I didn't realize you'd already made a thread, so I replied to your post over in the general thread, but I deleted it and I'll move it here:
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This all makes me curious: now that we've had six months plus experience with the game, and patching is proceeding, with signs of ongoing support for a little while at least, how is this game overall shaping up in terms of it's rank as a solid entry in the franchise, among fans? I'm tempted to start a survey.
I and II are still on top, with III trailing behind only because of technical problems. I would put V next, then VI, those two being very close together, with IV trailing behind at a pretty far distance, fairly cemented as my least favorite.
V is better from a gameplay standpoint, while VI is better from a lore standpoint. I know it may be shocking to some of you that I would still rate V higher than VI, considering my love of lore, but the questionable mechanical systems (so many ways to ruin the flow of battle) and the lacking stages just really do put a damper on the fun factor that just simply can’t be ignored. It’s also lacking in CaS appeal, though that is slowly catching up, it remains to be seen if it will still be inferior in the long run. I could have all the lore in the world, but if I don’t have a fun time actually playing the game, which I honestly don’t with SoulCalibur VI, then it still falls apart in the end, and doesn’t have lasting appeal once the single player modes are completed.
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I'll expand a bit, because this does have its own thread, and I didn't want to go into monolith-of-text mode over in the general thread, but what I look for most in this series is, above everything else, enjoyable gameplay, which I feel like should be the forefront of any fighting game, no matter how great the other features may be, even features a series becomes iconic for representing, such as guest characters and character customization. SoulBlade was a fun, if flawed, experience, but considering the other fighting games of the time, and that it was on the original PlayStation, it was quite good for its time, and I can look back upon it fondly, but when stacked up against the rest, it just really doesn't mesh, to the point where I'd have problems even comparing it fairly, because it lacks the central 8-Way-Run, of all things, and that's pretty important. It plays more like Tekken with weapons than it does what you'd think of with the Soul series brand. Not to mention those ridiculous jumps. But I digress...
SoulCalibur is where the series really hit its stride, and for good reason. It's still, to this day, the most pure implementation of the core aspects of the game, and while it suffers from clone characters more than any other entry, it revels in its simplicity and fluid nature, where it's just really impossible for it to be knocked off the top spot. SoulCalibur II didn't lose anything in translation, and only added more, with a more in-depth single player mode, more characters, the advocacy of the would-become iconic guest character slot, multiple weapons per character, just... everything better, nothing worse. So if SoulCalibur is on top, then SoulCalibur II has to be on top as well, because it just is everything the first game was and better, but both of these games are almost nearly perfect, so it's hard to even say, even though SoulCalibur II was better, that SoulCalibur has any faults, so they're just tied for first place, in my book. They're just not bogged down by anything else other than what they are, and everything flows well, and they're also reasonably balanced games, all things considered.
Third place, then, goes to SoulCalibur III. It tried, and I mean really tried, to continue to the trend of just being better, without losing anything, but it just did not manage to achieve this goal. It added so much content to the point of nearly bursting, I'm really surprised that it all fit on a single DVD. If the circumstances were different, if SoulCalibur III had gone to arcades first, and had the home release second, like the first three games, I really do believe that SoulCalibur III would also be tied for first, looking at how Arcade Edition fine-tuned the gameplay and ironed out the glaring mechanical bugs, it's just a shame, to the point where SoulCalibur III just really is the turning point in the downturn of the series. Hardly no one got to play Arcade Edition, which doesn't help matters, because it's a relative unknown. The only thing that really lived on past Arcade Edition was Amy, which was nice, but it's just a shame we couldn't keep Hwang and Li Long, and an even greater shame that SoulCalibur IV was just a drop in terms of... well, everything. But more on that later. SoulCalibur III was like a love letter to the series to this point, with the largest roster, taking into account the bonus characters, even if you take out the Chronicles of the Sword folks. Bringing back Hwang, Li Long, and even Arthur, as well as adding Revenant, Miser, Greed, and the trio of shop girls, each having their own unique fighting styles, it just really added an extra layer of depth that bonus characters in the future just don't have, that unique flair that comes with an off-kilter moveset that isn't simply a copy of an existing main roster character.
