Set seventeen years after Soul Calibur IV, Soul Calibur V introduces a number of new characters to the roster and offers new gameplay tweaks and online enhancements.
That chart does a good job at summing up the storyline, really. One glance at where all the arrows are pointing tells you EVERYONE WANTS THE SOUL EDGE. The end.
Haha.
Despite everything, I actually like Soul Calibur's storyline... even if that's just a stubborn hold-over feeling at this point. I don't think it's bad so much as it's been mismanaged. For instance, SCIV didn't move the plot forward at all... with the only focus being that inconsequential new villain. The bulk of character development is done via exchanges in "fated encounters" and whatnot, but they've pretty much been saying the same things since SCII. I think they either need to dial it back and stop taking themselves so seriously, or go all-in and make a real story mode. I'd probably settle for what they did in SCIII though... with hopefully more unique paths per character.
Either way, since the main issue is how much rehashing has been going on, I think this generational gap will be good for the series... at least as its plot is concerned.
@AwesomeAquaman said:
@Superkenon: Unless he had a child with Seung Mina.
Yikes, I didn't consider that one. That'd weird me out, since Mina plays more of a mentor/older sister role to Yunsung. I never really felt like they should be a couple.
Hwang's supposed to be Mina's love anyway. Now that I think about it, I can't remember if it was ever concluded what happened to him. I wonder what the odds are of a zanbatou-wielding child of Mina and Hwang.
Bart Simpson has been a 10 year old for 23 years. I am sure people wouldn't mind if he was replaced in The Simpson's by 33 year old Bart's similar looking kid.
I can't believe this game is as conservative as it is. They keep trimming the ladies' costumes, they keep looking like... well, a slightly more polished SC4 and most importantly, they don't even keep playing like SC, they had to go and borrow supers, EXs and the overall pacing from Capcom games as well.
The only thing changed here has been all that time-consuming single player content.
Ugh. It's so painful to watch the fighting game genre unravel again, just twice as fast as the first time. We're back to the "still quite popular, but only in the tournament scene, with casual gamers slowly dropping away stage". We'll be im "just over-designed b-list Japanese games" stage in no time. In fact, if not for the fact that it's an American game, I'd Argue Skullgirls launching marks the beginning of that era.
Here's what I want a fighting game to be: accessible, solid in the fundamentals, reliant on timing and strategy rather than combo memorization and, very importantly, not using a visual design that makes me turn the game off in shame if anybody else steps into the room.
Here's what I want a fighting game to be: accessible, solid in the fundamentals, reliant on timing and strategy rather than combo memorization and, very importantly, not using a visual design that makes me turn the game off in shame if anybody else steps into the room.
Ummm, that's exactly what Soul Calibur V is (outside of visual design, I have no idea what your tastes are). Also, the girls in this game are generally more clothed than they were in SCIV.
EDIT: Actually, ALL fighting games are more reliant on timing and strategy rather than combo memorization. It doesn't matter how amazing your combo is if you can't figure out the spacing, frame-traps and mix-ups necessary to land the first hit.
EDIT 2: AND all the crazy combos in any fighting game are 100% reliant on timing, often with multiple inputs that have a 1/60th of a second timing window.
Basically my only memories of SC3 are making extremely gay versions of my friends with the dancer moveset, and then showing them to them with a smug look on my face gloating "haha that's you!". Also, they did the same to me haha
@StarvingGamer: I'm sorry but the 3rd one was the last that was truly fun to play, 4 and 5 are just starving for content, and are generally bland and uninteresting.
And the unbalanced comment can be fairly levelled at 4 and 5 also, any game where I can succeed perfectly well by mashing the throw button is unbalanced in my eyes.
@SerHulse: I can see that if you're coming from a casual/single-player standpoint. I'm in it for the competition and SCIII had the most imbalanced cast with drastically disparate high and low tiers. SCIV was significantly more balanced, despite the fact that Hilde managed to raise quite a few hackles. Hopefully SCV will prove to be equally viable as a competitive fighter.
@StarvingGamer: Oh I try to get into the competitive, but after thinking about it I guess the reasons I prefer SC3 are mainly the sub-mode Chronicles of the Sword and in SC2: Conquest and Weapon Master Mode.
SC4 sorely missed similar cool side modes featuring just a boring battle tower, something SC5 didn't address either with what is basically a "Boss Rush" filling in.
Here's what I want a fighting game to be: accessible, solid in the fundamentals, reliant on timing and strategy rather than combo memorization and, very importantly, not using a visual design that makes me turn the game off in shame if anybody else steps into the room.
Ummm, that's exactly what Soul Calibur V is (outside of visual design, I have no idea what your tastes are). Also, the girls in this game are generally more clothed than they were in SCIV.
