Versus - Soulcalibur III and Soulcalibur IV Part 2

  Almost a full three years after the Soul series's third installment, Soulcalibur IV debuted in North America in 2008, once again predating foreign releases.  It was released to the PS3 and XBox 360, which made it the first game to feature online play, as well as HD graphics.

  The story is that after the clash between Siegfried and Nightmare in the Lost Cathedral, each with their soul sword, they released the old Hero King Algol who was sealed inside Soul Calibur.  Algol is thought to be one of the first wielders of Soul Edge, but one of the only individuals who had a stronger will than the cursed sword and thusly used it for good.  Algol's son however wasn't as strong and claimed Soul Edge for himself, turning on his father in the process.  Algol wrestled away the evil blade, but in doing so killed his son.  Knowing Soul Edge's nature and with regret in his heart, the Hero King sacrificed himself, his son's body, and a piece of the broken Soul Edge and turned into the crystalline Soul Calibur.

  Meanwhile Siegfried and Nightmare each own a fully powered soul sword now and are poised to do savage battle once again at the location of Algol's newly resurrected tower called... um... The Tower of Remembrance... and that's the entire premise of this story.  This is also one of the first failings of this game.  The story is weak.  Soulcalibur III offers the entire premise of it's story via an adventure mode for each character.  Even it's intro FMV gives you a good sense of the world as it stands in the eternal battle of souls and swords.
  That brings me to the second failing.  Soulcalibur IV has no FMV sequences at all.  All sequences are done with in game graphics, and while they look good, they aren't that good.  Soulcalibur II and Soulcalibur III had awesome FMV sequences that really set the mood and pace.  Even Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny had a FMV opening, and that was a PSP game.

  I think I've beat around the bush long enough.  Let's talk about something that really annoyed me about this game.  More or less, Soulcalibur IV was just a big advertisement for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed which was coming out later that year for pretty much any kind of device that would play a game.  For the PS3 version Darth Vader his Apprentice (Starkiller) were playable out of the box while the XBox 360 replaced Vader with Yoda, though your version's missing character could be purchased as downloadable content.

  Now I don't necessarily mind guest characters.  Link was awesome in Soulcalibur II, and Kratos is a neat addition for Broken Destiny.  That's because they look like they fit.  Now look at that picture above.  Yoda does not belong here.  Worse yet, there are a few battle areas on the Death Star.  Imagine characters from the late 16th century doing battle in space station with laser gates and space docks (even if all of these things are from a long time ago and far, far away).
  One important thing about any game is that it's immersive.  Let's imagine Super Mario Bros. for example.  What if there was a special cross over with Lord of the Rings that had Mario stomping on Ringwraiths, kicking palantirs, and dodging flaming arrows as you struggle with the burden of carrying the One Ring to Mordor.  There after you're back in the Mushroom Kingdom and solely concerned with Bowser and his antics again.  Absurd, I know.  Soulcalibur IV is equally absurd.
  The gameplay options are equally weak, featuring a simplified Story Mode which isn't much past Arcade Mode aside from little cutscenes between battles.  There is also Tower of Lost Souls which you can either ascend for special battle situations to overcome, or descend for a more classic survival mode.
  Character creation returns, but brings along new elements that served to ruin the experience.  Armor and weapons now have stats similarly to an RPG that affect attack, defense, and life bar.  Generally, you won't be able to make a character look the way you want and have decent stats at the same time.  On top of that, in battles your equipment can be broken, which more often than not leaves you with warriors running around in their underwear.
  Thankfully Soulcalibur IV is just as easy to pick up and play as it's predecessors, which for me is always a big plus.  That's not to say that the gameplay is identical though.  There is one new gameplay aspect that completely ruins the battles, especially between skilled opponents: Soul Crush and Critical Finishes.  As you defend attacks you lose soul energy until it eventually depletes putting you into Soul Crush.  If your opponent hits his horizontal, vertical, kick, and guard buttons at the same time when you are in Soul Crush, he get's to execute a Critical Finish which will instantly kill you.  It does not matter how much health you have, you lose the round instantly and move on to the next.  It's cheap and unfair and feels like a Mortal Kombat idea more than a Soulcalibur idea.

