I'm in general agreement with your viewpoint on the single player modes. They're all typically lackluster, and yes, throw has always been absurdly overpowered in Soul Calibur. However, I can't help but find your choice to judge the game entirely on it's single player aspects instead of it's multiplayer aspects rather baffling. The entire goal of a good fighting game is to allow a constant game of prediction to be going on between the two human players. The ability to execute more complex combinations is present too, but to be frank, most of SC's combos barely go beyond 4 or 5 inputs, nothing compared to jugglefests like Tekken.
For example, this is why there are "delayed" move input commands for various techniques, that are intended to be used to trick your opponent into believing you're not following up on your last attack, and make them stop blocking (thus allowing you to get a hit confirm). This could also be seen in the use of changing between high and low attacks frequently to cause a blocking opponent to have to guess constantly at.
Some people call this "luck", but frankly, it's present in practically any competitive sort of game, video game or not, and there IS a large degree of skill devoted into it. Varying your strategies, figuring out the holes in your opponent's, etc, it burns down to a very basic concept present in practically any multiplayer game.
Ultimately, it's like trying to judge a game of Chess when you're playing against yourself instead of another person. You're throwing a very large and important factor of a game completely out the window.
Paul The Best post=6.69063.648952 said:
Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting, Street Fighter III Third Strike and Street Fighter Alpha 3. Don't bother w/ any other fighting game unless you just want eye candy.
Guilty Gear and Melty Blood (newest versions for both ofc) equally deserve mentions.
Ionait post=6.69063.648968 said:
And to everyone agreeing with Yahtzee about the throw button.. Please. I understand that if you don't 'get' fighting games you wouldn't get this about them. In my house we call that chicken fighting. Backing the opponent into a wall and performing the same move or repeatedly doing any move over and over again just because it works, vs. human or cpu, is just plain wrong in the true fighting game player's book of morals. If you chicken fight, it sucks the fun and the sense of accomplishment out of everything.
Whilst I can agree to this somewhat, countering throws in Soul Calibur is really not that hard if someone is repeatedly spamming them (the same should go for any properly designed fighter for spamming any move) My real problem with them is the absurd damage that they do for an unblockable, something which I have never been content with for the series.