great fighting game that is worth playing
At the same time, Soul Calibur II has enough complexities to give the gamer much room for growth into an advanced fighter. Like the game before it, each character’s attacks at their most basic include side swipes, vertical attacks, throws, and kicks. Each style of move becomes most effective in specific situations, and a gamer who masters this will likely perform much better than your everyday button-masher. In terms of defense, Soul Calibur II allows for blocks, sparring, sidestepping, and more. Similar to its predecessor, jumping does not become a large part of gameplay. This is for the simple reason that Namco has not only made it an unintuitive procedure, but an action that feels almost pointless when one actually pulls it off.
The game’s arcade mode is much like any other fighter: knock out one dude after another. Soul Calibur II’s Weapon Master (story) mode shakes up the gameplay a bit, throwing extra rules and environmental factors into play. In one stage for example, a wall armed with explosives surrounds the battleground. In another the wind is so strong that it continually pushes you towards your opponent. In this mode you will also continually unlock new stuff like characters, stages, costumes, and weapons. Cool stuff.
In terms of gore, Soul Calibur is a classic arcade game. Translation? There isn’t any. There’s some, uh, flashes of light, but that’s pretty much it. Namco has to know it’s kind of extremely unrealistic given the blades these guys swing around, but hey, they want to keep the game open to the broadest audience possible.
The GameCube version of Soul Calibur II features Link from the classic Legend of Zelda series. Maybe it’s just the Nintendoite inside me talking, but that’s a damn cool inclusion. Link has all the cool sword moves you’d expect, plus some new ones Namco has added to better adapt the Hylian to the fighting genre. Link has a slight advantage over the other characters in that he has two long-range projectile attacks, but it just wouldn’t feel right if he didn’t have his bow and a stash of bombs. Namco also stays truthful to the Nintendo series in terms of Link’s voiceovers. All he does is yell incomprehensible battle cries; not one actual word is spoken