  That said, there are good things about this game that are very much worth mentioning.  Graphically it's stunning.  Levels are gorgeous to look at and characters are very smooth and natural looking.  Metal looks like metal and cloth looks like cloth, water looks very fluid, and backgrounds look naturally out of focus.
  Some battle situations allow for you to chose two characters and switch between them on the fly in a tag battle sense which is very fun, but sadly unused in any versus situation.  The feature is absent for Broken Destiny which is sad as with a little refining it could make for a unique battle mechanic for both offline and online play.
  Lastly the music is still wonderful.  Soulcalibur games have always been known for having a robust orchestrated soundtrack, and  IV is no different.  And fans of the series from the Dreamcast days can download the original Soulcalibur soundtrack for Soulcalibur IV.  The only time the music fails to keep you in the theme of the game is on the Star Wars levels, and we don't need to get into that again.
  Between weak story, bad tie-ins, empty gameplay, crappy character creation, and striptease combat, Soulcalibur IV left a lot to be desired, especially after the experience that Soulcalibur III provided.  The bar was set high and IV feel way short.  It's not even at II's level though I would put it on par with the original and above Soul Blade.   It speaks volumes when many of these complaints were fixed for Broken Destiny.
  Recently it's been more or less confirmed that Namco-Bandai's Project Soul team is working on what will likely be Soulcalibur V.  It's my hope that they're learning from the mistakes they've made, and remembering what made the series great to begin with.  It's about the gameplay and the experience.  It's about being able to immerse yourself into a world where the Spirit Sword and the Cursed Sword are locked in a struggle that calls forth fighters from all over the world.  Hopefully the next Soulcalibur will remind us why the tale of souls and swords will be eternally retold.

Equipment - Consoles: Old Vs. New

    I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the durability of video game consoles.  You no doubt are familiar with the issues the PS2, PS3, and XBox 360 faced.  Disk read errors, red rings of death… Even the Wii had it's issues with it's System Menu 4.0 update rendering your sleek little Nintendo console a white, slanted brick.  High technology sure has it's price.

    Rewind twenty years, it's the age of the original Nintendo Entertainment System.  The old gray box wasn't without it's own issues.  Stick a game in, shut the lid, click in the power button and… nothing.  What did you do?  Power off, slide out your game, blow on it, blow on the console, wiggle things, press down something, insert another game maybe.  Everyone had a trick that got the bugger to work eventually.

    How about the Wii?  If I put a disk in and nothing happens, what do I do?  Blow on it?  Push the disk in firmly?  In this day and age of next gen consoles there is one thing for certain, if it won't work you are more or less screwed.  Unless you are the savviest of tech geeks you're either on the phone with Nintendo's Help or in the market for a new console.

    I understand that these consoles are much needier devices than the older systems.  High end graphics, bluetooth, wifi, and internal hard drives all provide a number of things that could go wrong at any time, whereas the Atari 2600 - 7800, Sega, and Nintendo only had a motherboard and a cartridge slot for the most part, not to mention just simple RF or AV ports and your trust controller ports.  Very simple in this age that now lacks RF and controller ports (favoring HDMI, Component, Optical, and USB).

    There exists though another reason why consoles have become more fragile, a reason now long forgotten.  In the 1980's there was a video game crash of sorts.  Customers were't interested in consoles anymore and stores were quickly replacing displays of Ataris, Intellevisions, and Colecovisions with board games and card decks.  When Nintendo emerged on the scene here in the States they had a steep hill to climb.  There was no room for error as even the slightest slip up would forever doom the market to obscurity.  This resulted in the NES becoming a massively popular system, as well as the creation of the current video game era.

    Today games are a corner stone of companies like Sony and Microsoft.  Major games have productions that rival major motion pictures and release dates that the later schedule around.  E.T. on Atari had a six week development time from inception to release, Final Fantasy XIII was in development for over four years, both were highly anticipated titles for their times (ignoring the fact that E.T.'s flop lead to the 80's video game crash).  The industry is so huge now there really is little fear of it ever coming to an end, unlike the early days of Nintendo.  There is no razor's edge these days, just ups and downs.

