REPROBEAN_CHILD
[14] Master
#1 reason the game didn't sell well is very likely due to the poor early reviews and terrible word of mouth the game received.
SCV had a lot of hype and momentum going through December. Then when January came, the last 5 characters were revealed to be 3 mimics, Setsuka replaced as a re-skin of Patroklos, and yet another sword/shield clone in Omega Pyrrha, whose inclusion in the series is pretty damn pointless considering she's just a Sophitia/Cass mash-up in a game that already has a Sophie/Cass character in regular Pyrrha. The game screamed RUSHED before it was even released. Hype died immediately.
This probably would've been remedied if once the game was released, it scored very highly by reviewers and had robust single player content. Word of mouth would've spread as it did for MK9. People would've soon forgotten the missing characters and just waited for DLC. Instead, SCV had quite possibly the most barebones single player content in the series. Game receives a bunch of 6's and 7's, and casual fans of the series tell their friends to not even bother getting the game.
I kind of have to agree with this. The hype for the game actually started to die down the moment Algol and Edge Master were revealed. Kilik, Elyisum, Setsudude, and Phyrra O didn't make things better either. No one expected PS to reuse Algol again as a last boss or use a mimic character (let alone three of them). Using mimic characters contradicts the "no clones" statement that was made; a mimic is essentially a clone of other characters. After the game was launched, there's only about 40-60 comments on the Facebook page from the 150-200 comments when it was still in development. I could be wrong, but it seems like that "Likes" for Soul Calibur either stopped or decreased slightly...
We expected them to at least give some dlc that would make up for the shortcomings, but as of now, the dlc seem to be going in the same direction as SCIV's. I really hope I'm wrong about that...