Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

To add to what Dante said, it's not like SCVI bothers with giving the characters' ages this time either. Unlike the previous games, this one covers a wide swath of time, so their profiles don't place them at any particular age for this game -- because they aren't any particular age for this game.
 
Last edited:
To add to what Dante said, it's not like SCVI bothers with giving the characters' ages this time either. Unlike the previous games, this one covers a wide swath of time, so their profiles don't place them at any particular age for this game -- because they aren't any particular age for this game.
Right, but the fact that those stories cover a wider swath of time is exactly why the plots of the later games are implicated. Some elements of the story have clearly been shifted around. As to the "they just made Tira older because it made sense for this or that narrative or pragmatic reason" type explanations, that confuses the issue of why they did something with what they did. Maybe if we look behind the curtain, there's an explanation for it (I'm not convinced that keeping her the same size really saved them that much time in constructing the model: I think its more likely that they wanted to introduce essentially the same character everyone was familiar with, but they wanted her in this game because she's a semi popular character, and they just really have zero concern for such a discontinuity). But it really doesn't matter why they did--the fact of the matter is, she's older than she reasonably could be, based on the old continuity, and that's a change to the story (whether it was meant to change the story or was done for technical reasons or just because they weren't particularly concerned about it, inconsequential as it is in the grand scheme of things).

And look, this is Soulcalibur: it's not like anyone would notice if next to none of it fit together correctly, let alone just a few details being out of place here and there. My point is that Crash was correct: in at least some sense, this game pulls from plot elements of SCI, SCII, and SCIII. The majority of the characters may have narratives that fit cleanly into SCI (or SCI and into SCII), but not all of them do. And while I've not committed the details of all of the original "what if" plots of SCI-SCIII to memory at the level you two have, even I--as someone who is disinterested in what they consider a cornball anime plot, but who has nevertheless been playing the games for two and a half decades and thus accumulated a basic understanding of each character's arc, even if I have long since forgotten most of the details (if I ever looked into them to begin with, in those library modes where most of the info was relegated to in the earlier games, as best I can recall)--have noticed some discontinuities. I take you guys at your word, given your more purposeful scrutinizing of all of that lore, that the vast majority of the plot points sourced and re-incorporated into SCVI come from SCI and early SCII. But, for a certainty, at least some of it comes from materials originally presented in SCIII, so when someone says that SCVI covers events from SCI through early SCIII, I'd say that's essentially correct.

In the Game of Pedantic Corrections you either win or you...!!! ....well actually, you won't really die. Come to to think of it you can't reall lose either, or win. In the Game of Pedantic Corrections, we...all become nerds?
 
Last edited:
In the Game of Pedantic Corrections you either win or you...!!! ....well actually, you won't really die. Come to to think of it you can't reall lose either, or win. In the Game of Pedantic Corrections, we...all become nerds?
I mean sure, at the end of the day, you can say this, but the biggest point I could make, I did, which was that SoulCalibur III also takes place in 1590, and so Talim as we see her (which is also the same she’s always been) is from 1590, not 1583. The Tira as we see her is also from 1590, even though her playable story elements start earlier. They’re not new story elements, they’re just story elements that we haven’t seen in-game before. It’s not rushed, it’s not shifted around, it’s not a retcon, it’s just seeing something for the first time instead of having to read about it. The characters from SoulCalibur III are obviously SoulCalibur III content, but all story events in SoulCalibur VI take place before the events of SoulCalibur II start, which was the basis of my original correction.
 
See, but the "one more" thing only really would have worked if they were doing season two, which is assumed to follow like Tekken, and release three packs of two, so they could have shown Hwang's trailer... then one more did a reveal with Aeon. Which is why Cassandra should have been revealed last week.
There's simply no way that they announce three characters at EVO.

tumblr_pn4wgy1uY21s2wenvo2_500.gif

can't they announce season 2 without revealing the characters?
 
can't they announce season 2 without revealing the characters?
They technically could, but that wouldn’t be nearly the same draw or hype levels as it would be if they did show the characters, like they did for Tekken 7. It would address one of the biggest complaints as well, that being their keeping us in the dark. If there is a “one more” reveal at EVO, I bet it would be Edge Master, as a free bonus character. Not that I think that will happen, but it has a better chance than a season two announcement, by my estimation
 
They technically could, but that wouldn’t be nearly the same draw or hype levels as it would be if they did show the characters, like they did for Tekken 7. It would address one of the biggest complaints as well, that being their keeping us in the dark. If there is a “one more” reveal at EVO, I bet it would be Edge Master, as a free bonus character. Not that I think that will happen, but it has a better chance than a season two announcement, by my estimation

But that's so terrible!! surely they know cassandra is not exciting enough alone for EVO!
 
