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SSfox
[14] Master
Thing that put me off most in SC6 highlevel, are CE that can whiff punish almost everything even some fast moves, like even throws whiffs.
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I mean it's IGN.Welp, I've gone full doomer. I hate the fighting game community so much for their garbage taste. If even Soulcalibur 2 wasn't big enough to make this list, the series is officially dead. Bamco will see this and have no further incentive to make another game. With Okubo gone, nobody is even left at Bamco to fight for this franchise. There is now a 0% chance we're getting Soulcalibur VII. We'll be lucky of Taki & Ivy are reduced to crossover legacy characters like Morrigan & Felicia.
IGN is (unfortunately) the biggest media company in the gaming sphere, and I'm sure a massive corporation like Bamco cares a lot about what they have to say. IGN is adding more fuel to the "Soulcalibur isn't relevant" narrative that has effectively killed the series.I mean it's IGN.
They put VF5US instead of VF2 or VF4 evo. VF5 US is a fucking joke, it's just a 2012 ps360 remaster game but with cut content and worse netcode. releasing this game with such bad netcode in this day of age is like WTF.
I also would put T3 instead of T7. But yeah it's just one guy opinion in a sens.
Let’s not forget about Sonic. The franchise managed to endure duds that would have sank most others.Don't worry about Soul Calibur. The series has sold millions of copies, it ain't gonna stop being made.
Soul Calibur 5 disappointed, the free-to-play bombed, and we STILL got a 6th game after all that. That should convince you right there that the series is here to stay.
You can look at other games too. Mass Effect: Andromeda was a big disappointment, bigger than SC5, and it still gets another game in ME4. Devil May Cry 2 was a stepdown from 1, and they still made a 3rd game. Deus Ex; Invisible War was considered worse than Deus Ex 1, it got another game made by a different team called Deus Ex: Human Revolution and was hailed as a comeback for Deus Ex.
I could go on and on, you get my point - don't worry about a franchise that has a history of positive sales and reviews.
I played this recently and I'm convinced that 90% of people who say this, is due to nostalgia. The improvements 6 has made to the controls has put the gameplay in a much better place.
In 2, the feel was a little clunky (Voldo especially felt worse to play compared to 6).
It just has a faster pace in general, ranging from it’s movement speed, GI speed, step G, attack animations, and even the weight of the game as a whole. It constantly keeps you on your toes while playing.2 has better pacing because there's no Reversal Edge or long Critical Edge animations
So basically just get rid of it entirely then. Excellent. After all, it may as well not exist if those are the changes.Also, Reversal Edge is balanced. All they have to do is get rid of the rock-paper-scissors part and it's in a good place. The Critical Edges that have long animations were way more annoying than Reversal Edge.
It can be taken either way really. And honestly Voldo feels fine. From what I felt he’s pretty much remained the same in movement and animation.I was talking about how he felt, not about how strong or weak he was. So many characters felt like their moves ended abruptly compared to 6 where the moves felt more fluid and complete. Also you should work on your tone buddy - mocking people ain't gonna make them listen to you.
And I understand that to an extent, but it’s also not hard to see why some people amongst the community don’t really like it. Be it the return of the verizontals that were a part of SCV, the already mentioned long CEs and Reversal Edges killing the flow, the fact that Soul Charges can be a ridiculous game changer especially for specific characters and there’s very little ways to properly punish it, or even the over abundance of character specific mechanics or gimmicks in an attempt to “reinvent” the wheel with them. I’m not saying SCVI is bad or anything but I can understand why some just…don’t enjoy it in comparison to other installments.I don't think they give 6 enough credit when it comes to gameplay.
I never said RE was too strong. Hell, I’ll even go out and say it’s super easy to counter. Biggest problem I’ll say is it’s for the most part a redundant and pointless mechanic that adds nothing significantly new to the table. Once you get the hang of using GI’s you’ll only ever end up using RE sparsely if at all. Sure you gain a good amount of meter from it but it’s not really worth it just for that since gaining meter is very easy in the game as a whole and nearly everything you do can fill up almost half a bar.Why are you taking an all-or-nothing approach? Get rid of the minigame and it improves the flow of combat. The rock-paper-scissors and breaking up the flow is why it's detested, not the strength of Reversal Edge itself. Just ending the minigame is enough but maybe they can turn it into a break attack to prevent counter-Reversal-Edging. Hard to say without testing, but it doesn't need to be removed completely - just changed.
