It's fun, it's immediately playable and it's well done. But it's not going to change the genre or the industry.
Anyway got the box home, checked out the swag. Everything was packed in a fairly nice metal box. I have a serious weakness for anything that comes in a metal box for some reason.
• Pretty nice t-shirt, Vader and Mitsurugi.
• A pretty nice comic featuring Hilde and Mitsurugi.
• A code card for 'exclusive' unlockable content for the PS3 Premium edition.
• A poster / leader board chart for a tournament.
• And a tiny sharpie to write on the chart with. Kind of a nice addition, but it's not like there's a logo or anything on it, it just seemed weird.
Anyway popped the game in, it wanted a 16mb update right away. Then after reading the instructions during the download I entered in my unlock code. (I'm still not sure what extras I got out of it). The when the game came back up again, I decided to do the install and start making dinner. It was only a 2GB install so it wasn't too big. And since I upgraded my drive to 250GB I pretty much install everything these days.
Once dinner was in the oven and the install done, did a quick look though the options and jumped into some arcade play.
First thing I noticed was that the portraits for the characters are very small. Hilde and Vader are available right away but a lot of the other characters include the standard ones from previous games are locked. (More on that later).
Jumped right into things with Hilde, tall redheads wearing armor wielding polearms is totally my kind of thing.
Graphics are pretty much what you're expecting from your current gen HD consoles. I don't have any complaints. Controls felt good; not a big difference from previous SC games.
In a nutshell it's pretty much what you were expecting from Soul Calibur in a current gen console, with few surprises and overall I'm pretty happy with the game.
Unlocking the Characters
Some of the characters are displayed initially but are greyed out. You need to 'purchase' them in the character customization area. Characters like Setsuka, Yoshimitsu, and Amy fall in this class. It cost 4000 gold to unlock them. I stated the game with 20000 gold. I'm not sure though it that was part of my premium unlock code or not. Even then it's easy to get more gold though the story mode.
I'm not one of those super skilled fighter games types. I play on my own maybe just enough to unlock a couple more characters or get some point so I can buy Asuka a new schoolgirl outfit, but mostly I play fighters with friends. You know on Sunday when it rains during your BBQ, or before the hockey game starts.
One of the big things that has traditionally frustrated me about some fighter games is it's bloody hard to unlock some of the characters. I was really surprised and quite delighted when Vader was immediately playable. Even earning gold by playing though story mode, (on the normal level of difficulty) was pretty straight forward. I played though Hilde and Amy and earned enough gold to unlock most of the characters I wanted to play, as well as unlocking Scheherazade (Hilde's story) and Kamikirimusi (Amy's Story)
To me this made the game immediately playable. There's nothing worse than having to put 30 hours into a game just so your friends can play all the characters. Also that turns you into an expert in all the other characters and makes things somewhat less fun to play with.
Anyway the setup of the game seems pretty balanced and fun, and should be relatively easy to flesh out your fighter roster.
I also tried the online portion of the game, though only briefly. I connect for a ranked match and selected Hilde and I promptly got my ass handed to me by some 15 year old who probably skipped school all day and be practicing all the moves for the Apprentice.
I'll go back and play on line a bit some sometime, I really only had about 3 hours last night to try stuff out, but the online play was not a bit draw. Nor was I expecting it to be. Maybe that will change and I may really get into it, but I doubt it.
The addition of the soul gauge and the one hit kills seems a bit gimmicky. The destructible armor however I think is pretty cool. You can't just turtle in the corner anymore 'cause you'll get punished for it.
The one hit kills though, I'm not so sure about. I think some of that may be reserved for the truly elite players who are going to spend hours mastering this. I'm not.
Now for the not so good parts.
OMG the Jubblies!! I mean really is this necessary?
I like women as much as the next guy, (assuming the next guy's not gay) but Taki, Ivy and even Setsuka are a little ridiculous. Lovely, you've got a nice physics engine there, but Taki's just disturbing. She looks like someone stuffed to eggplants in rubber bag and taped it to her chest.
It just seems out of place. There are lots of other women in the game, in various states of undress and they're not physically deformed.
Maybe they're trying to balance out the various fetishes. I get the Amy Loligoth thing, etc… but … whatever I don't get it.
The other slightly minor thing is I think we may be approaching the uncanny valley in terms of character models. In an effort to make the models realistic, sometimes they just look wrong. Cassandra for example looks like she hasn't slept in weeks. It looks like she's got bags under her eyes like she just came off a 10 day crystal meth jag. Ivy looks like she just took a bong hit. Raphael literally looks like a corpse.
It's not a big deal when you're knocking the crap out of one another, but it's noticeable on cutscenes etc..
Overall score wise I gave this game a 7.5. It delivered almost everything I was hoping for, but not a lot more.
It's fun, it's immediately playable and it's well done. But it's not going to change the genre or the industry.
The online play may change that over time, but like I said that's not really a bit draw for me, but for the core fighter fans it could be.
If you're like me and you only pickup one or two fighter games for each console generation, this game is definitely worth considering for your collection.