Soulcalibur IV PS3

Fighting games. I'm not that big a fan of them even though I really looked up to Street Fighter 2 back in the day (probably more because of its amazing character design and awesome graphics, which still to this day make me smile whilst playing it on the Wii Virtual Console). I've never been against beat-em-ups but it's just not the genre I'm most interested in. Nevertheless, I've almost always bought the newest Tekken and Soulcalibur games because they do represent the top tier in the genre and the character design has been phenomenal. Soulcalibur's newest version still has the oddly stupid stories and dumb voice acting but at least the character selection menu's music is great. It's also still about the weapons as much as it was before and you won't find any boxers here.

In Soulcalibur IV (SCIV) you can progress sort of naturally through the game and the difficulty curve is excellent. So, I've chopped up the game into PHASES below each one getting more complex and meaning you learn more about the game and become more involved. That's part of the reason I love SCIV, they developer really knew what they were doing. It attracts beginners in the genre as well as hardcore fighters.

PHASE 0.

First of all you notice the game looks absolutely amazing. Nothing to add to that, it looks great and the animations are extremely smooth. It felt really good to finally play a real fighting game after a long time with no new note-worthy releases in the more hardcore sector.

Basically you could go and do some training first off. Not everyone does it in the beginning but that's why this is Phase 0. You can practise whenever you want and the practise mode is excellent, unlike Smash Bros Brawl, which I wrote about a while ago. You get to view lists of all your chosen character's moves, you can even see the character perform the move and what it should look like, you can set up your opponent with simple scripts so you can test out attack patterns, your health always replenishes thus making it impossible for you to die except in certain arenas due to a ring out, and so on. If you wanted you could set your opponent to the hardest difficulty level and keep fighting for 30 minutes. In the end you'd have a much better understanding of the speed the game moves at and you'd basically become a better player. Training is actually worth being in this game.

PHASE 1.

SCIV starts off easy by letting you play through Story mode on NORMAL difficulty and thinking "I'm not too bad!", whilst in reality NORMAL seems to be the "ultra-easy" one. You just feel like you're better because it's not called ultra-easy! You get a lot of in-game currency for completing story mode (which is a short 5 stage romp through some bad guys in regular 1 on 1 fights) and thus you can open up all the "locked" character pretty fast by buying them after a few playthroughs. This is how they reel you into the game and get you familiar with the system. At this stage it's still button mashing that'll get you through.

In each stage of Story Mode you have a certain amount of bad guys up against you ranging from 1 to 4. They could have special abilities too such as preventing you from doing grab moves or something. It's an interesting approach because you have to fight these bad guys in a row with the same health bar. You might have an ally or two to accompany you though at some points and those you can switch with at any time. The other character rests while not fighting and regenerates health slowly. You also can't switch too fast between them because of a timer but it's quite fast in replenishing itself so that's not a concern at all really.

PHASE 2.

After completing Story Mode on normal difficulty for all the characters you start wanting more from the game. There are a few options, move on to Tower of Lost Souls (yes, the name is generic and sucks) or go for Arcade. Generally I would think people are scared of the Story Mode's HARD setting still at this point so they go for something else but little do they know that Arcade Mode is actually comparable in difficulty for the last fights. Arcade mode is a traditional fight against 9 other characters in stages in-between which your health does replenish.

Tower of Lost Souls is actually more interesting but still generally a simple trick to make the normal 1 on 1 fighting (or Active Matching Battle, AMB, where other characters can swap in whilst another regenerates health) seem different. It works well enough and just like in Smash Bros Brawl, the Subspace Emissary seems like a good idea but doesn't work, I'm happy they didn't go that route with SCIV. They focused on what works best. It's just a different way of looking at things like the world map in Soulcalibur 2.

PHASE 3.

During the end of Phase 2 you'll get more interested in the Character Creator. Some people have no doubt tried it out in the very beginning already but you're not going to get a lot out of it until you've played the game for a while first to understand how everything works and what's really needed statistic-wise. Sure you can make a cute anime inspired chick with a huge sword but if the armor statistics don't work then the character will be useless.