SC6 is super great. But still lack things that make me put it above SC2. SC2 gameplay is more basic, but also more solid, i also prefer the tone and atmosphere of SC2 that has less of that cringey anime feel to it compare to recent SC games. Also no CaS in SC2 is another win, i mean i like being able to make costume for characters, specially since there are no alt costumes in the game, but not a fan of character creation being forced in all online modes.Like I said, I could go on and on. After giving 3 examples, I didn't want to add another.
Also Sonic 2006 was an epic fail. All these people worrying about the future of the Soul Calibur have no idea what Sonic fans had to deal with in 2006. To this day, it's Wikipedia page has restricted editing to prevent vandalism.
I played this recently and I'm convinced that 90% of people who say this, is due to nostalgia. The improvements 6 has made to the controls has put the gameplay in a much better place. In 2, the feel was a little clunky (Voldo especially felt worse to play compared to 6). 2 has better pacing because there's no Reversal Edge or long Critical Edge animations but on everything else (especially balance) 6 is better.
Also, Reversal Edge is balanced. All they have to do is get rid of the rock-paper-scissors part and it's in a good place. The Critical Edges that have long animations were way more annoying than Reversal Edge.
The Soul series always has art styles and graphics that look good to me. I never felt 6 was cringe.
Did it? Did they ever start making good Sonic games again, post-Dreamcast, let's say? I only ever seem to hear about terrifically faulty, broken, clunky, half-finished, and typically weird as shit games? Aside from maybe one or two arcade games in the mold of the oldest retro entries in the series? I'm asking as someone who genuinely doesn't know: what, if any example, is a good modern Sonic game?Let’s not forget about Sonic. The franchise managed to endure duds that would have sank most others.
Well, I don't think balance is the core of the criticism here: the point is in the word selection there: gimicky. As in, these characters had existed in reasonably balanced versions before, without odd thematic and mechanical additions which in many respects replace their traditional flow in fundamental ways. These kinds of changes are just present for far too great an extent, and for far too many different characters. Hwang did not need to be a meter maid, and Amy did not need to be a magical girl and...well, the list goes on. Variety is one thing; giving half your cast radical new preconditions on their play, that often seem randomly pulled out of a hat is quite another matter--especially given the many longterm players who faithfully bought each new entry who had been waiting for their mains to return for two or three games/a decade or more.Even with all the gimmicks, the balance felt good so it was fine. They handled the gimmicks properly it never felt like a character was unplayable or too strong, at least not at the end of season 2.
Well, I expect they will, but you can count me also in the camp of someone who firmly hopes it is gone. Talk about the mother of all flow-killers. Becomes problematic spam for the lower-level players, a crutch at the mid level that will limit the mid-tiered player's growth into an advanced player at the higher levels. And when it does land, it brings combat to a screeching halt, for the sake of replacing reflex and strategy for a degree of chance and then rewarding/conditioning new players with meter. It's just so ill-considered: for me I think it might be the single biggest poorly considered addition in the series, relative to the rest of the gameplay--or at least the worst mechanical such misstep since SCIII:CE.Offline sure, online I doubt it. The netcode is so bad and doesn't keep up with the pacing of the game, that landing a GI there is a lot harder I find than RE. Either way, I see your point on Reversal Edge and I'm ok with it being gone. I just think the developers should play around with it during development for SC7 to see if it's still worth it or not.
The Soul series always has art styles and graphics that look good to me. I never felt 6 was cringe.
I definitely feel that the art style of SCVI is slightly more bland and less eye-catching than SC2 and SC3, despite the higher graphical fidelity. Part of that is definitely down to the design with regard to color, but it's also just generally true. But here's the correlate: SCIV is the best of both worlds. I agree that the games that perhaps first cemented SoulCalibur's stellar (if often also hammy) art design were SCII and SCIII, but IV is underrated as the highwater mark for combining the best of the traditional idiosyncratic style and gorgeous use of color with increasingly high resolution character, object, and environmental rendering. Whatever else you can say about that game (like almost all in the series, it's a mixed bag of sorts), it holds up today as an inspired work in terms of visuals.Not saying SC6 is totale bad and cringe, it's great overall, but a bit lesser than SC2 and also SC3 imo.
Yes, I guess that is the point in this context--fair enough!The point is that they keep making them, regardless of quality.
Oh yes--no doubt there: there was an awful lot of hand-wringing going on about how "Soulcalibur V almost killed the franchise", and then on the other end of the spectrum, ridiculous hopeful thinking like "SCVI is doing so well, VII is sure to be out in a couple of years"--can't tell you how many times I had to burst that bubble on this forum in particular.So if a bad series of games keeps getting pushed out, a good series like Soul Calibur will be made too. It's just gonna take a while.
