Review: SoulCalibur V
By: Jeff Rivera
I have a soft spot for fighters. As a teen in the mid 1990s, fighters were all over the place, and I played just about all of them, from the shovelware to the ultra polished and balanced masterpieces. As the genre became oversaturated, it became harder to find quality fighters, especially in the 3D realm. When SoulCalibur hit the Dreamcast, it proved that 3D fighters could be deep, satisfying, accessible, and as replayable as the best 2D fighters out there. I must have sunk a few hundred hours into that Dreamcast release.
SoulCalibur II raised the bar for the series, and provided an amazingly rich fighting experience. The series begin to stumble a little going forward as SoulCalibur III was an unbalanced mess and failed to live up to either of its predecessors. SoulCalibur IV was the first release of this generation, and again, it had more faults than strong points, though it was pretty fun to play. So here we are with SoulCalibur V, and I think we're seeing the series move in the right direction on most fronts, but it's still not quite living up to the high bar SoulCalibur II set.
In an effort to bring the series up to par with modern fighting conventions, the team at Project Soul mixed in some new mechanics. New to the series is the Critical Guage; a meter that fills up during the round and allows you to execute special attacks or blocks at the expense of some of the meter, depending on how powerful the move is. This is akin to the Super guage found in Street Fighter IV. While the guage limits your ability to spam special moves or Guard Impacts, I'm not entirely sure it's a good fit for SoulCalibur. It takes some getting used to, and it adds another layer of strategy to the game, but it also removes a little bit of accessability from the franchise.
Another notable change is that you can only block so many times before your guard breaks. This is something that fundamentally changes the series, as there were two main ways to play. You could be aggressive and try to overwhelm your opponent, or you could play a more methodical game where you block and wait for openings to punish your foe. Now the game heavily favors the former type of player, and it makes the more aggressive character types far stronger. The only way to build back up your guard to prevent it from breaking is to deal damage, which again punishes the more methodical player.
One cool addition to the game is the Just Guard mechanic. The Just Guard is similar to the parry move in other fighters. Rather than holding the block button down for defense, in order to execute a Just Guard, you have to tap the block button right as the opponent's attack begins. This allows you to shrug off the attack and gain a slight advantage to counter their attack. It's risky, because a failed attempt will result in you taking a hit, but if you can master the move it will make you a much more formiddable opponent. This is definitely a mechanic that is indicative of high level play.
New mechanics can be adapted to, and in the long run they may be what the series needs in order to stay relevant. What is hard to accept, however, is that SoulCalibur V lacks overall content. The story mode is fairly light and somewhat unsatisfying when you compare it to the character specific stories found in other SoulCalibur games. The training modes are pretty bare bones, and so are the rest of the single player offerings. The character creator is nice, and you can do a lot with it, but it lacks the fine detail tweaking necessary to really make faces and overall body types unique. If you're used to the content rich offerings of the earlier SoulCalibur games, SCV will feel like someone forgot to restock the fridge after having the in-laws over for the weekend.
Online works well enough most of the time. Matchmaking could be a bit faster, but it does a good job of pairing you up with players at a similar skill level if they're available. Some of the online lobbies are well executed, and other fighting games could learn a thing or two about the way SoulCalibur V handles things.
I'll stick with SoulCalibur V, because there's enough depth here that I have a long ways to go before mastering it, but I am a bit let down by the lack of single player content. I hope it's not an issue where there's more content coming that will be paid DLC, because if developers start leaving out franchise conventions to make a few bucks, it would be truly unfortunate.
Veterans of the series will probably agree that this is a much better game than what SoulCalibur III and IV offered, but that we still have a ways to go before we're back to level of what SoulCalibur II gave us last generation.
3 Stars out of 5