So, what you need is to level up one of the character styles (level 9 is the max and can be achieved with a few hours of play). This is one of the interesting things you start noticing that the manual lacks. The manual is in fact extremely vague. There are good tips to get your started but the way Soul Crushes and Critical Finishes are explained makes you think they're the same thing. There's a lot of stuff in the game that's not easy to understand and the logic seems far off but once you put some time into it everything becomes clear (or search around the Internet a bit, even with the lack of good FAQs on Gamefaqs you can find some stuff through Google). Anyway, once you level up a character's style (note, the character doesn't level up, his or her fighting style does) you can use that style on your own characters (or modify an existing one) and with a higher level style, buy better skills for your character. There are lots of different skills all placed under nice World of Warcraft type icons (yeah icons aren't a WoW thing, it's just that these ones look like they could be direct spell icons from WoW).

Learning the character creator is a task on its own and it took a while for us to figure out that when choosing an armour piece the game shows your statistics as if you didn't have any armour on for that slot as opposed to what you would have if you replaced your current one. It gets even more complicated when certain armour pieces overlap one another graphically and thus can't be worm at the same time removing the other. This makes it look like you're gaining a percentage of health whilst actually losing a numerical value. Would have been better if they simply made the conflicting armour piece's graphic turn itself off automatically but still let you keep it on for the statistics it provides. But it seems the pieces that cause overlaps have better statistics anyway.

The menus are OK for a console but seeing only 3 pieces of armour at a time is a bit limiting for an HD resolution.

PHASE 4.

The requirements for Honor awards become more central to play because you get new items for your custom characters with each 5 Honor bonuses you collect. There are things like "Clear story mode with Darth Vader", "Clear arcade mode" and so on. They range from the easy to insanely hard and some of the descriptions in the Honor (Rewards) menu itself are too vague. For example, most of them keep track of your progress like the Honor for doing counters, which shows how many you currently have, whilst some like acquiring all the available weapons for 5 of your characters doesn't show any progress even though you've already acquired all for 2 characters for example. Also, it doesn't say anywhere that there are 8 weapons per character (which is fine because some things can be left a secret for the player to discover) or that you actually have to buy the weapons too and simply unlocking the right to buy them isn't enough (this is silly because once you buy all the 8 weapons for one character and don't see the Honor slot for the reward updating, you assume that's not how you do it, luckily the Internet had some helpful forum posts through Google).

Custom characters also become very important for the Tower of Lost Souls gameplay mode which is quite fun. You progress up floors fighting difficult enemies with 1 health bar as briefly mentioned above. There are secret "chests" on each floor and tips on how to obtain them. The requirement could be something like "switch character 3 times" or "block 5 attacks". The thing is that they get harder from Floor 11 onwards and without custom skills set up for a character you've made, you're going to have a harder time. With custom characters you could also have more than 1 health bar of health but this requires that character's fighting style to be of higher level and for you to have unlocked a few Honor rewards to get to choose the really nice pieces of armour.

You start learning more about countering and blocking at this Phase too and basically should have realized a while ago that you can't survive some fights without moving a lot and watching carefully what your opponent does. There are lots of mechanics that become apparent here such as blocking at the exact correct time and stuns through such manoeuvres. There is also the Soul Gauge which is a ball next to your health. It starts off green but can turn blue (good) if you attack a lot or red (bad) if you play passively and just hold your guard up. The only function it really has is to speed up gameplay so that nobody wants to go to the red side. The reason for this is if you're completely red and your health bar starts blinking red too, you go into a state called Soul Crush, the moment your opponent breaks 1 piece of armour from you and presses L1, they perform a Critical Finish and you die immediately, no matter what your health is at the time. This isn't explained well enough in the manual but it might be because it's wanted to be kept a mysterious thing. I just found it more annoying because L1 did nothing by itself when the opponent was simply flashing red. This brings us to armour which each character has 3 pieces of (high, mid and low). Repetitive attacks to a certain area will break your opponents armour from that slot or in Soul Crush mode the armour breaks a lot easier.