EDIT: Actually, ALL fighting games are more reliant on timing and strategy rather than combo memorization. It doesn't matter how amazing your combo is if you can't figure out the spacing, frame-traps and mix-ups necessary to land the first hit.
EDIT 2: AND all the crazy combos in any fighting game are 100% reliant on timing, often with multiple inputs that have a 1/60th of a second timing window.
Guess we got different mileage out of SCV, you and I. What I've played is a combo-heavy fighting game less friendly to button mashers and that has characters that went from this:
For the record, when I complain about combos being a bad thing I don't just mean dial-a-combos as in MK games. I mean hit-box tracking, frame-counting combos in the vein of MvC3 that require memorization of button inputs, timing and positioning. Those things raise the barrier of entry and turn anybody not willing to play at a competitive level away. Look at SFIV instead: rock solid basics, shorter combos. If you can make the rival pay for their mistakes with even a jab and avoid making defensive mistakes of your own, you can win without having to remember a single button combination. THAT is how you keep fighting games relevant.
Soul Calibur used to be good at that, but they gave in to the tournament crowd and sped it up, made it more combo-reliant and completely ruined it in the process.
@NoelVeiga: Outside of very rare circumstances, the extent of a combo in SCV is some sort of stagger/pop up into a single followup for one or two extra hits. Air control makes anything beyond that impossible. This is the same as it's always been in Soul Calibur since the beginning. Yes, you can use meter to power certain moves but that adds a lot of flash and very, very little damage most of the time. Soul Calibur is still 90% pokes and 10% openings that lead to a combo that does, at most, 3 pokes worth of damage. I just spent an hour watching some of the best European SC players steaming in a tournament, and I was seeing 2-3 hit combos at most. If professional players aren't doing crazy big-hitting combos, there aren't any crazy big-hitting combos to be done.
Also SFIV is a terrible comparison to make. One of the reasons I stopped playing SFIV as much as MvC3 is because it's significantly easier to perform strong combos in Marvel. The typical SFIV combo involves multiple 1-2 frame links whereas most Marvel combos rely on cancels with 10+ frame timing windows and the occasional 5-6 frame link.
I'll agree that they sped it up a bit, but I think it's for the better. In SCIV the game was balanced so far in the defensive player's favor that, against experienced players, attacking first was essentially suicide. SCV still offers very strong defensive tools, but they are more resource/skill dependent meaning they are significantly more difficult to abuse.
In terms of aesthetics I was more thinking of Ivy, the go-to character when it comes to mocking Soul Caliboobs, going from this:
@StarvingGamer: Now you're just being argumentative for the sake of it. They didn't replace Sophitia with Patroklos, they replaced her with Pyrrha. Like so:
If you count "removing the camel toe" as toning down the exploitative designs, fair enough. My standards are slightly different.
On the gameplay front, which is where there's an interesting discussion to be had, again we must be having very different experiences, because I've certainly seen combos way longer than 2-3 pokes (which is deceptive anyway, SC has hugely damaging normal hits). There are relatively long combo chains into relatively long juggles, independently of whether they're the most efficient damage dealers in tournament play or not.
I honestly don't give a crap if advanced players found the easy defense exploitable in 4, it was great for newcomers and middle of the pack players. The more offensive take in 5 is less accessible and more *boring* in matches that are not fully even in terms of skill on both sides. It's a more obscure, hostile game.
But the SFIV vs MvC comment is the one I found the most interesting. See, the difference at below-pro level is not in the frame gap. That's easy, it's just rythm. Anybody can go from a Fierce to a Shoryuken. It just works. It's muscle memory. MvC is all about long combo chains, which means that the 1-3 inputs for a basic poke-cancel-special combo in SF4 become dozens of inputs even for a simple air-into combo-into assist-repeat combo in MvC3. That's many more chances for the attacker to get an input wrong, a longer time window where the receiving player is incapacitated and overall a lot of extra frustration for anybody who hasn't yet mastered the technique of inputting a dozen button presses in time from memory.
Or, in other words, it's boring and infuriating.
My working theory here is that this is why post-Guilty Gear/MvC2 fighting games dropped in popularity while continuing to receive praise from specialized press and tournament players, and why SF4 and MK were such hits by taking the genre back to basics, while Tekken 6, SC5 and even MvC3 haven't been quite as big.
Anyway, pointless back and forth at this point. We've made our arguments. They're both perfectly compatible, even. You say that SC5 is technically competent and has fewer characters dressed like lapdancers from hell, I say that it's more obscure and unfriendly and it still looks like a slut parade. We're both right as far as I'm concerned.
