at $20 and no higher. The franchise is basically dead, and while I probably will rent Soul Calibur VI when it?s released, all I can say is that in the future you should completely ignore it unless you?re already hooked.
Oh, also, Ivy doesn?t wear the costume you see advertised. What a fucking rip-off.
--Pyramid Head
Next Review: Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations
Suffering. I had to take a break from reviewing after DearS and Hoshigami, but I?m back and will be reviewing the good items I find later on.
Now I?ll answer the question you?re thinking of right now.
No. You shouldn?t fuck the waitress.
Now I?ll answer a relevant question.
No. Soul Calibur V is not worth it. It?s a rental item AT BEST, maybe worth $20 if you?re really looking to expand your fighting game collection, but speaking as someone who checked it out as a fan of the previous games, SoulCalibur V is the worst Soul Calibur game I?ve played.
But is that really a surprise to anyone? I mean, look at the fucking ad they ran:
Seriously. They weren?t even pretending to give an effort. First fighting game of 2012 when it should have been the first fighting game of 2013 at best or maybe a holiday release in 2013, the game is only half-finished. The story mode? The area where Soul Calibur stood out in having a story for a fighting game that was actually kind of enjoyable? Guess what? That?s gone. There is a story mode that lasts roughly two hours that covers the story of two characters, the children of the original Soul Edge champion Sophitia named Patrokolus and Pyrrah, and that?s about it. There is no telling who any of the characters are because I can?t even find the fucking in-game profiles.
But, let?s get into things. SoulCalibur V (And yes, stupidly that is how it?s spelled) is the sixth game of the Soul Calibur series since a lot of people forget the original title was Soul Edge, Soul Calibur was the second game. Kind of like how no one remembers Metal Gear Solid 3 was the fifth game in the series counting the original two Metal Gear games, the numerical values reset after it went into 3D with Metal Gear Solid. Anyway, Soul Calibur is a 3D fighting game franchise that relied on weapons combat rather than martial arts abilities. It?s main competitor is probably Tekken which I don?t play, but what I can tell you is that the game was always a little flawed in the fine details but the core mechanics tended to be solid.
The real trademark of Soul Calibur is the bizarre guest characters, a ritual that began with Soul Calibur II, and the absurdly over designed characters who just look totally fucking ridiculous. Not that I really had a problem with that, the fact that the story was decent if a little to thinly spread earned a lot of points with me obviously.
The previous game was Soul Calibur IV and it?s biggest problem was that the character creation was way too stat based, you couldn?t send a teenage girl out to battle in her underwear with twin katars because her armor rating and health rating would be in the crapper. There were also problems in that the story elements were beginning to show their age and show that the franchise has been going on for too long, and that the core gameplay had a major problem with almost every single character regardless of difficulty being vulnerable to throw attack spamming.
People also thought the guest stars were a problem, but I think I was one of very few people in America who spotted the really weird one. Star Wars characters? No, not that surprising. Yeah Yoda was a cheap fucking character and Darth Vader was surprisingly weak and no one wants to remember The Force Unleashed, but the really weird cameo was Angol Fear. Don?t know who that is? Not surprised, this is only one I knew through my love of Lucky Star because I love Konata Izumi as a character and secretly want to fuck her teacher.
Angol Fear is related to a character from a manga and anime series called Keroro Gunsou, the English title is Sgt. Frog.
No seriously. It?s a series about a group of alien amphibians who are sent to Earth to conquer it but wind up becoming it?s guardians when they get hooked on the pop-culture. If I remember right Nickolodeon did a rip-off show of that, but that?s also something we try to forget about since Nickolodeon hasn?t been good in over a decade, if it was ever good.
This time around the guest character kind of makes sense. Ezio Fucking Auditore in his Assassin?s Creed: Brotherhood incarnation pops up in this game. Don?t ask why when the title of the story mode is 1602 A.D mode and Ezio was born in the mid 1400s, though the devoted Soul Calibur Wikia insists there are in-game profiles, I never found the fucking things in the actual game and was lost.
On other good notes, the game looks nice, trying to compete directly with the absurdly detailed backgrounds of Mortal Kombat?s 2011 release. The game is rated T so obviously they couldn?t get away with the cosmetic damage of Mortal Kombat and the whole spine-ripping thing, but it does have a strange mechanic where a chunk of your opponents armor breaks off if you finish a round using a power attack. Usually this isn?t always apparent, with characters like Ivy and Patrokolus it only breaks their shoulder armor, but sometimes it does cause male characters to lose their shirts or female characters to lose a cloak or jacket, so obviously it adds a bit of fan service to the violence.
