Soulcalibur IV boasts the standard Arcade and Story modes that will be familiar to fighting game fans. I was actually surprised that virtually every character in the game has a "story" to play through, but I was disappointed that Story mode only lasts about five rounds and you can get through a character in ten minutes or less.
There aren't really any cinematics except one towards the end, and many of those are repeated. What's there, however, is solid and works to give at least a marginal backdrop to the cast.
The Tower of Lost Souls is the other single-player option that gives you the chance to either ascend or descend the tower, facing challenges along the way. If you ascend the tower, you'll be able to select a "stage" or set of floors to fight through, which usually involve heavily weighted battles where you're pitted against several overpowered opponents. Fulfilling certain conditions rewards you with equipment unlocks for the fairly robust Character Creation mode and allow you to advance further up the tower.
Descending the Tower of Lost Souls is an entirely different matter. You can select two characters at the start they'll fight tag-team style and then you stick with those fighters through the entire affair. Each floor brings a new set of enemies that you must defeat and you receive items and goodies after clearing a certain increment of floors, like passing the 5th, 10th and 15th markers.
This is only possible because the character you aren't using slowly regains health until they're tagged in, so if you keep one fighter alive long enough, the other can come in with swords blazing. This mode is a great feature of Soulcalibur IV, though I feel as if it could've been deeper with a more fleshed-out, contextual narrative and a wider variety of specialty matches.
Regardless, having this avenue for unlocking content is nice and will add many more hours to the experience. A good deal of the unlocking you'll be doing in Soulcalibur IV opens up items to the Character Creation mode. Not only can you customize existing characters, including their equipment, weapons, skills and hair style you can't change "permanent" features like body build and skin color , you can also create new characters from the ground up, though they'll act as copies of pre-existing fighters when it comes to gameplay.
Being able to set up different skills works nicely, because the equipment and weapons you have set dictates how many points you can spend in certain skill categories.
Say you have 70 available points in the Special category and 40 points under Impact. You can opt to equip the Auto Grapple Break A skill, which has a high chance of automatically repelling a throw if an opponent gets too close.
Acquisition of these skills is governed by your Style Level, which increases as you use a character. If you use Ivy a bunch, for example, her Style Level goes up and gives you access to more skills. And the more you play the game, the more equipment you can unlock, which gives you more options for character customization. Soulcalibur IV also has your standard Versus options to consider, which means you can jump into a quick match with either a friend or an AI opponent.
I'm always thankful when a fighting game includes this option, as it's nice to get a quick couple of matches without having to start up an entire Arcade game. The real stinger comes in the form of Soulcalibur IV's online multiplayer, which is a first for the franchise. You can face the competition through Xbox Live and the PSN with ease, and participate in either ranked or unranked matches.
You can even take customized characters into the online arena, which is appreciated. I played numerous online matches on both the PS3 and and both ran very well, with only a few extremely brief moments of lag. Unfortunately, I can't say for sure how the game will perform once everyone jumps on the network with varying connection speeds, but what I saw handled admirably. Hopefully that will be the universal experience when everyone jumps on board.
So now with the general stuff out of the way, we can discuss some specifics. I think everyone is wondering how Darth Vader and Yoda compare. In case you're new to the party, let me fill you in: the PS3 version of Soulcalibur IV features special guest character Darth Vader, while the version gets the lovable, huggable Yoda.
The real issue at hand is that Darth Vader feels like the only balanced character out of the three. Although the Apprentice isn't radically overpowered, some of his moves feel a bit on the absurd side.
Plus, he can levitate and shoot lighting. That's tough to deal with. Yoda, on the other hand, is broken. As I feared since the first moment he was announced, Yoda's height makes him an almost ridiculous addition to the ensemble and he's quite possibly the worst thing to happen to Soulcalibur IV. Don't misunderstand: he's fun enough to play as but he's powerful, agile and, because he's so small, a surprising number of attacks go clear over his head.
Furthermore, he can't be grabbed. He's completely immune to it -- even Yoda can't grab Yoda. This is a clear indication that Yoda's just there for kicks and shouldn't be taken seriously as a competitive character. He simply doesn't mesh well with the rest of the cast. Vader, however, works just fine. He has a few fancy moves here and there but matches with and against him still felt balanced.
Even though Yoda is an "inferior" character, owners shouldn't be discouraged. He's just one character out of a collection of more than 30 fighters, so the experience doesn't suffer because of him. If anything, you can just elect to ignore him on the character select screen. When it comes down to the actual combat, Soulcalibur IV feels great. Controls are extremely responsive and there's a lot of potential for mastery, considering the daunting number of moves at your disposal. Armor destruction and Critical Finishers are also great new aspects to the game.
If your opponent blocks too much, there's a chance you can destroy a piece of their armor one piece for the head, upper body and lower body which then makes them susceptible to Critical Finishers. If you can wear down their Soul Gauge enough a colored sphere that turns red as too many blocks are used , you can pull off a Finisher which inflicts incredible amounts of damage and looks really slick in the process.
There are a lot of fantastic slow-motion moments during these finishers that need to be seen -- their style is without question. Although some have worried that this system would be a punishment for players who actively incorporate blocking into their common techniques, it really isn't an issue.
You'll only find yourself in trouble if all you do is block the entire round, which means you're in serious trouble anyway. This dynamic isn't set up as a punishment but rather adds a system to make sure that players are at least attempting to balance both offensive and defensive strategies. Other games with Collector's Edition releases from the Soul Calibur franchise. Soul Calibur V. This entry was added to the database on Friday, April 25th, at pm by Michael Pica.
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