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Soul Calibur IV
August 7, 2008 | 3:53 PM PST
Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game's About
Soul Calibur IV is a staple in the fighting genre. Using fighters from different places and times, each fighter wants to gain twin blades with opposite forces to rule the world. Through battles with friends and foes, you try and claim a spot in history.
What's Hot
This is the first time that Soul Calibur has hit this generation of systems. After the breakout success on the ill-fated Dreamcast and revival on last-generation consoles, there are high expectations for SCIV, and it successfully meets and even surpasses many of those expectations.
The characters are crafted with fine attention to detail and set a new bar for fighting games. The returning favorites and new faces all have distinct looks and matching fighting styles. Weapons have tiny embellishes on the blades, hilts, you name it, that give personality to the main method of dishing the digital pain. The character editor thankfully doesn't skimp on the graphics either. You can load up your personalized fighter with all kinds of gear and the only thing you'll have to worry about is if those boots really match with those gloves. This is by far one of the most fun modes to toy around with and judging by YouTube videos there are more than enough options to keep creating new fighters. And yes, Darth Vader is really cool.
The fighting gameplay mechanics are even more polished and refined this time around than ever before. The key to winning is figuring out what kind of fighting style your opponent uses and exploiting its weakness with your character's strength. For example, Kilik is an exceptional long-ranger fighter so he has the advantage of keeping opponents at arm's length. However, Maxi is a close-range fighter, and if he can get past long range attacks, he'll be able to tear up the health bar with quick bursts of speed at a close proximity. Adding a new layer of nuance to the game are skills that you can setup before matches start to give power-ups to your fighter when they are called upon. With all the characters and skills available, each match becomes a quick, careful assessment of what move sets work well so SCIV is as much of a mental game as well as a button mashing game.
The biggest new mode is arguably the online component. It is also the most critical to the success of the game because it does it well. The issue of fighting games online is that the pro players often have trouble finding lag free matches because when a match can come down to a few frames of animation, every millisecond of lag counts. There are numerous options to find just what you are looking for. You can play with the main characters or you can find a completely tailored match with all your skills and unlocked weapons. SCIV, during our tests, is problem free online which makes this a hard game to pass up.
What's Not
SCIV is a Japanese game and was localized for North America but the translation of the original source material isn't done very well or the game is just that corny. You'll laugh at the way characters interact with each other and the overly dramatic announcer who makes SCIV seem like the most important event to happen since… SCIII which at that point was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just don't have high expectations and you'll have a good laugh at the B-movie script.
While there is a good deal of content to unlock, many of the 30 characters are duplicates with different skins over the same animations. Even the unlocking process goes rather quickly because battles are short and the story mode only lasts a few rounds before the final boss. It would have been nice to go a couple extra rounds before it seemed like all the content was unlocked and there were enough points banked to get extra create-a-character gear.
Some characters are not well balanced at all. One such character that comes to mind is Yoda. The tiny, green Jedi terror is a textbook example of a cheap character. It's like picking Odd Job in Goldeneye 64. Yoda can throw anyone he wants, but when you want to return the favor, it won't happen. To add to the frustration, his tiny stature makes a lot of attacks fly over his head. Darth Vader's Apprentice isn't really tuned to be a SC fighter which makes you wonder if he was a quick addition at the last possible second and wasn't given proper vetting. Of all the new characters, Darth Vader is the most balanced.
Final Word
The Soul Calibur series hasn't changed much over the years, which is a good thing because it set the gold standard of what exceptional fighting games should be modeled after. SCIV takes the existing winning formula and carefully adds new elements to make this edition the best edition ever. The PS3 version edges out the 360 version slightly because Yoda is left out and the optional install speed ups frequent loading times. Start the fight on the stage of history for the fourth time, you will not regret it one ounce playing the best fighter of this generation, thus far.
What the Game's About
Soul Calibur IV is a staple in the fighting genre. Using fighters from different places and times, each fighter wants to gain twin blades with opposite forces to rule the world. Through battles with friends and foes, you try and claim a spot in history.
What's Hot
This is the first time that Soul Calibur has hit this generation of systems. After the breakout success on the ill-fated Dreamcast and revival on last-generation consoles, there are high expectations for SCIV, and it successfully meets and even surpasses many of those expectations.
The characters are crafted with fine attention to detail and set a new bar for fighting games. The returning favorites and new faces all have distinct looks and matching fighting styles. Weapons have tiny embellishes on the blades, hilts, you name it, that give personality to the main method of dishing the digital pain. The character editor thankfully doesn't skimp on the graphics either. You can load up your personalized fighter with all kinds of gear and the only thing you'll have to worry about is if those boots really match with those gloves. This is by far one of the most fun modes to toy around with and judging by YouTube videos there are more than enough options to keep creating new fighters. And yes, Darth Vader is really cool.
The fighting gameplay mechanics are even more polished and refined this time around than ever before. The key to winning is figuring out what kind of fighting style your opponent uses and exploiting its weakness with your character's strength. For example, Kilik is an exceptional long-ranger fighter so he has the advantage of keeping opponents at arm's length. However, Maxi is a close-range fighter, and if he can get past long range attacks, he'll be able to tear up the health bar with quick bursts of speed at a close proximity. Adding a new layer of nuance to the game are skills that you can setup before matches start to give power-ups to your fighter when they are called upon. With all the characters and skills available, each match becomes a quick, careful assessment of what move sets work well so SCIV is as much of a mental game as well as a button mashing game.
The biggest new mode is arguably the online component. It is also the most critical to the success of the game because it does it well. The issue of fighting games online is that the pro players often have trouble finding lag free matches because when a match can come down to a few frames of animation, every millisecond of lag counts. There are numerous options to find just what you are looking for. You can play with the main characters or you can find a completely tailored match with all your skills and unlocked weapons. SCIV, during our tests, is problem free online which makes this a hard game to pass up.
What's Not
SCIV is a Japanese game and was localized for North America but the translation of the original source material isn't done very well or the game is just that corny. You'll laugh at the way characters interact with each other and the overly dramatic announcer who makes SCIV seem like the most important event to happen since… SCIII which at that point was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just don't have high expectations and you'll have a good laugh at the B-movie script.
While there is a good deal of content to unlock, many of the 30 characters are duplicates with different skins over the same animations. Even the unlocking process goes rather quickly because battles are short and the story mode only lasts a few rounds before the final boss. It would have been nice to go a couple extra rounds before it seemed like all the content was unlocked and there were enough points banked to get extra create-a-character gear.
Some characters are not well balanced at all. One such character that comes to mind is Yoda. The tiny, green Jedi terror is a textbook example of a cheap character. It's like picking Odd Job in Goldeneye 64. Yoda can throw anyone he wants, but when you want to return the favor, it won't happen. To add to the frustration, his tiny stature makes a lot of attacks fly over his head. Darth Vader's Apprentice isn't really tuned to be a SC fighter which makes you wonder if he was a quick addition at the last possible second and wasn't given proper vetting. Of all the new characters, Darth Vader is the most balanced.
Final Word
The Soul Calibur series hasn't changed much over the years, which is a good thing because it set the gold standard of what exceptional fighting games should be modeled after. SCIV takes the existing winning formula and carefully adds new elements to make this edition the best edition ever. The PS3 version edges out the 360 version slightly because Yoda is left out and the optional install speed ups frequent loading times. Start the fight on the stage of history for the fourth time, you will not regret it one ounce playing the best fighter of this generation, thus far.
November 20, 2009
