|
Thankfully, once you get past the new glow-ified special effects and the voices, the combat system is still the same old pick-up-and-play friendly Soulcalibur that so many of us have grown to love. Dare I say that the actual weapon to weapon combat felt a tad faster if not necessarily more fluid? Stringing combos together works much as it always has, but we noticed that certain characters with shorter range have been given different varieties of "dash" attacks to make up for their range.
The actual act of playing Soulcalibur 3 felt immediately rewarding to everyone in the group. I'm not sure how Namco has so finely tapped that line between button-masher and overly-complicated, but if every fighting game was this good we'd all be in trouble. For your non-hardcore friends it'll be like playing Dead of Alive and watching the girls kick high. But you'll be sitting back working on timing your combo string to its maximum effectiveness. Both types of gamers will find themselves at home here.
As a fan of the series I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how cool it is to take a big bruising character like Nightmare – who wields a sword that would make Cloud from Final Fantasy VII drool – out against Maxi and his mere nun-chucks. That both styles feel balanced and both players can have fun win or lose speaks volumes of how refined the raw mechanics are in the Soulcalibur series. In all our playtime the only odd feeling came when the characters hit the deck. Here on the ground SC3 felt noticeably slower than past installments.
I know all about what the ground tastes like because the AI in Soulcalibur 3 reaches new levels of "bullshit" moments. If you've ever wondered what Smith felt like fighting Neo in The Matrix then please head out and buy a copy of this game. For the rest of you it goes something like this, -block- -block- -guard impact- -combo that juggles-… until you're dead. All the great single-player content winds up on the other side of the cheapest fighting game AI in the industry forcing you to play hundreds (if not thousands) of rounds to unlock content the long way.
No, please talk some more, digital ink is cheap
I'm not going to discuss the "Chronicles of the Sword Mode" because Aaron does this in great detail in the next section, but I will say that I agree with everything he said in addition to having this thought: "It's a really slick distraction that never gets involving enough to make you forget that you're doing tons of work just to get to the point where play a single match of Soulcalibur 3." In fact a cynical person could say that this is all Namco has done with this game: added a bunch of fluff around what is a pretty basic you-vs-me fighting game.
Namco has packed this title full of so much to do, so much to unlock, and so much to buy that even dedicated gamers will be busy until next spring. Taken as a whole there's no way a reasonable person could dismiss Soulcalibur 3 for being a thin game. I guess you should call me unreasonable then for expecting features like online multiplayer, because when even Street Fighter is playable online it seems like this is a feature that fighting games should be expected to support.
Still, for the non-online gamer there is no other fighting game this side of Mortal Kombat that packs so much content. As for replay value I would make the argument that Virtua Fighter 4: Evo's "virtual arcade" setup throws offline-players against a wider of range of challenges beyond "oh look, another stage where my health is constantly dropping." But there is only one weapon-based fighting game of this caliber, and there is only one soul burning Soulcalibur.
··· Ross Fisher
|
