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Review: Soul Calibur III |
The Soul series has been all over the place. It began with a strong outing, Soul Edge, which did well enough for itself, and to this day still has some degree of popularity among the earliest fans of the series. Following that, we got Soul Calibur, which has been hailed, on more than one occasion, as the greatest fighting game ever, gaining fairly signifigant popularity among the casual and hardcore alike for all manner of things. Following that, however, Namco gave us Soul Calibur 2, which was essentially a train wreck. While I myself would have never called Soul Calibur 2 a truly bad game, it simply refused to live up to its predecessor - and the many people who have and still do call it terrible can’t simply be discounted.
Ultimately, then, with the Soul series, Namco had traveled down the roads of good, great, and unfortunately, bad. For SC3, that left them with one path - the mediocre.
I consider myself a somewhat lengthy fan of the Soul series, with my play starting at the release of Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast, it being among the games that would teach me how to lift myself out of fighting game scrubbiness. Like a great many people, me and my friends would spend a rather considerable amount of time playing this, racking up hundred match sessions with no thought to it, other than the sheer amazement of being able to sit down that long without leaving an ass-impression in the carpet. With SC2, my vehement defense of the game would be ridiculed and manage to earn the ire of some, but in the face of all, I remained a fan. This continues in SC3.
It’s not that Soul Calibur 3 is a bad fighting game. It’s that you can’t find the fighting game.
In what I expect was a financial decision, Namco decided to try their hardest to cater to an American market (the region in which the Soul series does the best commercially), and did a few unusual things. The earliest of them was to drop the idea of an arcade release, and perhaps the most worrisome (but also hardest-pushed) was the idea of custom characters in a fighting game. With these custom characters, Namco included a mode known as Chronicles of the Sword, and as to not leave out “proper” Soul Calibur characters, they also developed the Tales of Souls mode. Ultimately, these two modes are where you’re expected to spend a lot of time with this game. That fact is a rather major problem.
Tales of Souls is SC3’s story mode, and it’s a decent one, insofar as story. You get some idea of what each character is like, what they’re trying to do, and how they interact with others in the storyline. Every characters has a decent length of script accompanying his or her story, and it’s fairly well-written script. Tales of Souls certainly did not fail those interested in the story of Soul Calibur 3… until you take into account that nothing is really different for anybody. Despite Namco’s wealth of text for each character and multitude of choices, it’s really nothing more than a semi-cleverly constructed ruse. Every fork in the road that you come to will eventually rejoin, and everything will sooner or later lead to the same place, with a slight variation if you manage to follow an arbitrary path to a labyrinth, and manage to win every single fight without continuing. Throughout this travel of sorts, Namco took care to implement cutscenes along the way, which are also the same cookie cutter mess that the rest of story mode is. With every character, you will have an enormous cog flung at you, immediately followed by a fight with Zasalamel (even if you’re playing him), a fight with Tira, have to dodge a cage, and ultimately, a cutscene that will determine whether you take on Nightmare or Siegfried in the final stage before the boss. More irritatingly than these being in every single character’s story in Tales, these cutscenes cannot be skipped, instead forcing you to sit through it every time so that you may put in an inane button press or combination that will prevent something bad from happening to you. It’s mildly cute the very first time, uninteresting the second, and irritating the next 28 times (or more) after that. In fact, this essentially sums up the entire Tales of Souls experience.
Chronicles of the Sword, thankfully, is less of a train wreck. In Chronicles, you’re placed into a simple strategy game, where you must guide your units across a map, destroying enemy strongholds and defeating enemy soldiers. This can be played as pure strategy, but it’s unlikely to be very interesting in that case, and as such, Namco gave the option (or in some cases, will force you) to go into a proper Soul Calibur fight, though it is only one round. If you win, your enemy falls, and if you lose, your character will fall and be returned to your main stronghold, resurrecting after a brief period. Ultimately, it is a decent simple strategy game, and is fairly well-meshed with the proper Soul Calibur fighting engine. It is not without flaws, however. Most notably, load times are abundant in this mode. For every fight, you will be forced to wait a brief period while the match loads, and, sometimes, you may very well finish matches in less time than it took to load them. It stops up the process quite unpleasantly, and makes Chronicles much more tedious to play than it would have been without them. Chronicles suffers in general from a lack of streamlining, but is ultimately the better of the two main modes.
The other single-player modes are surely presented as being less important, but for real fighting game aficianados they’re likely where you’ll want to spend most of your time, if you’re playing alone. In a small menu known as the Soul Arena, you have an option to play themed fights, collecting gold pieces, knocking your opponent everywhere, or shooting them with energy collected through Soul Charges. Also in the Soul Arena is the “Quick Play” mode, which is simply SC3’s version of an arcade mode, and definitely the purest mode from a fighting game standpoint. Finally, there is a practice mode, which is essentially just the standard fare that appears in most fighting games, with access to a command list and basic CPU controls.
So, with Quick Play, and to a lesser extent, the Soul Arena, why play Tales or Chronicles?
Unlockables. Masses of them. If you want to experience everything this game has to offer, you’ve got no choice. Tales and Chronicles both have a host of unlockable characters to be gained by playing them, and Chronicles will net you many custom character parts, as well as fighting styles for these customs. Both will also net you huge amounts of gold, which will be used in the game’s shop to buy pieces for the art gallery, more custom character parts, more custom character save slots, special weapons, or new modes. Quick Play will earn you almost nothing in the way of gold, and absolutely no way of obtaining new characters. Soul Arena will earn you more than Quick Play, but you have to perform exceptionally well for this, and it has the added downside of not even playing vanilla SC3 when in a Soul Arena mission.
By now, this review itself may have made one of my earliest points more clear. I have, so far, spent a great deal of time talking about single player modes, how they are implemented, and very little about the fighting - it being strangely overshadowed in general. In spite of this, the actual fighting is very solid. It’s a certain improvement over SC2, and how it stacks up to SC1 will probably end up being an issue mostly of personal opinion. It sports new stylings on the stun system, knockdown/wake-up system, and new quake effects. These new systems mesh in pleasantly and unobtrusively, so the Soul series you may already know should not feel drastically altered. Perhaps most impressively, however, Namco tried hard to add many new characters to the game. Obviously, there is Zasalamel, Setsuka, and Tira, and alone they aren’t many - just three. However, Rock has returned as a proper character after his absence in SC2, and Sophitia and Lizardman are in SC3 without being region specific to America this time around. Hwang and Li Long, from SC1 and SE respectively also return, but as bonus characters. Beyond this, there are fifteen more new, unique playstyles. This trumps even Tekken 5’s number of unique character styles by eleven, bringing Soul Calibur 3’s entire playable list up to 41 people. This is a staggering number by 3D fighter standards, and still pretty impressive in a 2D one.
Ultimately, Soul Calibur 3, as a fighting game, is deep, solid, and a strong outing. As an entire package, it gets a lot less amusing, as Namco pretty much got anything besides custom character building and the fighting engine wrong. Ultimately, if you want to play this game, I’m going to do the same thing I have been doing since shortly after release, and recommend that you buy a cheat device to complement this. Use it to unlock everything, forget Tales and Chronicles exist, and you’ll have a much nicer time with this game. I guarantee it.