@NoelVeiga: Sophitia and Cassandra became Patroklos and Pyrrha. Since Pyrrha's costume is significantly more analogous to Cassandras, they cancel each other out. This just leaves Patroklos and Sophitia as points of comparison. That's how I see the math of it anyways.
The one thing that has shifted SCV to be more offensively focused is the fact that Guard Impacts can't be spammed unlike SCIV. I find it honestly surprising that you find SCIV to be more "beginner friendly" than SCV since most beginner/intermediate never used GI's to begin with. If anything, for the beginner/intermediate player SCV is essentially the same game with the addition of a MORE accessible defensive mechanic since GI's have become significantly easier to use, albeit at the cost of meter.
As far as longer combos, I think you really need to look again. The combos are literally exactly the same as they were in SCIV except for when attacks are EX'ed which, in most cases, adds one more hit and 3-5% additional damage. Any longer combos you're seeing online are because the video maker did not turn on air control or ukemi for the dummy. If you didn't use those two basic techniques in SCIV you could be juggled just as much.
But just to touch on the SFIV vs MvC argument, if we're talking about the most basic combos, then I would argue that MvC is easier. This is because to do the basic LMHS > MMHS actually requires NO timing. In SFIV you have to know, ahead of time, that you want to cancel your attack into a special. This is because the timing window is so short, that if you're not already doing the Hadoken / Shoryuken motion when the attack hits, you're already too late. In MvC, however, you can just blindly mash on the buttons in sequence. Mash L until that comes out then mash M until that comes out etc.
Maybe it just comes down to different skill sets. In MvC I have to memorize a set of 12-15 different commands but the timings are all extremely lenient and if I make a mistake, the worst thing that happens is I miss out on a few points of damage. In SFIV I have to master 2-4 different 1/60th of a second timings and if I mess up any one of them, I am likely to leave myself open to a full combo. There may be more chances to make mistakes in MvC but the timing windows are so lenient that mistakes only happen for 1 out of 20 combos and when they do occur, the match just resets to a neutral state. In SFIV the timing windows are so strict that even at the top of my game, I was dropping 1 out of 7 combos and every time that happened, I was losing 20-35% of my life in response. In other words, it was boring an infuriating.
You may have mechanically accurate timing skills, but if someone held a gun to my head and told me to either memorize a list of 15 things or hit three different timings, each with a window of only 1/60th of a second for success, I know which option I would choose.
@StarvingGamer: OK, I think this is where the disconnect is:
I'm not looking at *anything* online.
Most players are not looking at anything online, either. Most players don't play fighting games as if they were a puzzle game. They memorize specials and a couple of combos and try their best to win matches with those.
Once anything beyond that is required, the game becomes frustrating for a big part of the playerbase. I understand your point. I don't dispute the mechanical description of your point. SC5 still plays more combo-based at the low end, because at the low end, it did not play combo-based at all before. It was mashy at entry and technical at high level. SC5 is faster, plain blocking is harder because of it (let alone parrying) and both the AI and the online scene push harder for high damage combos.
On the MvC vs SF4 question, I can only disagree and reiterate. My experience in SF4 is that the game is defensive and strategic. You try hard to not be the first to attack and when you see a superfluous move you strike back with the best you've got. My experience in MvC3 (which I actually played more than SC5) is this:
- Try to start a LMHS into LMHS combo. Miss into the fourth step.
- Have the rival start the same combo, connect with the whole set into a super. One character gone.
- Start over.
The timing in SF4 is stricter, but that's the point. In SF4 only very skilled players could wipe you by doing massive combo damage, which means it happens less frequently, so rather than frustrating, it becomes a "wow, that guy is good" moment. Meanwhile, low to mid skill players get to use the basics, one to three hit combos and single shots. This has two effects: a) they don't get stuck as the punching bag for too long at a time and b) they learn the basics before they try to learn the advanced stuff. More so, they learn the basics just by playing, because the basics are all they need to play.
MvC3 is trying to get people who have already gone through that process and make them feel like they're already great. In the process, it alienates the entry level, because it's only a fun masher against another masher. If the other guy is able to string a combo across two or more of his characters, a masher is dead before he can get a punch out. Same in SC5 (in fact, the AI kind of goes for it now, which it never did before). Not so in SF4 or Mortal Kombat.
To be fair, all of these do a terrible job at being friendly in absolute terms. They have no progression, no proper tutorial and no perception of what the new player needs to learn before he can have fun. With the possible exception of MK, which has a bunch of single player stuff there to teach stuff like combos, timing, moves and other characters. Soul Calibur used to do this with the side single player modes... which SC5 removed.
Now, we're clearly not going to agree, but I think we've both made our point. Mission accomplished here, don't you think?
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