#tragic backstory is allowed ive gotta give them something

[whatyoutaughtwasfear]

would love to read a crime novel where the main detective

a) has a positive relationship with their romantic partner

b) doesnt have a drug addiction

and c) has a healthy work/life balance and gets enough sleep

they're just normal. they're probably bad at their job

[archonreviews]

The Archon’s Review of SOULCALIBUR VI

SOULCALIBUR VI is the seventh installment of a venerable series of fighting games that started with Soul Edge. The series is created by BANDAI NAMCO Studios, more specifically by Project Soul. In the 16th century, rumors of a powerful sword, Soul Edge, have emerged. Many seek it, some to wield it in service to a greater cause, others in service to themselves. However, only a few know of the truth, that Soul Edge is an evil, soul-devouring blade that slays every wielder to comes into its possession. Fewer still know that Soul Edge has a twin, the spirit sword, Soul Calibur. In the midst of this turmoil, many warriors fight for good or evil, order or chaos, and future of the world and all its souls hangs in the balance...

While I was never very good at fighting games in general, I consider myself passing skilled in the specific arena of 3d fighters. I’ve played the shit out of Soulcalibur II, Soulcalibur III, and even Soulcalibur IV. When I heard that another one of these was coming out, I was rather quite pleased, especially since it’s out on Steam.

So, in case you haven’t heard, the Soul Calibur series is a tale of souls and swords, eternally retold. In this case, it really is a tale retold, as it is a soft reboot of Soul Calibur, which came after Soul Edge. What this really means is that we get the tragic backstories of certain characters as they were told in SC, plus the tragic backstories of other characters as they were told in SCII and SCIII, and some stories were changed entirely, just for funsies, as far as I can discern.

“But Archon,” I hear you ask, “this is a fighting game. Story would have been shunted faaar down the priorities list; why are you talking at length about it?” And to that I would ask you how you got into my house. But also, I would say that the Soul Calibur series has always put a whole heaping helping of plot and story in its titles, and that story is often... interesting, but not skillfully executed, leading to some... peculiarities.

I’ll start with the main story. They call it “Libra of the Soul”, and it’s called such because it uses a set of scales (or “Libra”) as a metaphor for their moral choice system. So you’d think that if they’re naming the main campaign after the moral choice system, then that system would be executed well. You would be wrong, sadly. Basically, what happens is that every so often, usually after a fight, you’ll be presented with a binary moral choice. Some of them make sense, such as “Steal this defeated bandit’s weapon, or tussle his hair and tell him not to do bad things anymore”. But the decision that sets the tone, the very first one, in fact, is completely bonkers. See, you’re in a dream sequence, and you’re presented with two swords, one golden and one azure. You’re told that the golden one represents freedom and the desire to forge your own fate, while the azure one represents a desire to impose order and harmony on an inherently chaotic world; you’re then asked to choose one. Naturally, because I am a red-blooded, eagle-fucking, burrito bowl-eating American patriot, I picked the golden sword, after which the game literally told me that I was “Aligned with the darkness.” Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that wanting to forge my own destiny made me a bastard! And there are plenty of other choices that the game boils down to either “good” or “evil”, despite being more complicated than that. Worse yet, the post-game content, as far as the morality goes, is literally just picking from those fucking swords over and over again. So why is it even here if it’s so poorly presented? Well, the only things of substance that seem to change if you’re good or evil is which of the two plot-important swords your character wields in certain cutscenes, and a particular line your character spouts after a post-plot optional fight. The game will tell you that certain optional fights are only available to characters who are either good or evil, but I don’t buy that, frankly. And certain weapons have an increased rate of scoring critical hits depending on your alignment, but realistically, you can just wield the one with the biggest average damage and you’ll be fine.

(This question about fate is the only moral choice in the game with a neutral option, and frankly, it isn’t even really a moral choice, in my humble opinion.)

While Libra is the story of your OC (more on that in a bit), the game also infuses the main cast with individual stories of their own. And it even does something quite revolutionary for fighting games: it creates a central canon and has the cast all tie their plots around it, so that you don’t have a case where theoretically one character’s ending is just as canon as another’s, unlike most fighting games I’ve played and seen. However, this creates a couple of glaring issues. First, it means that the main cast can’t be fighting each other all the time, because they’re all in different places and times. To solve this issue, a not-insignificant number of plot relevant fights are against total randos who contribute nothing to the story. This contributes to the second issue, that is to say that any character’s plot outside of the main canon feels tacked-on and unnecessary. Most of the characters don’t even interact with the main macguffins at all. In addition, many chapters are extended dialogues instead of fights, which seems extremely misguided seeing as how we are here for the fighting. One particular instance that really got my goat was the character Zasalamel, who’s entire plot is given via monologue, without a single fight. It honestly made me wonder what I was even there for.

(Now, when the game decides to go full cutscene, it’s pretty stunning)

So a fighting game has a poor plot; and in other news, bears remain Catholic. I bring attention to it, however, because SCVI just has a shitton of plot, more plot than is socially acceptable for a fighting game to have. This makes me wonder something. A thought, you see, crept into my brain pan as I traveled across the world map of Libra, stopping intermittently for plot-relevant fights and sidequests which I had little personal investment in. That thought being, “Would Project Soul be more comfortable just making RPG’s?” I mean, the Libra mode has all the trappings of an RPG: an expansive world map, random battles, tons of sidequests, weapon and item drops, a levelling system, and expansive scope, a binary moral choice system. And yet it was bound, or maybe cursed, to be a fighting game. So, Project Soul, if you guys happen to read this ever: Would you guys be more comfortable making RPG’s? Because I can’t speak for other people, but I would play the shit out of a Soul Calibur RPG. Just something to think about during the next company meeting when some bigwig from BANDAI NAMCO is droning on about how you’ve gotta make Sophitia twenty percent more “milfy” or how you’ve gotta make Siegfried sixty percent more emo.