    The consequence of this is that the same care and attention that went into the NES has been traded for mass production and lowered development costs.  What used to take only six weeks to three months takes years now, and in some cases more money than any single Atari or NES game grossed in it's time.  Naturally cuts have to be made where they can in order to curb time and lower prices for the consumer.  Unfortunately that sometimes means we're left staring at red rings and empty wallets.

    It's no wonder that old games are seeing a second life.  People are dusting off their old consoles for another go, even in this age of HD and 3D.  I think the new innovation in systems need to be reliability, not motion controls.  I'm confident that ten years from now I'll be able to hook up my NES and play The Legend of Zelda with a little tweaking.  I don't think my PS3 will survive that long.  My PS2 is showing it's age already, being unable to remember the date if the power is out even a moment.  And my PS2 is a slim, so it's not even as old as some of the others that exist out there.

    In conclusion while todays games are very gorgeous and tons of fun, the consoles are definitely letting us down, and I think it's high time we start remembering what it was about games that attracted us all in the first place; Reliability and simplicity.  Fun isn't determined by how it looks, but how it's played.

Single Player - Tekken in Review

Back in the mid 90's Namco released Tekken, one of the first 3D fighting games to the Arcade scene. It was the early years of the third dimension in gaming so graphically it's weak by today's standards, but back then it was state of the art. Soon there after it was ported to the PlayStation where players could enjoy the full excitement of the arcade experience with their friends and family without having to shovel out tons of quarters.

Currently there are eight Tekken games including Tekken through Tekken 6 (including Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection and Tekken 6: Bloodline Rebellion), Tekken Tag Tournament, and Tekken Advance. They've appeared on every PlayStation system to date, and Tekken Advance was released on the Game Boy Advance. Even the Dreamcast had an unofficial port of Tekken 3 if you used the Bleem! boot disk.

One thing I've always praised about the games is that you can just pick up and start playing without having to suffer through learning moves. It that respect it's much like the Street Fighter series, but without being limited to the same moves in different variations. You move with the directional pad (or arcade joystick) and use four buttons to attack, one for each limb. Different combinations of punches and kicks possibly combined with holding, tapping, or double tapping a direction result in a wide variety of attacks and throws.

Each fighter has their own move set, ranging from straight forward to zany and unorthodox. Each move set is, for the most part, based on a real life fighting style (if not embellished upon like in the cases of Paul Phoenix's Judo and Mishima Style Karate in general). As the series goes on the motion acting improves vastly giving you a very fast paced, intense experience as both the player and the spectator. Two skilled players can very literally beat each other to a draw consistently.

My first experience with Tekken was Tekken 3. This was the first game where the player had the ability to move into the third dimension at will (Tekken and Tekken 2 only allowed moving around the arena in certain moves or combos). As a result of this enhanced mobility, the balance was to end characters' "moon jumping", replacing insane vertical leaps with realistic hops. It was a solid fighter, especially as someone who's previous fighter experience was Super Street Fighter II on the SNES.

Back then I would have believed that Tekken games would only go up from there. I'd have never imagined that over 10 years later I'd still feel that the third installment was the best of them all.

That's not to say that everything from Tekken Tag Tournament to Tekken 6 was awful. Each is a satisfying experience. What I am saying is that the games started to trade innovation in favor or lame, gimmicky improvements that Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter, and basically every fighting game today falls into (Soul Calibur IV is a prime example in the extreme, but that's a whole other story for another time).

This is an accounting of each of my experiences with the newer games. I'm not going to try to explain the stories or anything, but give you my impressions as a gamer.

