Soul Calibur V
In the Street Fighter vs Mortal Kombat debate I just shrug, except on odd occasions I don’t bother too much with fighters. But Soul Calibur does hold a place in my heart; its Mario Kart approach allows newcomers to go toe-to-toe with veterans and still have a reasonable chance of a victory. The previous instalment was well received, but the general consensus was that more had to change than just a visual overhaul to keep the franchise relevant. Does Soul Calibur V up the ante or just Ivy’s bust size?
The story continues the history of the cursed sword’s soul edge and soul calibur. A new character, Patroklos, is the centre of attention for most of the three to four hour narrative. Set 17 years after the events of Soul Calibur IV, in 18th century Hungary, Patroklos serves under Graf Dumas in his quest to rid the world of the malefestation caused by Soul Edge. His ambition, to avenge the killing of his mother Sophitia, a series stalwart, and kidnapping of his sister Pyrrha.
The tale unfolds with a combination of parchment etchings, with voice work on top, and in-game cinematics. There’s little originality to the plot, Graf Dumas might as well stroke his beard and utter an evil laugh as it’s blatantly obvious he will be the puppet of Soul Edge. The spoken dialogue varies from under to over done with a combination of actors seemingly looking for a part in Batman: The Animated Series and others just clocking in for the cash. It distinctly reminds me of the intro to Soul Calibur “Transcending history and the world, a tale of souls and swords eternally retold”, you certainly won’t feel any rush to retell this story.
The controls will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played one of the previous titles. Despite iterations on most of the major platforms, as well as historic ones such as the Gamecube and Dreamcast, the basic horizontal attack, vertical attack, kick and block layout are unchanged. This same design translates to character movement, the biggest addition is double-tapping directions to allow a quick dodge.
The visuals have also had a nice upgrade, new backdrops are very detailed, but this is soon lost as the camera zooms in for the fight. To add visual variety some stages feature areas to knock opponents into or off which then open up a new section.
With a fighting game the expectation is that the single player will be training grounds for multiplayer. Soul Calibur V’s is for the most part tediously easy; failure is really not an option. Whilst battles have been expanded to first-to-three victories and multi-opponent battles have also returned, if you fail half way through you simply restart at that combatant. The only real challenge on standard difficulty was with Nightmare, which is the sole time you have to really use the new dodge and employ some strategy.
Once you take the battle online however, either from the character roster (mixing fan favourites with re-skins of other oldies) or using exclusives, such as Ezio Auditore da Firenze from the Assassin’s Creed series, there’s plenty of challenge. Strangely if you want to practice offline the training mode didn’t unlock until after some of the campaign had been completed. Character creation also returns with further additions: boasting adjustable character heights, new facial effects and weapon customisations, with the fighting style of Devil Jin from the Tekken series exclusive to characters created in this mode.
Whilst the force of Soul Calibur IV might have been dampened, Soul Calibur V is a good dip-in-and-out fighter, just don’t go in expecting a substantial single player experience.
