#12 Soul Calibur IV

The next step towards myself renting Civilization Revolution took a little detour and with me changing my lovefilm plan to save a bit of money, Soul Calibur IV will be my last rented game for the foreseeable future. The reason being there are the likes of Fable 2 and Fallout 3, huge RPGs that I'll lose many a hour to, not to mention other upcoming releases like Gears of War 2. Then, factor in some of the games I've yet to really play through, Grand Theft Auto 4, The Orange Box, Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise, and it's obvious that I won't have the time to continue renting games that I'm interested in, just not enough to purchase. It's a shame that the last one of these is Soul Calibur IV...

Now, one point I need to stress, and probably the most important thing to take away from this, is that I don't like fighting games. Now that may be a result of me being generally poor at them which I'll get on to later - consequently this "review-of-sorts" will probably be on the short side.

Before I tear apart the mechanics and all the "different modes" of the game, a quick note on the visuals. With fighting games the immediate foreground is the only area of concern and with this being a relatively small area to render, fighting games have always been very beautiful and Soul Calibur is no exception. All of your (presumably) favourite characters are back along with a couple of new characters, including some Star Wars stars (see later...)

Pick a dude and fight a different dude. Sometimes you may have 2,3 or even 4 dudes in a row to kill, and you may be lucky to have one (or more) backup dude, repeat ad infinitum.

One notable feature of this game is the character creator, something I looked into after giving the story and arcade modes a quick go. Although it's understandable, the character you create is effectively a re-skinned clone of one of the existing characters in-game. There's not the option to build your own move-list unfortunately. Despite that, the look of your character is very customisable, and new weapons, clothes, accessories are unlocked as you make progress through the game. That being said once I had made a half-naked, busty chick with a squeaky voice, my interest in the character creator had subsided so I moved back into the main game.

So Soul Calibur offers a number of modes: Story, Arcade, Tower of Souls and then there's the online play as well, but in reality all this is the same thing over and over again. Pick a dude and fight a different dude. Sometimes you may have 2,3 or even 4 dudes in a row to kill, and you may be lucky to have one (or more) backup dude, repeat ad infinitum.

The main reason I don't like these style of games is the the tedium of going through looking up a character's move list, returning to the game and I'm there staring at the pad trying to perfect the diagonally-down X, X, Y move and getting frustrated that my character is instead performing the forward X, X move every time. Add to that the time spent looking at the pad trying to get the timing down, only to miss the AI character take off 50% of my health - it does not lead to an enjoyable experience.
If I ever pull off a very cool looking move, it really is a fluke and whilst the more extravagant combos do reward you with better looking and more damaging moves, I can never repeat them again - and that is more of a reflection of my own "playstyle", not necessarily a flaw with the game.

Something I can't stand about this genre are the pre-fight exchanges and Soul Calibur is no exception. Expect your character to taunt their opponent "I will have victory" or "get outta of my way!" are prime examples, or seemingly random lines - I find it hard to take seriously, and it's something which could easily be dropped. Are these build-up cutscenes there to build "drama" or are they masking loading times? Speaking of which, the game has surprisingly long loading times - definitely a game that will benefit from the "rip to hard drive" feature coming in the new dashboard, sorry the New Xbox Experience, sorry my bad...

Moving on and the game also boasts the inclusion of characters from Star Wars. The Apprentice from the recent The Force Unleashed game and Yoda (Xbox 360) or Darth Vader (PS3) are the included cast. There's no way to convince me of a cohesive story why these guys are in the Soul Calibur Universe. I played through the story with Yoda for the achievement, there was something about a rift caused by the force that teleported Yoda through, WTF?! The apprentice seems a little overpowered during my play through, he was consistently the roadblock I hit during the Arcade, plus his mutterings of "kill" and "die!" were pretty lame - maybe that's why I lost my concentration and subsequently the bouts...

It sounds like I really ripped into this game and I'll reiterate what I said at the start "I don't like fighting games". I have friends who are fans of the genre and the Soul Calibur series so I could just be a button-mashing idiot that can't handle more than four buttons. The test comes to how often you come back to playing the game and with this being a rented game, I wanted to get my monies worth, but every time I loaded up the game, the same mechanic stared back at me, only with increasingly sophisticated AI which can easily trounce my very "one-dimensional button-mash and hope for the best" mentality. Whilst I usually try a rented game for a week, (sometimes longer) I had to cut it short as there was nothing in this game for me that enticed me back.