 Review By: Cameron Morris |
Developer: | Namco |
| Publisher: | Namco | |
| Genre: | Fighting | |
| ESRB: | Teen | |
| # Of Players: | 1-2 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Memory Card | |
| Buy Now: |   |
First I'll talk about the Create-a-Character mode, which is less approachable than it could be because initially you don't have all that many parts to work with. You have to play a lot of the game in order to unlock nearly all the parts, and by a lot I mean you better be prepared to play for nearly a week while cramming in several hours a day if you do nothing but earn gold. That's a lot of work for the ability to give your warrior some pretty earrings, but the pay-off isn't too shabby: the amount of accessories here is pretty hefty, and with a little imagination you can make a decent likeness of nearly any character you want. I personally took the time to unlock several parts solely so I could create effigies of Kefka from Final Fantasy VI and Ganondorf from the Legend of Zelda series, and even though the likenesses were far from perfect, I still got a certain amount of demented satisfaction from beating a couple of single-player runs with both of them. So if you've ever fantasized about whooping Nightmare or Astaroth with a fair likeness of one of your favorite game characters, the opportunity is there.
The limitations of the character creator are obvious, though, and problematic: firstly, there are only two body types to choose from in the whole thing, and those are, respectively, male and female. This isn't so entirely terrible, I guess, but when I make a barbarian berserker who is supposed to be an unstoppable strongman with a giant freaking sword, I like for him to actually look the part. I know that dynamically changing the proportions of the character's body would have made programming rather problematic for Namco, but I can't help wishing that they had, at the very least, given us a few body types to choose from for each gender. Another limitation, this one slightly more irksome because it wouldn't affect the fighting so much, is in the faces of characters: for each gender there are about a dozen apiece. That's it. If that doesn't sound awful, understand that it's almost detrimental if you're like me and prefer to have your copy of a character or person down exactly right. I can't help thinking that the inability to change a character's face dynamically - or, at the very least, the lack of faces we can choose from - hurt the effectiveness of the entire thing quite a bit. God love Namco for trying, and it certainly whet my appetite, but I can't help wishing that the character creation simply had more meat to it.
Chronicles of the Sword is probably the one part of the game that drives me the absolute most insane. I hate it. The setup of the game is very simple, and if you've ever played the Ogre Battle series it's like that: you make a character to lead your army, and use that person and either more of your own creations or characters that Namco made in order to go through a long RPG campaign. The game is actually played by moving characters across mostly nondescript maps so you can engage other units (which is the best part because it leads to actual fighting), conquer enemy bases, and eventually conquer the enemy stronghold. This is all set against the backdrop of a rather insipid story about war between three nations and the rise of a lowly fighter (that's you!) to the rank of a competent military commander. Biggest difference between this and the series I compared it to earlier is that there's no real strategy, the story is boring, and the characters are like paper dolls that Namco cut out of a story book. There are a ton of missions you have to go through, and these missions are long. I am not exaggerating: the shortest ones will still take you upwards of twenty minutes, and the longer ones can take three times that long if you're not a master.
The level-up system in Chronicles of the Sword is pretty exemplary of why this part of the game just feels like crap: unless you're just leveling up one character (bad idea), you're going to be severely overpowered by many of your enemies, especially early on in the game. And since enemy AI increases with level...well, let's say that you're going to learn the difference between your level 12 Ninja and the game's level 60 Astaroth in a fast and painful way. This wouldn't be so bad I guess, if leveling up were more complicated than just fighting. You don't have to win, you just have to take off some health and you're doing well. This in itself isn't bad, but it will often lead to battles where you have to throw half a dozen weak characters against one super-powerful enemy to chip away at his or her health over the course of thirty minutes, depending on how good you are with the classes Namco has given you. The whole process just serves to exemplify exactly how tedious the entire mode is, and the blandness of the characters you don't make yourself just goes to show how little care really went into this part of the game.
Tale of Souls is a much more interesting take on the Arcade mode of most fighting games, and I can't help wishing that Chronicles of the Sword had been scrapped in favor of fleshing out this mode more. It's essentially a Choose-Your-Own Adventure mode, so that any character you use can go through different scenarios and alter their own story to a certain degree. The end result is basically the same - you always end up fighting the final boss - but the journey there can take on a different tone just by making decisions about whether to travel by sea or by land. You can fight different characters (this is one of the only ways to unlock most special characters), go to different locales...all kinds of fun things are available to you if you take the time to explore different options. But at the same time, even this mode feels unfinished: not only because it lacks multiple endings in the traditional sense (there are actually at least two endings for every character if you do well enough in an interactive cutscene at the end of the game) but also because most of the story is conveyed through annoying text boxes. There are very few cutscenes throughout the entire mode for any given character, which is a shame because the ones that are there are boundlessly entertaining: the "good" ending for Yoshimitsu is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. If you have to play Soulcalibur III by yourself, this is the mode to do it in, even though the inability to change the ending in any meaningful way is a bit of a downer and makes the adventure seem a bit hollow.
I'll take a moment to mention the increased difficulty of the game: compared to its predecessors, this game is Hell on wheels. On the higher difficulty levels it feels like the computer reads every movement you make and reacts perfectly and instantly, turning any fight into a battle of attrition that can degenerate into a streak of cursing that would make your mother's ears burn away. So if you were disappointed by the difficulty in previous games, well, you can certainly rectify that now. I find it more frustrating than fun, but I guess that's really what you buy extra controllers for.
I might as well mention that there's no online component. Man, that sucks.
Bottom Line:
The core gameplay of Soulcalibur III is so phenomenal that there's no meaningful way that it can really be improved upon. For me, every fighting game between Soulcaliburs is just something to tide me over until the next one arrives. The fighting engine is intuitive, fast, and as deep as you want it to be. Insofar as that goes, this is still the best fighting game on the market and should be in everyone's collection. If you have someone to play with, there's nothing better.
But there's a lot that's wrong here, too: recycled sound and music, a limited character creation mode, a branching arcade mode that is only barely scratched in terms of potential, and an utterly craptacular RPG mode all serve to put blemishes on the game's surface and would've crippled a lesser game. Let me reiterate that: for what it is, Soulcalibur III kicks almost immeasurable amounts of butt. But some parts of it feel half-finished, while others should never have been included at all, and that isn't something that anyone who plays it can ignore. Recommended, but by God it could have been utterly spectacular.
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7.8 |
Posted: 2005-12-15 12:31:04 PST