Soul Blade

As impressive as the UK success of Tekken and Tekken 2 in 1995 and 1996 was, there is always a danger of running a series into the ground by updating it too frequently. Rather than keeping up that fast a pace of Tekkens or taking a break, Namco found a good middle path. For the next year, they came up with an alternative series that would go on to achieve at least as much as Tekken.

I hadn’t heard of Soul Blade and initially had no idea what it was when it came up on my list (the world of games not exactly being short of Souls and Blades) but that’s only because it’s not the identity Namco settled on longer-term. Soulcalibur, now that I know. The series didn’t start as Soul Blade either, in fact. In Japan it was Soul Edge, which is where the biggest villain of its story emerges. Not the dread skeleton pirate, but the persistent litigious trademark troll with a company called Edge who has made a perverse mark on games history by making life hell for anyone using that word in a games context.

Soul Blade is also about one edge making an impact on history, a legendary cursed and/or blessed sword that a whole bunch of warriors from around the world are going after for their own reasons. Well, its plot is about that. It’s about doing Tekken with weapons. Which is a good way to create a very similar fighting game which nonetheless has significant enough twists to create its own identity. Two people still fight each other on a two-dimensional plane with 3D graphics, but they do it from different distances and with a slightly different style of fighting, in every sense. There are fewer moves but more additional things to watch out for beyond the basic moves, with blocks in particular taking on a new level of complexity and importance.

Soul Blade’s more global and historical outlook (it’s set in the 1500s) further helps it to go for a different tone than Tekken. Pleasingly, it’s an even more ridiculous one. It has a great cast, from numerous noble heroes of assorted nationalities to the aforementioned skeleton to characters built from the enormous sword outwards. The weapons also let it go further into making the fighting as ridiculous as the characters. Seeing someone swinging that sword and having it blocked by a tiny, barely visible staff held above their opponent’s head is some sight and feat of game logic. Actually, that one gets an extra helping hand from the British Board of Film Classification — the restrictions that prevented nunchaku from being shown in Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles were amazingly still in place in 1997, so for us in the UK Li Long has a ‘three part staff’.

There are some additional game modes to go with the new styles. The Edge Master mode where you get a background story unfolding in revealed book pages while collecting new weapons is a little overwritten for my impatience, but it does give some extra narrative heft. The weaving of different characters’ stories around each other is the smartest part of it. There is even more of a sense than in Tekken of extra depths waiting for those to explore them, even if they’re not in the immediate fights. Personally as with most fighting games I’m more inclined to play it in a shallow way as a matter of total spectacle. With me and the friend I played it with it, both soon giggling several times a fight, it succeeded in that all over.