Parry! Thrust! Beat down!
I bought a PSX for Soul Edge and Castlevania: Symphony of Darkness alone, so the opportunity to play a sequel to this nifty weapons fighting game on a console that's still supported was too good to pass up. Soul Calibur apparently is regarded as the best weapons fighting game out there (as opposed to what? The fighting games where combatants rock paper scissors each other to victory?), so the sequel had a lot of goodness paving the way for it.
I got the version of Soul Calibur 2 for the GC, but excepting the legacy character on each version, I'd imagine they're all more or less equal. Rumor has it that the graphics are sub par on the PS2, and insert tired, overused joke about the heft of the Xbox controller here. That, and c'mon. Link!
The Plot: Hello, fighting game. Characters kick each other's butts. That's really all there is to know.
Weapon Master mode, i.e. the version you'll have to play to unlock all the hidden characters, game modes and weaponry, does have a story line, mostly to the tune of "You adventure to a place named after a star, and you see a mysterious figure on the road. That figure says something to you that sounds sorta like a challenge, and then you must fight!" I'd like to offer them points for trying, but, well, nobody really is going to care. Confusingly, the game uses characters in the game, but gives them different names in YELLOW CAPS as if to suggest "The part of SHANANA, Guardian of the Plot Thing will be played tonight by Taki." Since I hadn't played Soul Calibur 1, I was still learning the names of the characters, and giving them other names was just bizarre.
If I may make a humble recommendation, how about using the characters you already have in the plot? All of these characters are supposed to be competing against each other for the Soul Edge; why wouldn't they encounter each other and try to stop the others' quests?
I'll cover this a bit more in game play, but Weapon Master, while pretty fun, makes no real sense as far as a story goes. You can choose whatever character you like to play any mission you choose. Instead of being the story of one lone fighter's quest to find and stop an evil sword and its master, it sorta turns out to be a squad of unrelated fighters who can be called up like Pokemon to kick ass and then go back into their Pokeballs. The only time you can't toggle characters is when you're in a dungeon, which is a nice touch, but frankly, adds zilch to the story continuity.
I realize coming down on Soul Calibur's text-dump yawner of a plot and its weak implementation is silly; this is, after all, a fighter, not a RPG. I'm just confused as to why they bothered. Weapon Master mode is essentially just like the 51 Event Mode matches from Super Smash Melee; I can handle "Get through this string of challenging fight scenarios" just fine without any need for some overarching plot. In fact, I'd go so far as to say if you put some bait on the hook, like "Beat this pathway of fight scenarios and you get a goodie," I'd be perfectly satisfied with that. Simplify, man!
The Gameplay: I'll break this down into the fighting mechanics (being the bulk of the fun) and Weapon Master Mode, which is a major portion of what you'll need to play when you get this game.
Fighting: Sweet goodness. Soul Calibur has a very nice learning curve with plateaus. You can play the game to an average competancy just with button mashing alone. Some characters, particularly those with quick strikes, are excellent choices for novices, and frankly, that's good enough to set the hook. Link appealed to me first, simply because he's one of the few characters in the line up I even recognized, and I know he's a proven bad ass in Smash Melee. Frankly, this is an excellent game strategy; nobody likes having their ass mercilessly handed to them by somebody who Hadoken-cheeses them into the ground before they can even learn a few of the combo moves that are essential to playing the game. Street Fighter never appealed to me largely because of that; I never got a chance to even enjoy the game before I got frustrated by my character's inability to defend himself somehow against skilled onslaught.
As sort of proof for this idea, I brougth Soul Calibur along with me on a visit home, and left it with one of my best friends on his wedding weekend (i.e., a weekend where friends would all be hanging out killing time until scheduled events). In no time at all, a round robin sprung up, and everybody was demonstrating at least competancy in the game in under a half an hour. Finesse moves are showy and fun, but you can compete with mere button mashing -- that's good party fuel right there.
Pulling off combos is just for fun. You're not that much more effective pulling off the high powered moves, but you are more interesting to watch. Most of the combo moves are really simple (back-back-A, down-roll-back-B, A+B B, etc) and there's so dang many of them that are similar in execution that you'll often be surprised what your fighter does. I'm not all that hot at down-roll-back, so most of the time I'll pull off a different move than I had intended, but those are generally effective enough. Learning combos is really a matter of see-and-do -- training mode has a move list, and you can see the character demo the move until you get it. The only thing it's missing is a demonstration of which buttons are being pressed; it lists them, but the timing is fairly critical, and displaying the controller would have been helpful. A minor quibble.
I'd argue that learning Soul Calibur has 3 main plateaus to its learning curve. The first is simply learning when to use horizontal, vertical and kick attacks; recognizing the characters, and appreciating the cool stuff they can pull off. After that, you start learning how to pull off combos and which combos work best when chained together. I'd imagine the peak of your learning is when you can do this with ALL of the characters; I'm nowhere near that good yet. Even at the level of fancy beatings I'm at now, I can still get my rump handed to me by my fiance, who favors smacking me in the face with long ranged weapons before I can even get close enough to do something impressive looking. Curse you!
A few of the characters (Voldo, Ivy, Yoshimitsu) are utterly pathetic until you learn at least a few combos with them. I'd still argue that Yoshimitsu is still relatively pathetic even after you learn a few of his fancy moves, but that's just a matter of taste -- dude's just fruity. Characters generally seem well balanced; 2 of them are jack of all trades characters that copy, either partially or completely, the style of other fighters. Necrid, the Todd McFarlane designed character (I guess they made a deal with him so they could use Spawn in the Xbox version?) is fairly dull, and he summons energy representations of several other fighters' weapons. Yay. He does have a few of his own unique moves, making him at least a little more fun than Charade, who randomly takes on the weapon and moves of one fighter when each round begins.
Weapon Master: I've mentioned my general annoyance by the plot previously, so I won't harp. Weapon Master mode is essentially a web of fight locations, and each time you successfully beat a fight, you open up pathways to new areas where, surprise, you can fight some more. All of the fights have some trick to them to make them something other than "Fight this guy!", and the trick ranges from fun to absolutely infuriating. The fun ones are generally excuses to make you train up, like "Only air combos deal damage" or "Only hitting the other fighter against the walls of a cage deals damage". Those make you learn some finesse you wouldn't have otherwise bothered with, and I'll admit to retreating back to Training Mode just to learn how to lift characters into the air and smash them back. More common, sadly, are ho-hum beat fests -- the dungeons are boring excuses to string fights together. You only have to defeat them once and move on, but there's already a Survival Mode in the game; it's not much more fun to play through an "unexplored dungeon" where each room has a fight.
The really obnoxious ones are less of a test of skill then they are of luck. I'm not offended by "Beat up 5 characters in a row with limited healing between each round," that IS a test of skill, and that's very appropriate. The horrible ones like, "If you fall down, a bomb on you kills you, but your opponent can fall down all he likes" or "Your opponents weapons are electrified and stun you, but you don't have that ability" are just dumb. There's no penalty for losing (in fact, you get a pittance of experience and gold) and can retry the fight all you like, but it just becomes a luck test -- will the AI sucker punch me, or can I get off a string of uninterrupted pinning and rapings before that happens again this time? After a while, I got tired of playing that game, and just opted for cheese -- you can usually Ring Out your opponent by knocking them out of the arena, and some characters (Voldo) excel at easy to pull off, effective knock backs. So, in fights that just weren't satisfying, I swapped characters and pounded my opponent out of the park. It wasn't any more satisfying, but it got the job done, and I never intend on playing those missions ever again.
I've just about beaten Weapon Master mode (once you beat it the first time, there is a second, tougher set of missions that unlocks a few areas you couldn't access previously on your first trip), and I sorta doubt I'll bother to replay it once I've seen and done everything. You earn money from your fights (some are big cash cows you can fight over and over again) which you spend on weapons, character costumes, and other special goodies that matter only to the "must-have-everything" collector, but once you get all those, I don't think $ has any more use to you. There's no gambling for trophies like in Super Smash Melee, there's no real expensive things to save up for; once you buy everything you can, you're pretty much done with Weapon Master mode. That's sort of a pity; it's vital that you bulldoze through the game to unlock all the characters and modes of play, but without any real incentive to play them again, I'm not going to bother.
What would be nice: Allow you to play some of the odd mission options in Vs. mode. Super Smash Melee has a whole suite of options you can invoke to make Vs. play customized; why can't I play electrified cage matches versus my buddies? The only things you can select are weapons, % life, and the stage you play on, but Weapon Master has all sorts of options (characters heal, characters take damage over time, only the weapons are visible, only X type of attack deals damage, etc.) that you can't select in other modes. That's a shame, because I'd love to play me some air supremacy matches. I've gotten pretty good at Link's up-stab and tornado swirl...
The Aesthetics: Gorgeous eye candy. Soul Calibur 1 was stunning on the DreamCast; not that many improvements were made, but, well, they weren't really all that needed. Skin textures are generally lacking, but hair and clothing movements are spot on, and a lot of love went into the physics. There are some clipping issues for clothing at times (Talim has poofy sleeves that often intersect with her torso), but these are simply nitpicks.
If you're a fan of such things, boobies jiggle nicely. It's not overtly jug shaking like Dead or Alive, but Ivy, the whip-sword dominatrix looking character, has nice cans. I'm also pretty sure you can see Taki's nipples. Tee hee, I got to say nipples in a game review!
Sounds are a bit on the lacking side. Music is flat; even the Zelda theme doesn't really play out quite right. The narrator usually says something pretentious at the beginning of a fight, to the tune of "Two fighters, linked by destiny. A sword calls to each of them" or some garbage. That gets old real fast, and there's no option (that I know of) to knock it off. Fighters generally have something stupid to say both before and after the fight that makes me wonder about the quality of the translation - notable quotables:
"Your soul makes a poor meal" (Cervantes)
"Don't scream! Worms!" (Astaroth)
"Please, let me through" (Talim)
"This rod shall be your doom" (Kilik)
"You're in pain... it's painful, isn't it?" (Sophitia)
Frankly, the rod comment makes me laugh every time, particularly when it's randomly generated against a large breasted opponent. Link and Voldo don't actually say anything, so they earn big points in my book for not being obnoxious.
Final Thoughts: It's one of the few fighters that lets you whale on a downed foe for a few seconds, and then gives you a cinematic replay of the last 5 seconds of brutal abuse. In fact, kicking them when their down is what Vs. play is all about; I still remember laughing my head off the first time I played Soul Edge while the same buddy I loaned Soul Calibur 2 for his wedding weekend was pounding my face into the ground for the camera's delight. Soul Calibur 2 doesn't miss a trick off of the originals -- it's a nice, gussied up version, a solid fighter all around, practically begs newbies to give it a try, and has enough variety to make it a fun party pleaser. It's just too bad Weapon Master mode is more chore than single player experience.