When the PlayStation 2 launched Tekken Tag Tournament was right there waiting in it's next-gen glory. While not a canonical game (as it has the full roster of all characters up to Tekken 3 whether they were alive or dead) it was a great fighter. It was a fine example of the PS2's abilities early on and was definitely the easiest Tekken to pick up. The engine was exactly the same as that of Tekken 3 right down to move timings and character speed. The only change made in this iteration was the Tag mechanic. Two fighters were selected before a fight and the player could change between them at will, giving the reserve character a chance to heal slightly if injured.

It was just as fast, just as fun, but nothing really new. It left me wanting to see Tekken 4, believing that it would blow my mind in the same way Tekken 3 did.

It blew, I'll say that.

Tekken 4 came out in 2002, two years after Tekken Tag Tournament. I was excited to finally get to see the game I'd been waiting so long for. My excitement didn't take long to turn into frustration. Lots of things changed in this update, and not for the better.

Before I get into what went wrong I'd like to talk about what went right, the stages became more involved. In all previous Tekkens stages were just a never ending expanse that was surrounded by a background that didn't really seem to move right with the battle (imagine walking toward a building a mile away from you that never gets closer no matter how long or how fast you go). Tekken 4 introduced uneven terrain, walls, pillars, and all kinds of things one might find if they were to actually be in a world in which people lived. Characters could dodge around parked cars to avoid a hit, or smash the enemy into a wall for extra damage. The environment was very immersive and satisfying.

That brings us to the bad part. As a result of this they changed move speeds and timings drastically. Remember how I said Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag had the same game engine? For five years since Tekken 3's release in 1997 avid players had been practicing and refining their moves with their favorite characters. Then Tekken 4 comes along and just pulls the rug out from under you and makes you feel like you have never played Tekken before.

Combos have always been a strong part of Tekken games. To be good you really need to be able to take advantage of a momentary weakness in the enemy's defense and then exploit it as much as possible with a combo. Tekken 4 instead seemed to favor a single strike style, where hitting an opponent every now and again would get you farther than trying to combo, as most parts of combos (should you ever get the new timing back down to actually perform one) hit absolutely nothing.

This was all we had for three more years. I was heart broken by how much I didn't enjoy Tekken 4 (which is what I feel fueled my love affair with the Soul Calibur series until it too betrayed me with it's own number IV). Tekken 5 was released in 2005, and as a loyal fan I wanted to play it. It harkens back to 3 in that timing was properly restored and combos mattered again. However, that also meant that complex stages had to go too. Why? Instead of awesome stages like the underground parking lot or the mall in 4 we're back to battling across the planes of infinite space. There were a few arenas with walls, but there was still no varied hight or any random objects to affect the battle.

Still though it was an improvement over Tekken 4. Fights were fun again, the characters were well balanced, and we finally got a chance to play Devil Jin (who has the fighting style of regular Jin Kazama from Tekken 3). One would just about be prepared to say that Tekken 5 put the series back on track. Then you get into a fight with the game's main antagonist Jinpachi Mishima (Heihachi's father apparently) and discover that this Tekken is probably one of the most frustrating games out there.

Looking back, each Tekken that I can remember had a character or two that had a cheap move. Tekken 2 had Devil who could shoot lasers and fly. Tekken 3 had True Ogre who could teleport, fly, and shoot fire as well as hit through block with a few moves. However, a good player could easily dispatch these characters as their cheap moves had negative consequences (for the most part). The challenge was reasonable.

Well then here comes Jinpachi in Tekken 5 to totally break your will to keep playing the series let alone the game. Beating him devolves from a test of skill to just dumb, blind luck. Everything he does seems to connect, most of it is unpredictable, and most everything you do to him is ignored. You only have small windows to attack, and usually even doing so opens you up to be killed immediately there after. Not even Devil Jin with his own lasers can out cheap Jinpachi. Your only hope to see all the character endings is to set the rounds to one, so if you do get lucky and beat him you only have to do it the one time.

As a quick aside, it is unbelievably frustrating to anyone who is a gamer when a game's difficulty is whittled down to having to battle a boss or enemy that does nothing short of cheat. Going back to Street Fighter II, battling M. Bison was a harrowing experience, but with refinement of your skills with your favorite characters you could eventually beat him. Or in Tekken 3 with True Ogre. That's because, while having special moves, they still have to play by the same rules as you did when it came to the laws of attack and defend. If I dodge your punch and punch you back while your attacking, I get a hit on you.

