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Review - Soul Calibur IV [alternate] |
As officially-ranked 198,592nd best Soul Calibur IV player in the world, if not universe, I feel a strong duty to speak out as official ambassador for this game. So what shall we talk about? How about the huge, thrusting mammaries that jut forth from the chests of all of the (legal) female characters like Trident missiles, in a manner that make other games’ attempts at titillation look like Victorian church illustrations.
Perhaps we could talk about the numerous guest characters, created by some of Japan’s most sexually-inept comic artists, in order to give the game the widest possible appeal in its home market.
No, let’s talk about Star Wars. Specifically the Star Wars characters, stages and music in this game. I don’t know if it was deliberate or merely accidental, but SCIV players can indeed select Yoda in the XBOX360 version, Darth Vader in the PS3 version and, cross-promoting Lucasarts’ upcoming “The Force Unleashed”, which the slob on the secret video assures us is a game all about “kicking ass with the force” - The Apprentice.
The Apprentice is a terribly Gen-Y shaven-haired scowling Sith-in-training, who fights, daringly or perhaps stupidly with his lightsabre held behind him, possibly burning his back ever so slightly when he moves.
This lunatic crossover between franchises provides fascinating insight into the SW universe. For example we now know that the “long time ago” in that galaxy far far away was actually back in the 16th century. How about that! And that Yoda, after totally cocking up his potentially galaxy-saving shot at Palpatine and exiling himself to his swampland residence, decided to one day go on a jaunt (across SPACE? Across DIMENSIONS? WHAT? WHAT?) to kill an evil sword, getting back just in time to steal Luke’s torch.
If you think that sounds bizarre, obscure and pointless - it is. All the stories are. Concerns that this rich compost of bonus characters and franchises would ruin the ‘coherence’ and ‘feel’ of the game need not have worried; the Soul series flushed away any sort of integrity years ago. Yes there’s an evil sword and a good sword, and a host of potentially interesting and diverse characters to arrange around them. However if you’re not willing to actually do anything with them, well then you might as well go completely mental and stick Solid Snake and Sonic the Hedgehog in there as well.
It does prove one thing beyond a doubt though, and that’s the fact that Star Wars is better than Soul Calibur. The moments, few and far between where the game feels really, concentratedly *Star Wars* are far better than the moments where the game feels really, concentratedly *Soul Calibur*. There’s no point pledging any more firstborns for Namco to come out with a fully-fledged Star Wars fighting game, but it remains to be said that one made with this sort of budget and this sort of technology would be glorious.
Because let’s not hide the fact, this is a great-looking piece of software. It breaks no new ground, and will with time look as ugly and dated as the previous games do now, but as far as a high-definition, next-gen upgrade to the franchise goes, it’s attractive, it’s shiny, it’s fleshy.
The game retains much of the central concepts of previous titles - the same controls and the same physics. Additions are minor; “Critical Finishes” are spectacular insta-kills, accessed by both filling your three-bar ’soul gauge’ and then doing a guard-breaking ’soul crush’ on a blocking opponent. There is also armour breaking (astonishingly crass to see in a non-pornographic, mainstream game) and a heavier reliance on perfectly-timed “just frame” moves.
Despite some hefty changes to some of the characters, surface accessibility is as strong as ever. It’s still an intuitive control scheme, after all, and coupled with simple, solid physics (powered by the HAVOK engine) remains very easy to get into.
Like its predecessor, SCIV tries to do something slightly different for the single player. And while not as desperate and awful as the RPG and story modes in SC3, the new story mode is short and silly; putting the player up against various combinations of customised and official characters, each with a variety of altered statistics, before fighting the final boss and handing over a brief but pretty real-time ending.
The option to customise existing characters and create new ones has returned, and remains as much a waste of time and resources as ever. Intensely tedious, once the initial draw of making the girls fight in their pants has worn off, this mode allows the player to not only customise the characters’ appearance, but their stats - with items that confer abilities such as extra speed, strength and immunity from ring-outs.
As always there is an option to fight with these things enabled, and one without. However by including them at all the game misunderstands one of the basic tenets of the fighting game. It’s no longer a small tight ship where every fight, exchange, move and animation strikes a chord with the player and inspires the player, but instead a sprawling caravan of half-formed ideas, RPG influences and tacky player-generated images. It’s discouraging. It’s unengaging. When I first played Street Fighter 2, the fact that other people all around the world were playing the same game I was, doing so many different things with the same core characters and functions - it blew my little mind, and created a real sense of community. If I’d for one second suspected that those people were actually spending their time putting purple hats on Ken and giving Dhalsim a pair of +5 speed shoes … who knows?
That’s not to say it’s a completely meaningless experience. An efficient, effective online mode means there’s always a steady stream of competition, and providing the connection is marked 4/5 or higher, play is barely discernable from offline fighting, save for some of those trickier, frame-dependant manoeuvres.
The online community? Well, it’s online gaming. Be prepared to be sworn at for doing a move more than once or picking a character more than once, while at the same time running into endless hordes of Mitsurugis and Maxis all preprogrammed with the same three moves and three strategies. Yes the standard of skill overall is currently low, and many of the players seem uninterested in doing anything to rectify this. Perhaps it is early days, but it’s still better than the boring AI.
So now. If SC3 was a direct-to-DVD release, then SCIV is a huge, dumb Hollywood sequel, slickly ticking off boxes and meeting quotas but crushed by an overwhelming sense of its own pointlessness. Easy to get into, it’s not fun or engaging enough to bother persevering with, feeling too random, disjointed and illogical to offer the zen-like fighting experience that the best of its peers can.
The series’ devoted fans will get more out of it than most, and casual players won’t be able to resist the mix of sex, splendour and easily-accessible play. Anyone in the middle of these two extremes should be extremely cautious.
