I bought this a while ago, motivated mainly because I now own a Hori Mini Fighting Stick and wanted to try different fighting games with it. Also because I have never played a single Soulcalibur game before and this newest entry in the franchise features Geralt of Rivia as a guest character. Beyond the fact that it’s one of the few fighting games involving characters who are armed with melee weapons plus the character Ivy in it often appears as a sex object, I knew nothing about this franchise beforehand.

One surprise here is that this game seems surprisingly single-player oriented as there is not one but two separate single-player campaign modes and indeed many of the achievements are tired to single-player. This seems odd as most such games are mainly all about online playing these days. The much longer campaign is called Libra of Soul and has you creating your own unique character thereafter known as the Conduit. In the 16th century, Astral Fissures appear throughout the land and the Conduit is linked to them. You are forced to travel to each fissure and absorb its power, closing it, in order to survive. But a sorcerer known as Azwel is using the power of the fissures for his own purposes and once he realizes your existence, uses you as part of his grand plan. Naturally in order to defeat his plan, you must tap into the power of one of the two legendary swords, the good Soul Calibur or the evil Soul Edge, and that involves a very long quest. This mode involves travelling around a map that covers Europe, Asia and Africa and has many side quests including repeatable ones so you can use them to grind, hence its length.

The other campaign is called Soul Chronicle and consists simply of a fixed series of fights featuring each character. Basically everyone is seeking for Soul Edge for one reason or another. The most important of the stories involves a staff using disciple of a temple named Kilik who has to confront the current wielder of Soul Edge, the corrupted knight known as Nightmare. There are annoyingly long dialogue sequences in between the fights and the sad thing is that each character only has a few few to complete his or her part of the story, maybe five or six fight per character. It’s surprisingly short and very easy compared to Libra of Soul. Unless I’m missing something, you can’t even turn up the difficulty level for this mode and the AI is so scelrotic that it often just stands there and does nothing at all. This makes it a total walk in the park so the only thing you need is patience to sit through all the dialogue.

Anyway the interesting part is to talk about the gameplay and this indeed the mechanics of this series are very different indeed from any other fighting game I’ve played. Combat takes places in a real 3D space so characters can sidestep and circle one another. As such attacks in this system are either horizontally inclined, which helps you hit a side-stepping enemy, or vertically inclined, which tend to be more damaging but can be more easily avoided. I do notice that jumping is less emphasized in this game as the up and down commands are used to move right and left. To jump or to squat, you need to use the up and down command together with the guard button or an attack button, and in any case the jumping distance here is much shorter than in other fighting games.

Then there’s how the game gives you such strong defensive tools. Not only does the guard button make blocking easy but you don’t even take chip damage from blocking like in other games. Add to that the previously mentioned option to sidestep vertical attacks, you can also parry incoming attacks if your sense of timing is good and there’s also something called reversal edge which lets you auto-block attacks while it lasts and shifts to a cinematic confrontation mode afterwards. Like in other games you can build up your soul gauge to launch supers but a better use of it might be to spend it to enter a soul-charged mode which enhances all of your regular attacks and gives you new ones, plus when you activate it, you can blow away the opponent, instantly giving you a bit of space. Of course if your attack does go through, it is possible to achieve a lot of damage through combos and you can even throw the opponent outside of the arena completely for an instant win. Then of course there are special attacks to break guards and there are throws and unblockable attacks.

This results in a fighting game that plays very differently compared to anything else I’ve tried. You cannot simply wail on an enemy based on the reasoning that you’re at least doing chip damage anyway. You really want to mix up high, mid and low attacks to get past the blocks and pull out the big, slow block breaking attacks when needed. It also pays to notice if the opponent is relying on too many vertical attacks as they can be easily side-stepped around. It is also critical to pay attention to where you’re standing as being knocked out of the ring is an instant win. Finally, the moveset of each character is huge as there are so many things they can do. They are eight-way-run moves which applies when a character is running side to side or front to back. There are moves which are usable only in a soul-charged state. Certain characters also have stance-specific moves and special game mechanics. There really is a lot to go into you want and they even added new mechanics in the patches.

Yet despite all this the game feels, well, strangely easy? Yes characters have a lot of moves they can pull out but you can just familiarize yourself with a few basic ones and actually do okay until you hit a situation where you feel like to a different tool and so you go learn that. This game even has fairly extensive tutorials and tips to help you learn each character’s playstyle. The execution is so forgiving and many characters have such simple combos that you can just button-mash your way to victory quite often. It just feels more casual and less technical than other fighting games. Even though I’m a noob, I’m not sure that I actually prefer this style of game.

It doesn’t help either that the AI here seems really bad. As I said, I could breeze through Soul Chronicle without losing a single fight. At the same time, some fights, mainly the optional ones, in Libra of Soul are absurdly difficult but only because of the ridiculous advantages the opponent gets like being permanently soul-charged and getting slowly healed over time. But then you can cheat too by adding enchantments to your weapon and eat food that gives you temporary bonuses. In arcade mode, I can turn the AI difficulty all the way up and well, not win reliably, but actually not get instantly destroyed which is unheard of in other fighting games. I’m sure that if I put more time in it I could make serious progress and I’ve read people saying that this is one of the easiest fighting game franchises to get into.

However I most definitely do not like almost all of the character designs and the stupidly overwrought story. With Geralt in the game with his character design straight out of his own video game, it’s easy to compare that with the anime style faces of the other characters and their stupidly impractical outfits, especially on the women. I cannot emphasize how much I prefer Geralt’s look to anyone else. It just so ridiculous to have a character like Sophitia prancing around in a short skirt. I am also underwhelmed by the graphics in general. This game isn’t that old but it doesn’t look as good to me as something like Injustice 2 for example. It might also have something to do with it having too many shiny, pyrotechnic effects that obscure the view of the characters and an art style that has less emphasis on detailed, realistic textures. As for the story, for all that this is about combat with deadly weapons and how much the villains posture, no named characters ever die and no limbs are ever amputated. They tend to get caught in cave ins and later emerge unscathed.

The upshot is that I enjoyed discovering how the mechanics here are so different from the other fighting games I’ve played and it’s really cool how the single-player campaign is a pseudo-RPG on a world map. Yet I find that I don’t enjoy the gameplay that much and I totally detest the ridiculous fiction that is the Soulcalibur universe. Eventually I even came to dread how they break up the fighting matches with painfully slow and stupid dialogue sequences. This means that I’m rather glad to see the back of this game after finishing off both single-player campaigns. It was satisfying to finally understand what this franchise is all about but I don’t think I’ll ever be back.