High Calibur

Slowly but surely, a few games are showing up that get me to occasionally put down the Rock Band and play something else on my Playstation 3. One of the most successful of these of late has been SoulCalibur IV.

I've never been that big a fan of the "fighter" game genre, but I've made room for SoulCalibur since the second installment. This series has always managed to walk a fine line that others of its type have not: skill vs. randomness. My feelings from sampling other people's copies of Tekken, Street Fighter, and other such games is that they heavily favor the skilled players. If you know the great combos, you will dominate all comers. SoulCalibur, by contrast, strikes me as making room for just enough "button mashing" to satisfy. The skilled player will still win most of the time, but even a novice can pull off some great looking combos and actually win a fight.

One of the reasons SoulCalibur IV has been able to slide in between the Rock Band marathons is that it is a very "bite-sized" game. The game has dozens and dozens of characters, each with his or her own storyline. But the storylines are incredibly minimal. You play each through five stages, taking perhaps a total of 10-15 minutes, and then you're done -- you see that character's ending, and can move on to another. So every night, I'm playing one, maybe two characters' stories to completion, and having a really fun time with it.

I have yet to delve into the character creation that's getting a lot of attention. I frankly don't even know what any of the special abilities do that you can put on characters (including the "stock" ones). I'll probably get there once I've played out the storylines, but that just feels like "bonus" to me and not a vital part of the experience.

But it almost never happened. A few months ago, they announced that Star Wars characters would be featured in SoulCalibur IV, Yoda and Darth Vader. Now, I have no problem with illogical character bleeds into the series. SoulCalibur II for GameCube had the Zelda series' hero, Link, after all. But Yoda fighting in Episode II was, by many parsecs, the dumbest frakking thing among thousands of dumb frakking things about the prequel trilogy. If Yoda fighting was going to be any part of the game, I was not going to buy it. That's all there was to it.

Fortunately, Yoda turned out to be a character exclusive to the XBox 360 version, while the PS3 got Darth Vader, who, despite that laughably lame Frankenstein moment at the end of Episode III (another of those thousands of dumb frakking things I mentioned), manages to not have had all the cool leeched out of him. Him, I could accept in the game. But fortunately, he hardly factors in the storyline at all. He, like all the other characters, has his own 10-15 minutes you can play, but as yet I haven't seen him appear in any of the other characters' storylines. So it would seem Vader is way off on the sidelines, an extra you can enjoy or ignore, according to your tastes.

I probably need not say that the graphics are amazing, the settings quite varied, the music fitting... all past hallmarks of the series. SoulCalibur has never been a "grade A" series for me -- it can really only aspire to being "best of the fighting games" in my mind. But it has still proven worth the money. I'd rate it a B+.