Well, I do agree there is a lot of room for games less focused on combos as a central mechanic, but that's not really the direction Soulcalibur has been headed in over the last few entries. It's relationship towards neutral has been...well, neutral itself, at best, and if anything skewing towards slightly increased combofication.Fair. Less focus on gimmicks, meter, and combos and more focus on neutral would be interesting. Too many fighting games focus on those combos and not enough on neutral stuff.
They did the best they could with what they had.
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Part of it is due to a limited budget, don't forget that.
And this kind of dovetails with that last point, but is less about fan expectations and more about Namco's spin, because I'm a little skeptical about that "2 million +" figure. We really don't know if that figure includes DLC sales, and I rather suspect it does. Namco famously does not publish its sales figures for some of its top games in many of the ways other major players do, and keeps the lid on other analytics. Even its shareholder-facing data can be stingy, from what I've seen. And yet, even as they've gotten tighter lipped in this respect, some of their teams like to trumpet supposed milestones over social media. I really take it with a grain of salt, personally. But I do think we can say with real certainty that it was much more successful than SCV. I'm just not sure we are going to be happy with the lessons Namco and Project Soul take from that uptick in sales, because many of the things that seem to have greased the skids for those sales are not things I really want to see as longterm trends for the series.If they reduced the content, who knows if they would've sold 2+ million copies. Then again, Tekken 7 over there is making 9+ million with barebones content so who knows.
Well thank you very much. :)Fantastic point.
Well, even if we assume for the sake of argument that the budget truly was meager (and I tend to agree that it was not particular large, we can say at least), the point is, I just don't care for many of their priorities and the choices they made within the budget, whatever it happened to be.That's too high of a standard for a low budget game. Look at 6 as a first step to getting a top tier fighter. The success of 6 should boost the resources for the next game. You need enough resources and time to get the fighting game that captivates people. Otherwise you get SC5 (not enough time) and 6 (not enough budget).
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Lack of budget explains most of this.
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The other option is to focus on the multiplayer which the majority of the player base isn't gonna stick around for because it's a fighting game. They knew people would gravitate towards the less competitive content hence why they focused on the story mode.
. . .
Just look at the game. Look at all the reading you have to do. Look at how Soul Chronicle is like a visual novel. You ain't getting that from a high budget title, you'd be getting actual cutscenes.
You sure about that? Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Street Fighter, and Soul Calibur sell millions of copies. The genre isn't as niche as people say, just doesn't have the popularity of other genres.
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True but 2 million is still a good figure for a game. And if you believe that fighting games are niche, this is an even bigger deal.
Well, the presentation was indeed atrocious, yes, but the quality of the story, how it was formatted, was also quite terrible.Giving most characters meaningful stories is not generic content. Especially when fighting games have a history of bad stories and lack of single player stuff. Sure, the presentation wasn't great, but the devs had to make do with what they had.
Thing is, I think there's a market for that game too. You better believe there's a small army of players out there who would lose it over Tekken Tag Tournament 3, and I think you could design a Soulcalibur game that leans a little more cleanly towards multiplayer (and competitive/hardcore) enthusiasts. Soulcalibur Arena, if you will.The other option is to focus on the multiplayer which the majority of the player base isn't gonna stick around for because it's a fighting game. They knew people would gravitate towards the less competitive content hence why they focused on the story mode.
True...but I'd really like to fall in love with a Soulcalibur game again. SCV and SCVI both have their strengths, but IV was the last game in the series that sucked me in with a...how do I put it? Graceful quality?No point worrying because regardless of the direction, the series has a good foundation to work from. Even if things aren't to your exact liking, the game should still be worth playing.
No, clearly not. The observation is about timing though, primarily.Still not gonna stop them from making the game.
lol, no, I guarantee you I most assuredly would. The story itself is one of the most embarrassingly bad, painfully stilted, flat, and ham-fisted efforts at storytelling I have ever seen, even within the constraints of video game narratives. It's a series of almost procedurally generated--they are that uninspired--encounters between cookie-cuter npcs, interspersed with cringe-inducing melodrama. I mean, Soulcalibur always lands in the realm of "acquired taste" in terms of its plot, but this was just next level tedious: somehow they kept all of the bizareness and still lost all the fun. It's like they gave all the previous scripts and voice lines from prior Soulcalibur games to one of those laughably bad, rudimentary script-writing AIs, turned its settings to "rushed job" and "randos as characters=90%" then had the resulting product script-doctored by eight-year-olds on prozac. It's terrible. I'm not disagreeing the format and presentation were contributing a lot to how bad the final product was, but no amount of machinima or animation, voice acting, or stellar production values all around could polish that turd. It's a fundamentally un-engaging, boring-ass, dramatically vacuous, and artistically inept story.Terrible is too strong of a word. I guarantee you if this game had more cutscenes, less reading, but everything else stayed the same, you wouldn't be saying this.
