Soul Calibur IV Review

Platform: Xbox 360

A tale of souls and swords, eternally retold . . . with progressively skimpier outfits, heftier amounts of exposition, and cheesier commentary. You all remember Soul Calibur II (or Soul Calibur for you old school folks), right? Now those were some damn fun games. You also remember Soul Calibur III, right? Well, I do, and I have a bone to pick with that turd (though not today). Using these two games for comparison points, it’s safe to say that SC4 is more fun that getting raped with a jackhammer, but less fun than being on the other end of said jackhammer.

I certainly hope that an explanation of what a fighting game is would be unnecessarily to anyone reading this. Why did I just say that? I’m not sure, actually. It’s not like I’d explain it even if it was necessary. Regardless, I’ll at least say how Soul Calibur is different from other fighting games. Unlike in, say, Marvel vs. Capcom, you don’t jump around like a lunatic and press 30-something button combos to whip out a laser cannon the size of Belgium. Instead, you can encircle your opponent strictly on the horizontal plane, and your attacks actually take off portions of your opponent’s health bar in increments larger than nanometers. That said, like in most fighting games, button mashing will get you pretty far in Soul Calibur IV, so odds are that unless you spend weeks memorizing the move list instead of studying for your finals, the little 13 year-old shit spamming Kilik’s long-range attacks will have just as much of a chance of winning as you do.

Who’s Kilik, you ask? Well, answering that question would involve delving into the plot, something that I’d rather not do. Besides, it’s not that important. There are two swords: a good one made of crystal and wielded by a pretty boy knight and a bad one made of flesh with a giant eyeball in the middle that’s wielded by a crazy, demonic suit of living armor. Shit happens, people find excuses to get involved, and they proceed to beat the shit out of each other. There, are you satisfied? I’m not gonna go into detail on the characters because I frankly don’t give a damn about them, and neither should you.

The game throws the usual array of modes at you: story, arcade, online vs, and a special mode, among others. The throwaway special mode for this game is called the Tower of Lost Souls, but more on that later. The only thing special about the arcade mode is an inevitable battle against the Apprentice from that horrible Force Unleashed game. Regardless, he is one cheap motherfucker. Really now, there’s not much you can do when your opponent shoots lightning from his fingertips aside from rolling over and dying. On a different note, it seems as though the creators learned their lesson from Soul Calibur III and decided not to shoehorn in a stupid pseudo-RTS mode. Unfortunately, they took a page from Soul Calibur II’s Weapon Master mode instead, pitting you in combat against ridiculously powerful enemies with equally ridiculous conditions for unlocking shit, so if you want those cat ears, you’re gonna have to fight Nightmare on steroids.

My last paragraph was getting a bit long, so I’m going to make a new one even though there’s no big change in topic. If you’re a stickler about this sort of thing, you can suck my metaphorical balls. Moving on to SC4’s online mode, I can say that, at the very least, it works. To put it bluntly, I fucking hate the interface. It’s a bare-bones set of menus that offers very little in the way of details or options. You can search for a game automatically, which will almost always fail since the system looks around for roughly five seconds before it throws its hands up and claims there aren’t any open games. Well, a peak into manual matchmaking always proves that there are, in fact, many open games. Thus, you shouldn’t trust the computer because it tells filthy lies. Even more annoying is how the game deals with lag. Matches can only go as fast as the slowest player, so if you end up playing some kid in Uzbekistan on an AOL trial, it’s curtains for you. Therefore, I’d recommend playing online only if you plan to fight your friends or you’re one of those million or so bastards that want to show off that “totally original” Ichigo Kurosaki they made in character creation.

Speaking of which, character creation from Soul Calibur III makes a comeback, and there’s a fairly diverse selection of clothing, weapons, hairstyles, etc. Unfortunately, using this mode to create characters for the Tower of Lost Souls mode is an exercise in frustration and monotony. Each item has stats associated with it, including those that alter your damage, health, defense, and whatnot. The problem with trying to maximize your stats is twofold. For one, there’s no way to organize items by their attributes, forcing you to wade through the default list. Secondly, the game lags like hell every time you equip or unequip an item. A different problem stems from the fact that everything is really fucking expensive. Seriously, since when do cat ears cost 10,000 gold? God damn inflation. By the way, if you’re going to make a character, for Christ’s sake, don’t take Zasalamel’s style, slap on a bunch of black armor with skulls on it, and name your dude “Death”. It’s not cool, it’s gay. Really gay. Millions of Linkin Park-listening emo fucktarts had the same idea, and they’re not rockin’ either.

I know it’s been fun folks, but this long-overdue review must come to a close. Before that, however, I’d like to say one last thing: Soul Calibur IV isn’t a bad game by any stretch. At the same time, it is also supremely unrefined, which prevents it from reaching greatness. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to building a team of lizardmen dressed as the Village People.

Rating: 3/5

PS: Next up is Fable II. Hopefully, it’ll still be relevant by the time I finish the review.