Review: Soul Calibur V

I’ll just put my feelings out here at the start. Soul Calibur V is a game that will likely please fighting genre fans. It will also provide amusement and general fun to less fighting enthusiastic gamers, but you probably won’t love every part of it.

As a fighting game, it does well to stay within the realms of the franchise while updating the look and feel. Admittedly, several of the “new” characters, some the children of SCIV characters, seem almost like clones with just differing hair and clothing styles. But overall, you feel the progression of time from SCIV to SCV.

The story telling is interesting if a bit odd for a fighter. It makes me think of Street Fighter 4 a bit, with the panning camera view on a drawing. There’s much less of animated cut scenes, but rather a series of grungy drawings with sound and text put to them. At the beginning, I liked the art style and step away from traditional cut scenes, but after a bit playing through the story I had mixed feelings. It’s also episodic, where it moves in a linear fashion from one fight to the next with story filler in between. There’s something of a world map so you can move forward and backward between the fights you’ve already completed and the one you’re currently at.

Overall the story isn’t bad. There were a few points where I would think “it better not end here,” but in general it was merely alright and short. I didn’t really get too dragged into it and I guess my closet cynical side came out as I found several character attitudes just plain annoying. As a side note, the game didn’t ask me for a difficulty level when I started but when I lost a battle I could choose to replay on a lower difficulty.

Actual game play is pretty good. I admit to being a bit put off by the lack of a jump button, but the full 360 degree play where instead of just moving forward or backward you can step left or right helps counteract that. Rather, towards the player or away from the player. This may be partially due to my reliance on a jump option in other games and the time it takes to adjust to using all 360 degrees of movement instead. It helps get you out of tight spots. This is especially important since players can get cornered by someone just repeating the same move over and over again. That’s one of the things that really annoyed me as you get stuck just holding the guard button. There are special moves/combos that are considered unblockable, but they are relatively few so beware opponents that guard too much.

Several of the characters, such as Nightmare and Siegfried are overpowered. In most cases, they had a much longer reach for attacks. While they are slower, the strength of their attacks made up for it so that using less powerful characters requires a whole lot of skill or luck to win. I found it lessened my fun and joy in playing when opponents (AI or real) picked the above characters and then just used the same moves over and over again. The tactic made it easy to focus on winning instead of having fun.

You’ll also find that some of the characters have the strangest start fight and end fight phrases. There are some new and varied characters, but I felt slightly put out by the lack of really “new” characters. Sure the names, ages and appearance may have changed but by saying they were trained by previous game characters it seems more cookie-cutter like. But at the same time, I slightly enjoyed seeing the team make their versions on the students. So that’s maybe not so much a bad thing, depending on how loyal you are to the SC franchise.

The really fun part of the game comes in the character creation and multiplayer. Damn but making characters is fun. You still choose basic starting points from the already existing ones, but you can make changes to the bodies, voices and clothes. Having a gigantic and over-muscled guy with a squeaky voice and a bow on his head is hysterical. While it definitely doesn’t have the same level of customization that you would find in say a RPG, but it definitely gives gamers who want to shy away from the typical character choices.

You’ll still be forced to pick a fighting style of one of the usual SC characters and choose from their weapons, but there’s enough to change to make it fun. With some friends, we spent a lot of time just making different characters and laughing before testing them out in combat. In general, the multiplayer is pretty good. Except for issues mentioned above (see the story related area), you can enjoy playing. I’m not sure I can expand on it much more than that.

The Good

Character Creation

Different Story Telling Style

Good Music

Limited Variation From Soul Calibur Franchise

360 Combat Range

The Bad

Short Story

Combat Easily Exploitable (aka you can be cheap)

Too Similar to Past SC games?

The Final Word

I admit, for those that aren’t aware, that I am not a big fan of the fighting genre. But I still play and enjoy it. Soul Calibur V has elements that make it fun and enjoyable, but it may be more for house party challenges or fans of the fighting genre. If you’ve seen it (or played previous SC games) and are interested, definitely worth a try. Not too sure on the fighting genre or SC in general, this one may just be better to sit out. Regardless, SCV is a solid game for smackdown and shenanigans.

3.5/5

Copy of the game (Xbox 360 version) provided for the purpose of review.