Gameplay wise it?s no longer possible to beat the entire game just by spamming throw. Why? Well a couple of characters have really weak throws. You can still beat basically every single enemy with throw attacks, but the final Nightmare boss fight in the arcade mode is too aggressive for throwing to work. There is also a new system called ?Just Guard? replacing the old Guard Impact system. If you press the guard button right as you?re about to be hit, your character totally deflects the blow and no damage is taken, and this applies to normally unblockable attacks. Why was this system added? Well, I never confirmed this because I play more aggressively, but according to the Angry Joe review you lose the ability to block if you spam it too much in battle. It?s kind of preferable to the weird armor-segment breaking-soul-gague-soul-crush-critical finisher thing in Soul Calibur IV, but I still prefer the deflecting ability of Guard Impacts from III to the Just Guard of V.
But, now it?s time we get to the bad. The story mode only focuses on two characters, like I said earlier, and even in what little exposition we get there are some major questions that go totally unanswered. The top five gripes I had (Out of roughly three dozen) were these:
5. Kilik and Xianguah apparently never got together, so we have no idea who the unlucky bastard who knocked her up is. This becomes clear when Kilik doesn?t recognize Xianguah?s daughter (Or maybe he did knock her up and Xianguah wound up with someone else anyway due to sexual frustration), but what is never clear is why she possesses Kilik?s amulet, why she?s with Maxi, and why some random kid has Kilik?s staff, the Kali-Yuga, when they?re all supposed to be sacred treasures you?d think Kilik and Xianguah would guard a little more closely.
4. It?s completely random which characters are still around and which ones were replaced with clones, and sometimes the identity of the clones is more than a little idiotic. Taki, a female ninja and a major character in the game, is gone. Officially, it was because it didn?t make sense for a 50 year old to still be an assassin (A claim undermined by Ezio who is the same age as Taki ignoring the time leap). For some reason though, Hilde is still there, no explanation as to why, Mitsirugi is still around even though he is even older than Taki if I remember right, Astaroth is still around, Yoshimizu is still around, Tira is still around even though both Yoshimizu and Taki would have been hunting her for various reasons, and Cervantes is not only back, but it looks like he came back to life. There are other returning characters, but I knew they?d be coming back because they?re unaging for some contrived reason.
3. Remember the detail above about the identity of the clones? Okay, it shouldn?t surprise you Patrokolus uses the fighting style of Cassandra, his aunt. They keep saying it?s his mother?s fighting style, but that went to Pyrrah. You can tell the two styles apart by Sophitia?s tendency towards ball kicking and snapping necks with her vagina. But later on Patrokolus switches to using the fighting style of Setsuka, a woman from Japan who used a strike-from-the-draw fighting style using a dagger hidden in an umbrella. Why does Patrokolus know that style? Come to think of it, if Cassandra trained him, where the fuck was she? And why did Pyrrah have her mothers shield?
2. This is a major gripe for me. Sophitia is dead. She was the one who set in motion all Soul Calibur games when she originally destroyed Soul Edge, but now the writers just casually killed her off. The implication is that some random possessed human killed her. I?m calling bullshit that the only character willing to go for the balls was brought down by some random demon. Her children are the major focus, but both of them are idiots and there is no way to explain why Pyrrah is even still alive with how psychotic Tira is.
1. There is no individual arcade story, the ONLY story we get is through the story campaign, no other characters have any real identity.
There are a lot of other problems, but they all stem from the big gripe. Since there is no arcade story mode with individual character endings and no in-game profiles, anyone who hasn?t played previous Soul Calibur games will be totally lost. There were two new characters, actually new characters with new fighting styles, but one of them totally sucks and we have no idea who either of them are. Also, a few characters are curiously AWOL. Zasalamel, an immortal who uses a scythe in battle, is gone even though you?d think the continued existence of the Malfested and the fact that Siegfried lost the ability to wield Soul Calibur would be kind of a big deal to him. The Korean characters Sueng-Mina and Yunseung are both gone and have no clones replacing them even though they were both in their teens during IV, Talim, the wind priestess is also gone and you?ve got no double tonfa character even though she?d only be in her early thirties in this game.
Okay, I?m bringing the rant to an end. SoulCalibur V has some minor gameplay improvements but has countless fuck-ups that give the overwhelming impression the game was rushed out at least one year before it was finished. FMVs are randomly swapped with really crappy still images, and a lot of important content is missing. I can?t recommend it to someone who isn?t already a fan of Soul Calibur since even the PS2 titles are better than this one, and would only recommend diehard Soul Calibur fans buy it at $20 and no higher. The franchise is basically dead, and while I probably will rent Soul Calibur VI when it?s released, all I can say is that in the future you should completely ignore it unless you?re already hooked.
Oh, also, Ivy doesn?t wear the costume you see advertised. What a fucking rip-off.
--Pyramid Head
Next Review: Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations