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Two enter, but only one leaves... after they foot the bill
Once I got past not being able to create the Mitsurugi-clone that I've always wanted to play as I got down to the task of kicking my friend's butts from one ring-out to the next. (Yep, I'm a cheap bitch, but I've learned to live with it. If god didn't want me to kick people into rivers he would have put up walls or made the arenas bigger.) Now I can't claim to be a fighting game coinsure but I've played my fair share of Street Fighter in the day, and I've certainly put away the hours in both of the previous Soulcalibur's.
It was here in the arena that the fate of Soulcalibur 3's score would be decided. Does the soul still burn, or did Namco sell out for "money hats? Well, the soul still burns, in between waiting for character portraits and arenas to load… oh and of course after every vs. fight you have to wait for the auto save to finish. Why? I'm not really sure. Unlike Virtua Fighter 4 you can't create a profile and track your win/loss record.
So what is the game recording? Why, the number of rounds you've plugged away and after a set number of rounds something that might normally only be unlocked through skill is automatically unlocked for those of us less skillful. Still, it would have been nice if the game saved after you exit back to the character selection screen and not at the end of every vs. fight. Having to wait through the loads was bad enough, but at least we could do something about the "autosave."
We exited back out to the title screen and were confronted with the most "xtreme" voiceover ever saying, "Soulcalibur 3." At first we were dumbfounded by the over energetic announcer, but upon later inspection realized that the game seems to randomly choose a character to speak the fabled title line. I mention it here only because it had us laughing in stitches for the next hour.
Wizard needs pants… badly
Once "autosave" had been thoroughly disabled we once again selected "vs mode" and got our fight on. The first things I noticed were the newly added special effects. For a moment I thought we had accidentally turned on "Burnout" mode or something, because you would have thought two cars had run headlong into one another to produce sparks like these. I'm not talking sparks when weapons collide, as these wouldn't even warrant discussion, I'm talking instead about sparks that light up when you kick someone.
Other newly added special effects that cluttered up the screen included some kind of blur effect that sweeps across the screen when a character is stunned or k-o'd. These were slightly less annoying than the sparks and lightshows that fighting produced, but nowhere near as bad as the new all-new English voiceovers. Who thought we'd want to hear Xianghua say, "How about this?!" over and over and over as someone button mashes their way to first place?
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