With that in mind consider how unfair Jinpachi was to everyone who faced him. He teleports, shoots fire from his belly that instantly crosses the screen, can hit you with the same move regardless of whether you are in the air, standing, or ducking, and in some cases when you are no where near him. He can stop you in any move, and seems to only be vulnerable when not actually moving (as in he's not doing anything like if one was not controlling him so he just stood there). Eventually, if you are patient, you'll get lucky and defeat him, but you'll walk away from the fight with the sickening feeling that you have a long, long road ahead of you if you intend to beat the game with every character.

Sadly, this ridiculous final boss crap stuck around for Tekken 6, though in every other way it's a massive improvement over Tekken 5. Whatever version you've played (as the first arcade version was released in Japan in 2007, the XBox 360/PlayStation 3 version in 2009, and the PSP version in late 2009 or early 2010 depending on where you live) you are treated to an amazing roster of about 40 characters. The endless plane battle areas are gone again, though complex arenas are still absent. Instead some areas have break thru points which take you to another area or expand the current area if you beat someone into the ground or wall enough.

Battle timing is still spot on, and even for having so many characters there is hardly any overlap that didn't already exist (like Nina and Anna, or King and Armor King). Even the Scenario Campaign is a massive improvement over Tekken 5's The Devil Within or Tekken 3 and 4's Tekken Force modes. Combos have just as much of a place as single strikes, and both a patient fighting style and an aggressive one will be as successful. The pick up and play is right where it needs to be, though it's still not where it was in Tekken 3. Only Yoshimitsu fans probably complained about the fighting system as his move set seems to have completely changed to be a blend between his Tekken style and his Soul Calibur style.

In the Arcade Mode you are faced with three tough opponents. The first is a giant robot that goes by the name of NANCY (which I think stands for something, but you never learn what it is). Nancy does not respond to hits, though it does take damage. It has missiles, machine guns, and a laser that will cut a hole in the floor to make you fall out and lose. This would be insanely frustrating except for it's only a bonus round, so you don't have to win to continue. As of yet I haven't beat it, so for that I'm grateful.

After than you are engaged in battle with Jin Kazama (not to be confused with Devil Jin). He is always in Rage Mode, a new mechanic that enhances your attack and defense slightly (when near death for players). He's fast, and he hits hard, but he's beatable. The fight against him usually ends fast one way or another, and it's not anything frustrating. That's yet to come.

Once Jin is down, you go on to face the final boss Azazel. Guess what? He's almost as cheap as Jinpachi. The main difference here is while Jinpachi had a lot of unblockables, Azazel only really has one in his sweeping laser. However, while Jinpachi was vulnerable when not moving, Azazel seems to have an auto guard function that just protects him like there is a force field around him. He doesn't even respond to the hit. And this will exist even if he is in mid attack. You never know what attack is coming up next, and once you are knocked off your feet you will die. He will not let you get up again so you might as well just let him finish you off. Azazel also appears in Scenario Mode, but he's easier because you can surround him by having yourself on one side and the other character (whether it's the CPU or a second player) at his front to distract him.

I'm not sure why it is that a good challenge anymore has been broken down into just having a nearly impossible boss. Or why you can either have complex levels, or good fighting mechanics, but not both. In conclusion though, Tekken games as a whole are still very satisfying experiences for fighting game fans. Every game has had it's improvements, and it's pit falls, but none of them have quite been as good as Tekken 3. None the less each was a memorable experience that kept me coming back for more. Not every fighting franchise has that luxury (Virtua Fighter and Mortal Kombat are two examples that pop to mind of fighters that just don't keep you interested.).

All in all, I do recommend the games. Even if you are new to the series, you can rest assured that the basics of what you learn in one game will carry over to the next, even if the timing is off. Hopefully when Tekken 7 comes out there won't be an even cheaper boss waiting at the end between you and being declared The King of Iron Fist.