Wow, did this story mode piss me off. There were so many plot holes, nothing was explained or brought to the light, and the majority of the characters in the game were either hi and bye appearances or just left out altogether. I seriously thought that Patroklos was going to be an actual character that I would enjoy but instead made me hate this douchebag and not to mention Pyrrha, who whined, complined, and cried all the time about what to do. Tira was pretty good and actually helped the story be somewhat watchable but once she was gone, it was all downhill from there.
I didn't mind Z.W.E.I. so much as he was a more tolerable character in the story mode and we all would've wished to learn more about this guy but he gets taken out as quickly as he was introduced. We don't know why he has such a beef with Graf Dumas or why he's traveling with Viola. And speaking of Viola, she's given very little to do, despite Tago and Daishi saying that she was going to be a main character in the storyline, talk about having egg all over your face about that one. Siegfried's only role in story mode was to be nothing more than the old mentor character to Patroklos' student character (think Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-san in Karate Kid only with no kind of chemistry whatsoever). I felt as though Siegfried should've had a much better role in this game other than I'm the old mentor and I pass Soul Calibur onto you because it no longer chooses me anymore.
Aside from Siegfried, the other veterans in this game are either not being represented as they should in story mode or not even mentioned at all. To prove what I'm talking about, let's start off with Ivy, who was perhaps the only recognizable veteran in the story that was given something to do. She only gave exposition regarding the Kali-Yuga and Dvapara-Yuga as well as doing nothing afterwards. Then we have Maxi, poor Maxi was reduced to babysitter to Natsu, Xiba, and Leixia, and we're really not given any information on these three either or why they are with Maxi as well as how Xiba ended up with the Kali-Yuga and Leixia wearing the Dvapara-Yuga. Then there's the exclusion of Mitsurugi, Cervantes, and Hilde and I was wondering where Setsuka was since Patroklos now inherits her fighting style and she wasn't mentioned at all in the story, at least that's how I see it, not to mention there was no mentioning of Cassandra and EdgeMaster's random appearance
Finally, there's the villains, one let down after the other. Graf Dumas being the new Nightmare wasn't really fully explained or why he became an overlord of such looking to destroy anyone that was "malfested" and as well as some theories of Raphael being Graf Dumas/Nightmare. Then there was Voldo and the new Astaroth, they clearly served no purpose other than being filler and quite frankly, I wasn't even expecting them to even be in the story mode, much less this game as they were clearly hi and bye appearances that didn't further the story's progress. Finally, we come to Sophit--I mean Elysium, who clearly manipulated Patroklos into killing his own sister and later wanting to fight him because he now has a conscious of his own. All in all, these villains were just bland and made me not want to root against them, let alone root for the hero either.
Conclusively, This story mode was terrible beyond imagination. Nothing was explained or resolved, the characters weren't fleshed out and complex, and the cutscenes were just cut and paste sepia toned sketches. The 17 year skip really threw the continuity and establishment of the series way out the window and is seen as a debacle by most fans (just because Tekken did it for their third installment of the series doesn't mean you can have the same results). The setup was there but the payoff fell flat followed by a thud. Overall, this story mode has to be the worst and many have made comparisons of this story mode to that of MK9 and Blazblue's story mode due to the setup, timeline, execution, and payoff.