The latter. Or more precisely, better balanced between the hardcore and the casual I agree the balance in VI is surprisingly adequate, given how mixed the decision making was in other areas of the game's design, including some of the other aspects of the fighting mechanics.Gameplay balance or single-player vs. mutli-player content balance?
Yeah, but that can change, eventually. I'm not looking for the door right now, and I'm probably on board even for a few more mediocre games, but bluntly: my hours for gaming are so limited these days, and I've dropped other once-cherished franchises over the years. I really hope the next game brings the magic back a little, because, honestly, I just wasn't feeling it this time. SCV was like an incomplete half-mess that wasn't properly supported, but had a skeleton of artistic vision to it at least. SCVI was better planned out for a budget, but substantially lacks, depth, character, and charm. Both came from a lack ofYou're on a forum dedicated to Soulcalibur. Forget about a game, you're in love with the series.
Only a few have decent ones and 6 is one of them.
Sorry, I'm not grading on a curve here: a bad story is a bad story, and that was a terribly told, terribly plotted, and on every level terrible story. It just was. Judging stories by what other fighting games have done with them in the past is one of the very worst metrics I can fathom for such a evaluation. But even putting that aside, and judging purely by comparison, VI's story is easily the clumsiest and most embrarassing in the series. The fact that they put more effort into it and attempted to paint a broader picture of the world doesn't automatically make the story superior to the narrower and leaner stories in past SC games. If anything, it only draws more attention the abundant flaws and overall tediousness of the entire exercise.Ok, not to sound rude, but your response is honestly overreacting and that wall of text really didn't prove anything. The 2 story modes were nothing special by video game standards but by fighting game standards? Hell yeah it was decent. Most fighting games either don't bother with the story or they have crap ones.
Actually, these aspects kind of hilight some of the problems for me. The whole A&A thing felt like a clumsy way to try to tie in this new hithertoo-unknown character (himself one the most eye-rollingly goofy things to ever happen to the franchise) into existing lore. I mean, it's not terrible: if the mustache-twirling villain is going to stay in the narrative for subsequent games, I guess it doesn't hurt to make him feel rooted in the world in a way other characters already do (at least to the extent anyone can in such a silly world) because of their long history of known interactions. But it still felt shoe-horned in. I do like that we finally have some clarification on A=V (I assume you know what I mean by that), but other than that? Meh to that whole plot line. And the less said about Gambit-style Hwang, the better.How are you gonna look at Azwel and Amy's connection and tell me that's not interesting? Hwang's story was epic and introduced intriguing characters. Not every character had a good one, but they did get fleshed out. And that's more effort than most fighting games will ever do.
Well, we're going to disagree here again too, though I will concede you're going to have popular opinion in your corner on this one: I actually think SCV may be the best story in the series. Don't get me wrong, War and Peace it is not: it's the best by default of all the previous games in the series barely putting together a story and SCVI being, well, as I've said, just plain awful. But SCV at least has stakes: people are actually capable of dying, there's some sense of resolution to the conflict (rather than just a bunch of silly status quo ante resets as with all previous games), and I actually found myself feeling a little something for the Alexandria family, who have suffered so much just because their matriarch tried to do the right thing. Or the righteous thing, more accurately, as she was set up to believe.Your response is better suited for 5 and not 6. Yeah the story has flaws but nothing as bad you make it out to be.
Well, I've seen a fair bit. I've probably played forty or fifty fighters in my life just counting the ones that belong to one of the top ten or twelve ongoing franchises of the last 35 years or so. But I don't really play them for their stories...because that's an insanely stupid thing to go looking for in this genre. I really don't need more context than "get over here!!" I get that they're gonna still keep trying, and that inexplicably people (mostly very young or very fanboyish people) are going to take this shit more seriously than they have any rational reason to, but.. What I'm getting at here is that I've been exposed to a fair bit of it, and very rarely has it felt so awkward as in SCVI.If true, you haven't seen shit.
Yeah man, you're probably right, I'll give that to you. But it's not 100%. The problem I have with the story in SCVI is not that it's bad. I can just ignore a bad story, all other things being equal. The problem I'm trying to stress here is that it was bad while also being a huge development priority, which cost the game in other areas.But you think Soulcalibur is still worth the limited time. That's telling because if somebody has limited time, I'd imagine fighting games are one of the first things to get dropped. I'm gonna bet you're gonna be buying every Soulcalibur even if you don't come back to the site. Based on what you told me anyway.
