[This is a guest post, and I’m as happy as ever to welcome back David C James, whose previous posts here include Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and God of War II. You can find David at pixelhunted.com and on twitter as @PixelHunted.]
Sliding back into Soulcalibur IV is like putting on a cosy pair of winter socks you’d left in the drawer all summer. This was Namco’s first entry in the series on 7th generation consoles, bringing the franchise into shiny HD and debuting online play, all bolstered by a deep character creator that meant you could show off your weird and wonderful creations to other players.
Sadly, though not unexpectedly, fourteen years on from its release the servers have been mothballed and IV is now a firmly offline game. But is there enough here to make it worth heading back to the stage of history and this particular tale of souls and swords, eternally retold? This is a surprisingly tricky question to answer.
Let’s start with the positives. Despite its age IV still looks great. The characters are just on the right side of stylized, with expressive features and animation that oozes personality. Stages are feature neat details like dodos wandering around the beach stage or stained-glass windows casting dappled colours over the characters. And – as this is a fighting game – it’s all running at a buttery smooth 60fps.
I played the game on Xbox 360 (it’s sadly not backwards compatible on Xbox One) and it looked so good I half suspect my 4K TV is doing some kind of automatic upscaling to round off the rougher edges.
IV also plays beautifully, by which I mean it plays almost exactly like the Dreamcast version. The second and third entries cranked up the pace of the combat, with III particularly frenetic. IV dials back the speed (to the consternation of some), but I’ve always thought Tekken is where you go for that type of fighting and a game where the characters are swinging around slabs of metal should have a bit of heft to it.
With online not an option I spent my time with the game exploring the story mode, the ‘Tower of Lost Souls’ mode full of matches with special modifier, and dabbling with the arcade playthrough. But battling against the AI isn’t half as satisfying as squaring off with another human being, so I put a controller in the hand of my skeptical girlfriend for some versus matches.
In an entirely predictable development, she trounced me by button-mashing, easily overcoming my carefully considered tactics. Soulcalibur has always been friendly to button-mashers, but even so it’s a little humiliating to be beaten by someone doing the same move repeatedly while giggling that I couldn’t figure out how to counter it (and yes, I was guard impacting as best I could).
Story mode proves to be exactly what you’d expect from a fighting game, though at least someone at Namco is taking it seriously as there’s a ludicrous spaghetti diagram of how all the characters are linked to one another. But all you really need to know is blue sword = good and red sword = bad and just settle back to enjoy the overblown theatrics and exceptionally cheesy dialogue.
But there’s a Star Destroyer-sized elephant in the room. The Soulcalibur series is known for its guest-stars, but while characters like Link, Spawn, Heihachi, Ezio Auditore, and Geralt slide into the fantasy history setting fairly easily, Yoda, Darth Vader and The Force Unleashed’s Apprentice stick out like a sore thumb. Yoda and Vader were temporarily exclusive to Xbox and PlayStation respectively (they were each eventually made available to the other platform, but that DLC has long been delisted) and the game is so proud of them they’re in pride of place on the box.
As I’m on Xbox, I get Yoda (I guess because he’s green?), who’s straight-up busted. In this instance it’s fair to judge him by size, as regular attacks zoom over his head and he’s almost impossible to land a throw on. His character model is impressive enough, though I’m sure Lucasfilm wouldn’t settle for anything less than perfection. But when you’re clashing lightsabers as Yoda vs the Apprentice on the Death Star to John Williams’ ‘Qui-Gon’s Noble End’ from The Phantom Menace it just doesn’t feel like you’re in the same game.
Soulcalibur IV was an excellent fighting game in 2008 but I can’t think of any reason why you’d want to dig it out now unless you have a burning desire to see how Yoda fares in battle against Mitsurugi. If you’re itching for this series just pick up Soulcalibur VI, which is better than this in every conceivable way and can be had for a couple of bucks on all platforms.
Top of the charts for week ending 2 August 2008:
