Review: Soul Calibur IV

It's time to enter onto the stage of history for the fourth time, but this time in shiny hi-def.

{ Mon 8th September 2008 }

Despite enjoying a good beat'em up, it's not a genre I've ever gotten into massively. For the longest time the I was into one series alone: Street Fighter. I've owned and played games from SFII Turbo through to the Alpha series, and even had the original EX (Street Fighter's first move into 3D, which I distinctly recall enjoying, though that admission may earn me some mocking comments). I dabbled with various other series, Mortal Kombat (though I was never a fan of the fighting system, or the re-design on Sub Zero), a little Virtua Fighter, Fighting Vipers (anyone remember that game?), and Tekken.

Tekken was probably the one other series out of those that I got into to an extent, owning a couple of the titles on the PlayStation. But it still didn't compare to the Street Fighter series, which I'd started playing, like a lot of people I imagine, back on the SNES with Street Fighter II. Then sometime in the mid-90s, whilst on holiday, I made a discovery.

Enter the stage of history

We were staying at a holiday camp, which wasn't a particularly fancy holiday camp, but surprisingly (and much to my joy) the arcade was stocked with a range of shiny machines featuring the latest games. One of those machines was a cabinet for a fighter called Soul Edge, and which I fell in love with the instant I started playing it. I never had masses of holiday money when I was younger, but I can tell you that nearly every penny of it I had that year was ploughed into that machine.

I raved about the game for months following, annoying my friends greatly no doubt, and when I heard about a PlayStation version I was incredibly excited. Needlessly renamed to Soul Blade in Europe, it was none the less the same great game, but with a wealth of new features such as the fantastic 'Edge Master Mode', endings that you could interact with and alter, extra weapons which affected character stats, oh, and you could unlock Sophitia in a bikini (what? I was 14 OK).

Then in December of 1999 my parents surprised me on my birthday with a game I'd been raving about for months again, Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast. Whilst this was most yay-some, unfortunately I was still in the process of saving up for my Dreamcast, but my crafty parents had decided to forward me the money I was missing and had got me one of those too (this was an incredibly excellent birthday, let me tell you). And boy did Soul Calibur deliver; it was a fantastic game, refining and improving the experience, introducing some great new characters (such as Kilik, Ivy and Nightmare) and it looked amazingly pretty. My love for the Soul Calibur series was confirmed.

Soul Calibur II rolled around with it's multiple versions, each with their own special character (I plumped for the GameCube version because, well, Link) and it was just as good. The third entry in the series I somehow missed out on, I can't remember why, but I did. Then again, by all accounts wasn't all that amazing a game, so perhaps that was a good thing.

A hero returns to the fray

And that brings us to the latest in the series, Soul Calibur IV, the first for the current hi-def generation of consoles (I'm ignoring the off-shoot mess that was Legends on the Wii), and the first in the series to offer an online mode.

In fact the online mode is one of the few real additions to the feature list, with the game delivering mainly a refinement of the formula established over the course of the series. In the single player arena you'll find a standard arcade, story and training modes, as well as the Tower of Lost Souls (SCIV's take on the mission-type challenges). Versus options - both online and local - allow for either a standard or special match up, the latter making use of stat-modifying equipment and garb. As usual there's a museum area, which provides access to character profiles, stats and unlockable artwork, and finally there's a fairly extensive character creation mode.

Strangely absent in the versus arena is the team battle system that used to be available, whereby each player would pick multiple fighters to square off against one another. This is notably odd given that the game includes this feature in the single player Story and Tower of Lost Souls modes.

Wanton destruction

In addition to online, the other new features to be found Soul Calibur IV are the Soul Gauge and Critical Finishes, and equipment destruction (in a slight throwback to the original Soul Edge).

The Soul Gauge is a little gem that appears alongside the health bar, and as you guard against multiple attacks it will start to change colour. After a sufficient amount of pummelling it will go red and then the whole health bar will start to flash. If you continue to guard and take a beating eventually the gauge shatters opening yourself up to a Critical Finish. The attacking player can trigger this by pressing a shoulder button just after the gauge shatters, and it unleashes a special round ending move (regardless of how much health you had left) unique to each character.