I really would like to put SoulCalibur VI in fourth place, but I just can't. At least not right now. It's possible that, by the end of its life cycle, it could be moved up a rank, but for now, I put SoulCalibur V above SoulCalibur VI. Despite all of SoulCalibur V's flaws, and there are many, as we all know, so I won't really retread on those, it still offered an incredibly smooth experience in gameplay, as a fair compromise of keeping SoulCalibur's core ideals in place while also advancing the formula along to compete with other fighting games. Critical Edge was a much better implementation than Critical Finish from SoulCalibur IV, and I believe that Brave Edges were superior to the Soul Charge mechanic that we have in SoulCalibur VI. Just Guard actually worked and gave advantage, which made it useful, and nothing really stopped the flow of battle, save for Critical Edge, but they were a lot shorter and to-the-point in SoulCalibur V, where they weren't really all that intrusive. It was a great balance. The only negative aspect of the gameplay, really, was that Guard Impact cost meter to use. They could have, should have even, kept all this intact, and removed the cost of meter for Guard Impact, and kept everything else about SoulCalibur VI the same, in terms of roster and game modes, and I would most assuredly firmly place SoulCalibur VI higher than SoulCalibur V, and with the game coming to a completed state with all its DLC, it could very well even top SoulCalibur III. The customization aspect of SoulCalibur V is debatably the best (tied with SoulCalibur III, pros and cons), creating the system we're still using today, but also having a ton of parts to use with it, and allowed us to truly begin to make unique-looking characters of our own that are hard to replicate by a passing observer.
So SoulCalibur VI sits in fifth place, and while I regard it as an extremely good effort, all things considered, as an attempt to revitalize the series after such a long wait, relieving us that our beloved franchise might have met its end with SoulCalibur V, but it just really has not lived up to its predecessors. They tried to re-invent the wheel, here, and I just really don't understand why it was necessary. Granted, I am a long-time veteran, having been with the series since SoulBlade, so it's possible that these things are really meant to bring in new players, but at the cost of alienating your already established base? I really don't think that was a good idea. And I don't have proof/evidence, but it doesn't even seem like to me, that we attracted and kept a sizeable amount of new players, seeing as how the player base goes down so quickly after new releases. People pop in, try the new shiny stuff, and then go back to not playing it after each update, instead of continuing to play. And, though it pains me to admit, I actually also belong in that group, due to how off-putting the gameplay of SoulCalibur VI really is. I have my fun with the new content, but my biggest attractor for SoulCalibur VI is the centralized lore, and I can experience that in a day when the new content drops, and then after that, all I'm left with is the not-really-all-that-fun gameplay to play with after that. The online modes have gotten even more busted with the latest update, which I pray they fix, but even if they do, though I love Amy's new technical nature, and she's pretty fun to play, the game just... drags, a lot quicker than it should. I just can't play it for hours on end like I could the previous games in the series, even SoulCalibur V, because it just feels like a chore.
Sixth, and last, place, though, firmly belongs to SoulCalibur IV. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most lacking entry in the series, on pretty much every level. The gameplay is incredibly sluggish, to the point where it feels like I'm seriously playing the game at half speed sometimes, and there were glaring technical issues in Hilde's doom combo, for starters, but the game just felt like it didn't know what it wanted to do. The slow nature made it seem like you would want to be more defensive, and you could be, but that clashed with the guard break/Critical Finish system they implemented, which encouraged more aggressive play, or at least discouraged turtling, it was just a weird balance, no pun intended, as the balance of the game was pretty off as well, featuring some of the most aggressively uphill battles in the entire series for some matchups. There's also the elephant in the room in the Star Wars guest characters, especially Yoda, but all of them just really broke things in a way that only really 2B comes close to, but even 2B is manageable compared to Yoda. Which yeah, guest characters do not, in and of themselves, make or break any of these games, it was just pervasive in how much they disrupted things, when added on top of everything else. It was already a low point, and it just got lower with them. And then there's the ruination of customization with gear and weapons having stat points and skills, and just... whoever came up with that was not having a good day in the creativity department. The story mode was laughably disappointing, and the extra mode Tower of Lost Souls was quite simply a grindfest. I really don't have much of anything nice to say about SoulCalibur IV, except I really enjoyed Kamikirimusi, even if she was just a Nightmare expy, her character was interesting and I felt like it had a good potential for development, far more than the other four bonus characters, though Ashlotte definitely gets an honorable mention. Speaking of bonus characters, though, SoulCalibur III gave us a host of extra (albeit poorly balanced and incomplete) movesets to work with, so this even was a downgrade. I really can't say there's anything SoulCalibur IV did better than SoulCalibur III except up the graphics.
