Fighting on the Stage of History: My Soul Calibur IV Review
I am bad at Soul Calibur IV.
My online record as of Sunday night is a pathetic 27 and 118. If I were to rate my Soul Calibur skills on the stink-o-meter, it would be somewhere between a dead whale and a side of ass. Still, there’s something very particular about this game that keeps me coming back online to get my ass handed to me.
SCIV represents my first real entry into the series, not to mention the first 3D fighter I’ve seriously played since Tekken 3. Although I’ve played a tiny bit of the original Soul Calibur, I did not own a Dreamcast nor did I follow up on the series’ further incarnations on the PS2/Gamecube/XBox. As such, I don’t know a whit about the history and evolution of the series. What I do know is that the game plays very differently from all of the other fighters I’ve played: blocking is not back on the directional pad a la Street Fighter 2. Nor is the game a game of simply mashing buttons and making cool stuff happen (I’m looking at you, Eddy Gordo). Summarily, this is demonstrated by how context sensitive all of the characters are – just about every direction-and-button combination has a uniquely named action associated with it. In short, there’s a lot of commands to learn to use for the different situations that come up while battling human or computer AI opponents.
My first actions in the game consisted of going into the training mode and scanning through the characters to see which one looked interesting enough for me to play as a main character. After sorting through (and gawking at) the amazing character models, I decided to stick with Hilde instead of Setsuka, one of the two new characters introduced to the Soul Calibur universe. Then it was off to learn the ropes with the single player game so that I could play against the real competition online.