These hands-off moves do look pretty impressive, but in actuality it's pretty difficult to whittle anyone other than a computer character who's set up to guard a lot (such as can be found in the Tower of Lost Souls mode) down enough without killing them. It can happen from time to time, but it will be pretty rare. Plus there's a slightly annoying feature whereby any button press other than the special Critical Finish button after the gauge shatters, such as might occur in a combo, voids the attempt and leaves the defender with a brand new gauge, making them just a little harder to pull off.

As for equipment destruction, unlike Soul Edge where your weapon could be destroyed leaving you to fight empty handed, it's your body armour that can be removed during matches in SCIV. The head, body and leg pieces, if they take enough of a pounding, can all be shattered, leaving your more vulnerable on high, mid or low attacks. I can't say I noticed this having much of an effect on proceedings really, the biggest impact it seemed to have was visually, as removal of outer layers exposes your fighter's undergarments.

The search for Soul Edge

On the story side of things it all seems to have become something of convoluted mess. As always various characters are (still) after the Soul Edge sword either for their own nefarious purposes, to use it to protect something/someone, or to destroy it. Some people are also/alternatively after the Soul Calibur sword (which is the good one, I think). These seem to be in the possession of Nightmare and Siegfried respectively, though often the last fight is against someone called Algol, who appears to have both swords (sort of) and I have no idea how he hit fits into things, or why in some peoples endings he's suddenly good at the end or has a son or why that is important/relevant. As I say, it's all got a bit messy.

And whilst each character has a (rather short) story mode the amount of actual story to it is debatable. For each the bulk of the story comes up front when some of slowest scrolling text known to man drifts up the screen (I say 'drifts', though that may be being generous to the speed at which it moves), to try and explain which of the swords they're after and why, but it's fairly uninspired nonsense. After sitting through four or five of the character intros I got fed up of attempting to read them as the quality of writing and story weren't good enough to justify the waiting.

There's no real narrative between matches, except the occasional extra cut-scene heading into the final fight, which are largely meaningless. Beating the 'boss' for that particular character rewards you with a cut-scene ending, but these are also rather short and seemed to be either baffling or boring.

Then there's those Star Wars characters (which took a prominent place in all the game's advertising): Yoda on the 360, Vader on the PS3, and The Apprentice from the upcoming Force Unleashed on both. In the fine tradition of crossovers there's a shonky attempt at explaining why they're in the game, when really it doesn't stretch beyond "because they have lightsabers and it's fucking cool", which they do, and it is.

New challenger

And aside from the Star Wars characters and new boss guy Algol the only new character is Hilde. She actually has a pretty cool design, and has a rather unusual fighting style since she carries a short sword and spear, allowing for a combination of long- and short-range attacks. I found her slightly awkward to play with, but I know a few people who loved her style.

There is a collection of five bonus characters available too, and that I took to be modelled on anime characters (from their look), but it turns out they were specifically designed by Japanese artists for Soul Calibur IV. And whilst visually they are unique their fighting styles are borrowed from the existing line-up (for example, the dual katana wielding Shura plays exactly like Cervantes).

But don't go thinking that they've skimped on characters as all these, plus the wealth of returning fighters, brings the total number of selectable characters up to 34 (with 28 different fighting styles between them). And in reality, there's a wealth more to select from thanks to the character creation mode.

It's alive!

The character creation mode allows you to make a male or female character based on nearly any of the available fighting styles (Algol and the Star Wars fighters are excluded), set their physical attributes (which pretty much boils down to how beefy you want the blokes and the size of the boobs on the ladies), pick a face, some hair (or not), a voice, a weapon, cover them in whacky clothes and armour, and then pick the colours for it all.

However, dressing your new creation up isn't a straight-forward or shallow experience — though if you want to create a busty brunette wearing next to nothing the game won't stop you. What adds depth to it all is that every piece of clothing and even the weapon you pick for your fighter will affect their stats (split across attack, defence and health) for better or worse.

But the complexity doesn't stop there either. Equipment, including weapons, can adds points to one of five skill areas ('power', 'impact', 'boost', 'gauge' and 'special'), which are required to assign various abilities to your created character. For example, if you want to give your character one of the 'HP Drain' abilities, which recovers some health whenever you dish out the hurtin', you need a certain amount of 'gauge' points (and the better versions of the skill require more points).