So, lets veer away from plot and get more mechanical. I’ll start with the character creation; and let me just say that I’m actually more mixed on it now that I’ve had time to reflect. When you first create a character, the game gives you a list of fantasy races to choose from (my idea from when I was like, 13 years old, but go off I guess), and you can be as fat or as skinny as you want to be, and you can modulate your character’s voice to be however you want it to be. All in all, first impressions were good. However, I was disappointed to learn that you couldn’t be a female lizardperson. In fact, several races lack female options, which really irritated me, because I had an awesome idea for a lizardwoman character, but I couldn’t use the female clothing options to make that idea a reality, so I just had to use male clothing options and headcanon my own OC as a female, even though it said “Male” on her sheet. What chuffed me even more was the fact that you could have a female skeleton, skeletons being the one entity I could imagine skipping out on gender designations for. In addition, they still havn’t brought back the custom character styles from SCIII yet, nor have they allowed you to make your own, forcing you to use a pre-existing style, which, as has been stated before by better critics than I (notice me Yahtzee), is basically just crafting a custom model for an already existing character. This wouldn’t be a problem if they just brought back the custom styles from SCIII or let us create our own style in the vein of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. However, the creator may be more robust than I give it credit for here; I did manage to make some characters that I thought were pretty awesome, and plenty of people have bent it toward the ever-noble goal of transplanting Pokemon into the Soul Calibur universe. Basically, if you want to create a fun and interesting-looking character, great. If you want to have a custom moveset, or if you wanna make a big-tittied lizard play a female lizardperson, so sorry.

(Seeing this screen actually brought me no small amount of joy.)

Now, what about the mechanics of play? Well, this is the reason I, despite all my earlier criticism, really like this game. The fighting is solid, each move having appropriate weight and impact. The controls are responsive and smooth, even at high graphical settings (online play notwithstanding). Guard impacting makes a triumphant return after its apparent disappearance in SCV, although, it seems like the timing on it is a little more lenient than in previous installments. Soul Charging is its own little cutscene and knock-back effect, instead of SCII, where I remember Soul Charging being a liability that no one used. There’s also this new thing called a Reversal Edge, where you and your opponent both press a button and the person who pressed the best button wins. Okay, it’s a little bit more complex than that, as when the two players tie, they do it again, except verticals win, except if both players did a vertical, in which case the instigator wins, so the whole process ends up being like speed Rock-Paper-Scissors with extra rules. People seem mixed on whether this is a welcome edition to the formula or if it’s pointless and dumb, but I personally like it. If nothing else, it’s flashy as fuck. The move list also seems slightly more simplistic, although that could just be down to me finding all my favorite moves early.

Now for small potatoes and nitpicks! They changed many of the voice actors since SCIV, although, since I didn’t play SCV, I wouldn’t know if these are recent changes. While I really didn’t dig most of the choices, I will admit that Siegfried’s VA was spot on, capturing a sort of perfect middle ground between tortured hero and lovable wangsty-man. I remember liking the old announcer more too, although I fully admit to having nostalgia goggles on for that.

The amount of objectification of women in this game is frankly intense, although, if you’ve ever seen the models for the characters of Ivy the dominatrix or Taki the ninja, that shouldn’t surprise you. What may surprise you is that clothing damage is back, which is weird, because while in SCIV, clothing damage had a purpose, as certain pieces of clothing informed certain stats, it doesn’t seem to serve any mechanical purpose here. However, it does mean that the men can get in on the sexualization action too. In fact, I’ll tell you all a little secret: Raphael, the fencer, has a move that can tear off all the clothes of any other character, leaving them in their skivvies. Step one: Soul charge. Step two: Use the Triple Botta In Tempo (forward+vertical, then vertical vertical vertical vertical...). If you’ve completed step one, and the enemy hasn’t blocked, Raphael will do this kind of Zorroesque maneuver and wham bam thank you mam, all your opponents’ clothes fall off. Do it on Mitsurugi the samurai and...

(Both of these characters are only based on the mentioned characters, but I hope it demonstrates my point. On the left, my Raphael-style character.)

One last point, and one that’s been made to death: the guest characters. While Geralt from The Witcher series made sense, being at least aesthetically consistent with the other characters, BANDAI NAMCO are apparently going to put in 2B from Nier: Automata, and frankly, that doesn’t make much sense to me, but I may very well be in the majority on this, so I won’t say too much more about it, since this gripe is even more subjective than usual.

To sum, would I recommend Soul Calibur VI? I would say so, if for no other reason than that the game mechanics are solid, and frankly, if I take the nostalgia goggles off, I have to admit that this one is the best Soul Calibur so far. In addition, this character creator is pretty robust, if you don’t mind not being able to do very specific things, such as making a big tittied lizard. While the unnecessary sexualization and weirdly grandiose story can bog things down for some, I’d still recommend it for the gameplay alone.

(No big tittied lizards, but Pokemon/Human hybrids are okay. Sure.)