PHASE 5.

Many people will try online mode earlier but it might be best to go and play with the real pros only later after you've learned to play the game a bit. However, at some point you'll want to go online due to the few Honor rewards you can get from it (such as playing a set amount of games and winning some, etc.).

I've heard about online mode being laggy but I haven't had any problems with it yet. I haven't played it too much though but everything has worked fine and it's always nice to set up a quick game against someone in another country. You can see statistics for players and leaderboards and you can use your own characters which is great. It's not very complex but there are enough options to get you by and it matches up people fast which is extremely important. People also have a level there so you can play and win to progress along and the system matches you up against someone closest to your level from those available. I've fought against people 20 levels higher than me who go down easily so either they didn't focus as much that time or the levels don't work as well but it does seem fair because you only gain a small amount of "experience" per win.

Update: Been playing online a lot more recently and there are a few things that bug me. First of all it seems like you can't level up without actually winning a fight even though you do get points ("experience" if you will) for certain things like first attack and so on. The opponents seem to be really difficult during the night but it's probably because only the hardcore play then. But it doesn't matter when you play, you rarely get matched up with someone near your own rank (at least at the lower levels). I don't know if the system matches players up but I'd hope it does. The highest level player on the leaderboards is around level 200 and I've been put in fights against people 100 levels higher than me, so that gives you an idea of the "fairness" of some fights. However, the queue times are quite short possibly because the system doesn't wait so long to find someone perfect to match you up against. I would've wanted an automated "re-search" each time it fails to find a group for you though because currently you'll have to choose the "search for game" function manually every time you're late to enter a game (meaning the technical side of it, not related to the player's speed). Also, the whining about having lag doesn't seem to hold any water, I've played over 100 games and in only 2 of them was there lag. And I'm on 2mb WiFi. You really start to learn to play the game after honing your skills on one character you like online for a long time. The levels are spread out between normal games and games where you can use your custom equipment and skill setups. Mostly it's best to go for simply 200% health. I find it odd you can't play tag team games with your friends on the same console against people online though. It would be fun to switch around. Maybe it's a technical limitation, who knows. Also, sometimes people seem to disconnect mysteriously after I win. I'm not sure if it actually counts as a victory then or not, maybe there's info around the net about it. It seems bugged in some way at least because right now the Honor rewards screen has a different number for "Current record" on wins as opposed to what my online account says. All in all, online play is quite fun and even though the levelling up system is fairly weird (in addition to the above, if someone 50 levels higher than you wins you in a fight, they still get full experience points sometimes taking them halfway through the next level already after levelling up, which is odd in a way. Doesn't the levelling slow down later on?) it all works quite nicely.

Everything in SCIV is related to gathering some bonuses and making your custom characters better and thus performing better. The character creation UI isn't the best and seems a bit confusing at first (and why do you have to have text directly on TOP of the character when choosing whether to buy new pieces of armor? You can't see the character well then!). Finally after you've cleared the entire game you can keep playing random matches online when you feel like some good fighting. I really love the game and being able to change the absolutely terrible voice overs from English to the original Japanese ones is excellent. Although hearing Darth Vader say something that's not in English seems odd. The game is an excellent fighter for those looking for some in-depth skull bashing with weapons.

There's one empty character slot between Darth Vader and The Apprentice in the character selection screen so I'm hoping it's for Yoda in a future DLC, but people have been wondering about it all over the net. Speaking of DLCs, the XBOX360 version of the game got a patch with new items for all regions but the PS3 version patch hasn't been released in Europe yet, which is frustrating as hell. I have no idea why it's not possible to release it here too when it's out in other regions already and also on the XBOX360 here. If the reason has anything to do with money, release schedules or bureaucratic crap then I'm going to be pretty pissed off. I highly doubt there's any technical issues with releasing a simple DLC such as this seeing as it's already out in the US.