All this can lead to some tough decisions as you try to create an optimal character with the best stats and best abilities, which often requires sacrifices in one area or another. For me this was especially difficult as I'm a complete sucker for aesthetics and I'll admit that on a few occasions I sacrificed better stats for looks.

For some a fun part of the character creation process will be trying to make, or recreate, characters from other things with the options available. A quick look around the Internet will reveal various people's efforts, some of which are rather impressive. I ended up making myself an M.Bison character (initially by accident, but then purposefully when I realised what my creation looked like) but ultimately I had more fun making my own oddball characters.

It's worth noting that you can also make custom versions of the existing characters too, rather than starting entirely from scratch, but that isn't nearly as much fun.

Up the tower with you

And don't be fooled, customising characters isn't just an amusing distraction, it's entirely necessary if you wish to conquer the Tower of Lost Souls (or TOLS for short). Initially you only have the option to 'ascend' the tower, which takes the form of various multi-floor, multi-character fights (typically two to three on both counts). Progress is straight-forward, survive and win each of the fights within the time-limit. As you'd expect, the higher the floors the harder the fights get, to the extent that the computer starts gaining special skills to make life difficult, and can be incredibly cheap bastards sometimes.

Things are also made slightly less straight-forward by the fact that your characters (you get to pick between one and three depending on the floors) don't regain lost health between floors, so if you only just scraped through one floor the next is going to be just that extra bit of a challenge. Also, failing on any of the floors in a set requires you to go back to the start, which can be especially annoying if you keep falling at last hurdle.

And an additional challenge to these floors is that each has a special condition associated with it, that if met unlocks an item that can be used in the character creation mode. As the fight starts you're given a cryptic clue as to the condition and some are more obvious to work out than others, but I'll admit I didn't even bother and just checked online for a list where people had deciphered them already. These range from simple to bastard-hard in difficulty, but thankfully they are entirely optional and can be totally ignored if you so wish.

Once you've unlocked floor 20 you also get the option to 'descend' the tower, which is essentially survival mode, with opponents getting increasingly tougher as you progress. There is something on an incentive to do well here too, as surviving though each multiple of five floors (up to something like 30) unlocks yet more items for the character creation mode.

Worlds to explore

All in all there's a fair amount to do in the game and working your way through it all will definitely take time, especially if you want to level up the fighting styles of all the characters (which requires fighting experience with that style, and which unlocks access to various skills for that style), or to earn enough money to buy various bits of equipment for the character creation mode.

I really did get sucked into the character creation mode and I found myself happily spending a fair amount of time just tinkering and trying to make the perfect combination of stats, skills and aesthetic, or just making someone for fun. What I will say is that a strange side-effect of creating your own characters is that the original characters are rendered entirely pointless. In all the online fights I had we stuck almost exclusively to our own creations, or to the randomly generated creation option the system offers (which for some reason generated topless people more often than not). Since you can play through the arcade mode with your own creations there's very little reason to use the stock characters at all, especially in special versus fights as they will have relatively weak stats compared to custom characters.

And speaking of the online mode, I was impressed by the seeming lack of lag. It did seem to ignore button presses on the odd occasion — annoying when you're trying to guard — but for the most part it felt pretty responsive.

Finish him

So a wealth of options, a character creation mode that can keep you entertained for days, and a strong online offering for that player versus player fun (complete with vocal taunting and abuse over voice chat, though minus any elbowing in the side): it's a strong package. OK so it doesn't exactly do much new. In fact it does pretty much nothing new, but it mixes things up a little, has refined and tweaked a little here and there, and dressed it up real pretty (this is a gorgeous looking game, it really is).

Though for some the little changes aren't going to be welcome and some long-time fans may be put off by them. Personally they didn't bother me and I still enjoyed the fights. I was a little disappointed in how weak and boring the story elements were, and that the Tower of Lost Souls wasn't more like the old style mission modes, but not enough to stop me having a good amount of fun with it.

That said I don't know how quick I'd be to recommend it to people, certainly not without trying it first, as some may find it a fairly shallow experience, especially if the character creation area holds no interest. However, there's always the chance you'll find it to be just your cup of tea and rather a lot of fun.