An announcement for Season 2 is good enough at this point in time, Season 1 isn't even over yet which is technically October so I'm not fussed at reveals though the only thing I really want revealing is who's coming back. To me character trailers should be more about showing what they can do in the latest game than just revealing themselves. IIRC SFV did an amazing trailer for one of their seasons showing all the upcoming characters then just before they were released showed their gameplay trailer.
 
I mean sure, at the end of the day, you can say this, but the biggest point I could make, I did, which was that SoulCalibur III also takes place in 1590, and so Talim as we see her (which is also the same she’s always been) is from 1590, not 1583. The Tira as we see her is also from 1590, even though her playable story elements start earlier.
But...that's exactly the point I'm making: Tira is shown being the same age as she is in SCIII (maybe even a little older), so you either have to accept that the events are shifted around or that her age has been retconned. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter which you've chosen: in some sense, elements of SCIII have been pulled into SCVI's story, whether they are discrete plot points or passive elements of the setting. And it's not just Tira, though we have tended to focus on her as an exemplar: numerous of the SCII characters also have stories running into SCIII, either in the original narrative, or even with the dates as they are presented in this game. And then there's Amy as well, whose story has also been repositioned with reference to her age. Again, no matter how you slice it or redefine the parameters to try to make it all fit neatly together, you have to concede that it really doesn't unless you concede some degree of retconning, which includes some degree of implication of the plots of all three games--at least enough that crash is not really incorrect to say that this game "covers" (in some sense) events/character arcs from SCI-SCIII.
 
The point is that 1590 is a loooooooong year. The beginning of SoulCalibur II, all the way through the end of SoulCalibur IV, all takes place in that same year. Tira at the end of SoulCalibur IV is the same age as Tira at the beginning of SoulCalibur II. Same goes for everyone else, Amy, Talim, or otherwise. Pretty much everyone in SoulCalibur VI is shown as how they would appear in 1590.

Any plot points from SoulCalibur III that were included in SoulCalibur VI, indeed, were backstory elements from biographical information, not events that actually took place in SoulCalibur III proper. They were included to establish the characters properly, in lore, in timeline, along with everyone else. That’s not my definition of a retcon, at the very least. They didn’t change history, they just expanded on it. SoulCalibur II hasn’t happened yet, so it follows that nothing in SoulCalibur III has happened yet either.
 
Right, but the fact that those stories cover a wider swath of time is exactly why the plots of the later games are implicated. Some elements of the story have clearly been shifted around. As to the "they just made Tira older because it made sense for this or that narrative or pragmatic reason" type explanations, that confuses the issue of why they did something with what they did. Maybe if we look behind the curtain, there's an explanation for it (I'm not convinced that keeping her the same size really saved them that much time in constructing the model: I think its more likely that they wanted to introduce essentially the same character everyone was familiar with, but they wanted her in this game because she's a semi popular character, and they just really have zero concern for such a discontinuity). But it really doesn't matter why they did--the fact of the matter is, she's older than she reasonably could be, based on the old continuity, and that's a change to the story (whether it was meant to change the story or was done for technical reasons or just because they weren't particularly concerned about it, inconsequential as it is in the grand scheme of things).

I'm sorry, but this is the first time you've employed what I'd have to call ridiculous logic. There is, by necessity, a certain degree of disconnect between the gameplay and the narrative in any game.

We take it with us into every battle in this game, accepting that characters who were just impaled or bisected will continue getting back up until an arbitrary colored bar has depleted. Hell, even before all that, we've accepted it when a meeting that began in a bustling marketplace shifts to a butte in the desert when it's time for the fighting to begin.

The battle models that do the fighting in these random locations and walk off fatal attacks inflicted thereupon fall into this same nebulous space. There's simply no way I can take the argument seriously that Tira having a single battle model indicates anything about the narrative when they would have had to be straight-up stupid to expect her fans to learn how to play with a drastically different version of her from the beginning of her Soul Chronicle to the end.

Should the balancing and designing effort have been put in by the developers for a handful of matches that would inevitably have been ill-received anyway due to players being forced to play most of Tira's Soul Chronicle with her handling slightly differently from one battle to the next? How absurd.

If you're only insisting that the narrative here expands as far as the time of SCII and SCIII, then ... well, yes. One look at the timeline screen tells us that. Or a viewing of the trailer for Amy.

But if that was what you were trying to get across, you've chosen an odd way of doing so.
 
Back