8-23-08

Dave bought Soul Calibur 4 for the 360. Namco's major accomplishments with this one are as follows:

- Yun-Seong has been turned into a gay pirate. This is not a joke.
- Ivy's boobs have gotten even bigger.
- All of the characters' eyes are now blood-rimmed, as though they'd just been snorting coke. With their eyes.
- Cervantes has a beard. He is actually now the hottest character in the game.

The excellent story mode of Soul Calibur 2 is apparently a relic of the past, as the designers seem to have spent most of their time pandering to repressed teenagers by making all of the characters hotter (see "Cervantes" and "beard," above) and giving them bigger boobs if at all possible, and by making it trivial to unlock every single character within .5 seconds of inserting the disc.

True to the spirit of the shitfest that was Soul Calibur 3, a bunch of new features have been added that add nothing whatsoever to gameplay, such as an "equipment destruction" system which is really just an excuse to transform the characters' already revealing clothing into even more revealing clothing as the battle progresses. Men lose their shirts and fight barechested. Women are much better about keeping their shirts on, but all of their clothing becomes tattered and jagged as large strips of it are ripped off. I wonder how many repressed teenagers will subtly throw matches with female characters in an effort to see how much ass they can glimpse. (Answer: quite a lot, and I recommend Sophitia.)

Also in line with Soul Calibur 3, everybody's still a bit slower than they were in Soul Calibur 2. This means you can usually attack into a blocking opponent and still have time to block their counterattack, making combat a tedious block-centric affair where the only way to deal damage is to hope that your opponent does an attack at the same time you do and that your attack randomly supersedes theirs. To be fair, there is now a "soul gauge" that eventually flashes red if you block too much, at which point the next attack from your opponent will pierce your block and send you into a state of "soul crush." But the inclusion of this feature is essentially an admission on the part of the developers that Soul Calibur 3 was a piece of shit, because Soul Calibur 2 was perfectly fine without any such shenanigans. Moreover, the soul gauge recharges so quickly that the threat of soul crush is rarely relevant. Things like this make me wonder why game designers are so reluctant to, you know, keep doing what works.

Also in line with Soul Calibur 3, characters perform fewer moves than they did in Soul Calibur 2. In 2, pretty much any button combination + direction resulted in a different move. In 3 and 4, many of the combinations are either redundant or do nothing whatsoever. For a game that's (let's face it) resolved primarily by button mashing -- or, okay, intelligent button mashing -- the dramatic decrease in combat variety continues to be disappointing.

So in short, if you're wondering, "Have they found a way to make a Soul Calibur game that isn't strictly worse than Soul Calibur 2?", the answer is still no.