Four Soul Calipers, Sir

12:31 am Games for Fun, Gaming

Soul Calibur IV Box 360I’m not the biggest fighting game fan. I played some Street Fighter II back in the day, mainly on the SNES. Outside of that, I’ve only really scratched the surface of the fighting genre. I think it’s because I’m not a terribly competitive person. When I play a fighting game I play almost exclusively single player. Sometimes though, you just need to play something different to mix things up. I was watching a few other people play Soul Calibur IV (SC4) around the office and decided to give it a go. Due to it’s buttery smooth frame rate and instant gratification gameplay, I bought it the next day.

Since I’m not much into the multiplayer side of things, it was nice to find so much single player content for a fighting game. Single players modes in SC4 include arcade mode, story mode and the Tower of Lost Souls. The Tower of Lost Souls was a blast to play through. Basically, there are two parts: ascending or descending. The ascending portion allows players to pick a few characters and fight a few floors up a “tower”. As they move up floors, they can do objectives like “perform 3 throws” in a match to unlock a treasure chest. Each chest contains some piece of equipment you can put on your characters. Once you beat a set of floors you’ve unlocked those floors for later play. Descending on the other hand, starts you at the first floor each time and you just go until you lose. Every five floors nets you a chest when you descend; no need to complete mini-objectives here. Going up and down the tower while unlocking items and getting gold was terribly addicting and fun.

The character customization feature was fun to play around with as well. I can’t believe how much control they give you to make custom characters; at times it can be a tad overwhelming. You can select equipment for just about every part of the body and then some. Then you have like 20+ options for each piece of equipment. Then you can color each piece like three ways. If that wasn’t enough, you can change the physique of the character, the face, hair, skin color, all the standard stuff, plus the voice. You want a husky man-bear-pig voice for your school girl? Fine. You want her to sound like an actual school girl? You can have that too. It’s pretty insane.

The regular characters themselves are pretty cool, but making your own is was more fun. SC4 features Star Wars characters (Yoda and the Apprentice… who is the Apprentice?) of all things, in addition to all the regulars. I had fun messing around with Yoda for a bit, but I was more effective with other characters. The artists and animators did a great job with the character assets. I guess if you’re basically only rendering two characters and a stage then they should look pretty good.

I’m impressed with how many ways a fighting game held my attention. The combat is fun on it’s own, which made me want to get more gold to get more items to put on my characters. Doing the Tower of Lost Souls gives you items and gold quickly, plus achievements are linked to doing the tower, so I spent a lot of time there. New weapons open up for characters if you beat their story mode, so that was fun to play as well. SC4 basically has a highly addictive reward system, much like the unlock system from COD4, plus it gives you loot (gold and items) like a Blizzard game. Each match happens so fast though that you find yourself always playing one more round.

I won’t talk much about the controls since I’m not fighting expert. I will say that I was able to jump in and get the hang of things, even with button mashing fairly quickly, which was nice. I’m sure the top end players have multi-hit combos with finishing moves all planned out, but I won’t ever be one of those guys. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough time to get good at just one game.

What didn’t I like about the game? Cheap AI that knocks you on the ground and hit you until you’re dead. I forgot how mad I could get at a video game until I played SC4. My wife’s over here enjoying some TV show, and I’m going off in Tourettes mode about to blast my controller through my monitor. Pretty funny in hindsight, but not at the time. Maybe that’s why I stay away from competitive games. Oh, and finishing moves seemed like an afterthought. I was only able to do them with one character consistently, and that’s because one of his chief moves is like a two hit Soul Breaker. So, it’s button mash over and Y until the opponents Soul Gauge is flashing red, then hit them with it again when a red particle effect plays on them (with a breaking metal sound) , then hit LB. Oh, and you only get a small window to do it in. I mean, my guess is the designers didn’t want finishing moves to upset the game balance, but as is they are they’re totally marginalized.

Another cheap thing about the game is although I liked the Tower of Lost Souls, losing any floor except the first one is annoying. Especially if you’re going for chests. So, imagine you get to the last floor of a three floor set and you die. You didn’t get the chest on this floor or the previous one but you got it on the first floor. What are your options? Go back and replay the first floor in the set (even though you unlocked the chest), play the second floor and hope you get the chest, then the third floor and pray for chest. The designers should have let you start at any individual floor instead of having to replay entire sets of floors. Luckily, once you unlock a certain amount of achievements, all the equipment is available to buy and you don’t have to unlock the chests if you don’t want to.

Games like SC4 make me wish I was 15 years younger (except if that were the case I’d be locking myself in my bedroom and making Ivy jump up and down). I have the feeling that if I ever went online and played, I’d get my ass handed to me. Plus, being that SFII was the only fighting game I ever really got into, my instincts always tell me that back = block. I’m still learning that lesson in SC4, where only one button is dedicated to block (A). Plus, there’s multiple layers of blocking, called “impacts”, where if you press a certain direction and hit A at the same time your opponent lands their hit, you sort of stun them. If you do an impact on the same frame as when the enemy lands their attack, you do a “just impact” which stuns them more. After getting a guard impact every now and then in training, I found it basically impossible for me to do it in an match. I fear the more hardcore aspects of fighting games are out of my reach.

Besides DOA4 and Def Jam Icon, I can’t think of any fighting games out for the 360. As a guy who isn’t into fighting games, I had a blast playing SC4. Bandai-Namco did a great job making the game addicting on multiple levels for me. The fighting is fast paced and fun (even if cheap at times). Maybe I’ll try online out so I can get spam thrown by a 12 year old playing an Asteroth clone not wearing any pants and sporting a purple afro and a monocle…

One Response

  1. Mid-sis Says:

    Nice description. I don’t know what you call people who don’t play games much (actually never). Losers? Novices? Fraidy cats? I guess I’m all of those b/c there never seemed a game worthy of my precious life’s time. This one sounds like it would be worthy. However, that would require I actually buy a gaming system. Oh well. Interesting read anyways.

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