The saddest thing is a good chunk of these character specific mechanics could have good but they don’t do them any favours. Some like Nightmare’s, Voldo’s, Yoshi’s, Groh’s, Geralt’s, Mina’s and Zasalamel’s are some of the few that are relatively harmless towards what the character is about. But others generally handicap the characters, are useless, or just don’t need to be here.Did it? Did they ever start making good Sonic games again, post-Dreamcast, let's say? I only ever seem to hear about terrifically faulty, broken, clunky, half-finished, and typically weird as shit games? Aside from maybe one or two arcade games in the mold of the oldest retro entries in the series? I'm asking as someone who genuinely doesn't know: what, if any example, is a good modern Sonic game?
Well, I don't think balance is the core of the criticism here: the point is in the word selection there: gimicky. As in, these characters had existed in reasonably balanced versions before, without odd thematic and mechanical additions which in many respects replace their traditional flow in fundamental ways. These kinds of changes are just present for far too great an extent, and for far too many different characters. Hwang did not need to be a meter maid, and Amy did not need to be a magical girl and...well, the list goes on. Variety is one thing; giving half your cast radical new preconditions on their play, that often seem randomly pulled out of a hat is quite another matter--especially given the many longterm players who faithfully bought each new entry who had been waiting for their mains to return for two or three games/a decade or more.
It's just like everything else in the game: they wanted to paint with a broad canvas, but the depth and the quality suffer from stretching a clearly limited budget across too many ideas that clearly needed more attention, refinement and rethinking than they got. Frankly, it's surprising that the balance isn't more of a mess: so much else feels half-assed in VI.
Well, I expect they will, but you can count me also in the camp of someone who firmly hopes it is gone. Talk about the mother of all flow-killers. Becomes problematic spam for the lower-level players, a crutch at the mid level that will limit the mid-tiered player's growth into an advanced player at the higher levels. And when it does land, it brings combat to a screeching halt, for the sake of replacing reflex and strategy for a degree of chance and then rewarding/conditioning new players with meter. It's just so ill-considered: for me I think it might be the single biggest poorly considered addition in the series, relative to the rest of the gameplay--or at least the worst mechanical such misstep since SCIII:CE.
I definitely feel that the art style of SCVI is slightly more bland and less eye-catching than SC2 and SC3, despite the higher graphical fidelity. Part of that is definitely down to the design with regard to color, but it's also just generally true. But here's the correlate: SCIV is the best of both worlds. I agree that the games that perhaps first cemented SoulCalibur's stellar (if often also hammy) art design were SCII and SCIII, but IV is underrated as the highwater mark for combining the best of the traditional idiosyncratic style and gorgeous use of color with increasingly high resolution character, object, and environmental rendering. Whatever else you can say about that game (like almost all in the series, it's a mixed bag of sorts), it holds up today as an inspired work in terms of visuals.
Yup, I agree, up and down. Amy's is perhaps the most infuriating example to me, though I admit to some substantial bias here. Amy's entire raison d'etre is as being a slippery counter-puncher. Why do I have this tonally and thematically bizarre addition that has me spending the first 2/3 of very round jockeying around trying to find spacing to toss a fricken flower overhand and charge up in order to get access to a fully viable status. It's not just that this is wasted opportunity either: they took classic moves out of her flow and re-arranged her inputs significantly to accommodate this mechanic. Yeck. It fundamentally shifts her from a character who spaces based on a ballet of trying to lure in attacks and then either brush just barely back out of the way before countering on the generous frame advantage her moveset affords--or even using it to just getting to the first hit sooner.The saddest thing is a good chunk of these character specific mechanics could have good but they don’t do them any favours. Some like Nightmare’s, Voldo’s, Yoshi’s, Groh’s, Geralt’s, Mina’s and Zasalamel’s are some of the few that are relatively harmless towards what the character is about. But others generally handicap the characters, are useless, or just don’t need to be here.
Siegfried for example with his Dark Legacy. While it gives him the giant “fuck off” bubble in this form, he doesn’t have any access to his Lethal Hits until he’s on life support, and even then you could never end up taking advantage of them.
And then you have Astaroth’s armor which can’t take more than a single hit, making him very weak to string pressure should he even try to use it and these traits get carried into his Soul Charge.
And then there’s Tira’s Coda. Which basically turns Tira into ultra instinct while in Gloomy. Why is this is even a thing?
I could go on about the rest but I think I’ve made my point.