Okay fine, the stage design was kicked up a notch, as I'll note below, but the spirit of my argument still stands.
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Beyond gameplay, the other lesser, but still important, elements of the games have also been a bit of a sliding scale. Understandably, due to technical limitations, the earlier stages were incredibly basic by comparison to what can be accomplished now, but despite that, starting with SoulCalibur II, the stages really did create a cinematic appeal that would only get better in each game that followed... up until SoulCalibur VI, anyway. SoulCalibur VI's stages are incredibly basic, with very little interactive elements, and while it could be argued that they're doing a throwback to SoulCalibur's original stage design and are basic on purpose, that just doesn't really work as an excuse, since really, it should have been bringing those classic stages to new heights with improved mechanics and interesting qualities, so we could see them like we never saw them before. And then there's that about half of the stages don't really have an identity or ties to characters, not really, but this was so that Libra of Soul could have generic locations for exploring the world, so I get why it's that way, but they still could have stood to make those stages interesting, even if they had to be "plain", so as to not be defined to just one location or character. SoulCalibur V slightly ran into this issue, with a few characters sharing stages, but mostly, everyone had their own, and each stage had its own quirks and appeals to set them apart from one another. SoulCalibur IV started this idea with Phantom Pavilion, perhaps the most ambitious stage, but I can't be saying nice things about SoulCalibur IV, now can I? -grumbles and adds a note above-
Next up is music. SoulCalibur VI has some standout tracks, but is mostly pretty bland when compared to the previous games. SoulCalibur V was a bit of a slouch in this department too, but it still was more memorable than SoulCalibur VI. "Moon of Oblivion" is really the only new track that I would say holds a candle to the legacy of music that came before. SoulCalibur IV was the tipping point, where the music was alright, but merely passable, didn't feel like it had the same passion as the games that came before. Thankfully, both SoulCalibur V and SoulCalibur VI have afforded us the opportunity to use the classic music, and while SoulCalibur V was just a small selection, it would appear that eventually, SoulCalibur VII will have all of the tracks from the main series, eventually, someday, maybe, like Tekken's jukebox. I could go on, but I feel like the next part is more important.
Game modes are another aspect that have been lacking since SoulCalibur III, and I do applaud SoulCalibur VI's effort to return us to form, but I still think it fell short. Yes, we have two complete story modes, one for the main cast and one for your custom character, both managing to be canon and work off each other, which is a fine accomplishment in and of itself, retelling our narrative that was chaotic at best and nonsensical at worst, in a way that everyone's role is clearly defined, without power fantasy and wish-fulfillment what-if stories, that's pretty fantastic. But the gameplay of these modes rings hollow, without much, if any, replay value, once completed, where you could go back and revisit SoulCalibur III's modes again and again as they offered multiple options and paths, as well as being stimulating and worthy challenges, despite SoulCalibur III's infamous input-reading AI. But that's just single player modes, there's also multiplayer modes that they could have and should have brought back, but didn't. Team Battle is highly requested, and they again put the system in place where it could be a thing, and yet it still isn't a thing, because... reasons? I don't really know why they won't bring this back, especially considering the tease of tagging in SoulCalibur IV and that Tekken has two Tag titles to its name, and SoulCalibur has none. I fully expected SoulCalibur Tag Tournament instead of SoulCalibur VI, but that dream faded over time where we weren't getting a new game at all. But still, giving us the return of Team Battle, even without tagging, would be a great improvement and add some fun to the gameplay that SoulCalibur VI desperately needs. Granted, it would still be held up by the core mechanics, but it would help.
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Overall, I feel like SoulCalibur VII has the potential to get back on top, if they take our feedback into account and reel back on these gameplay innovations that no one really asked for, that only serve to slow the game down and break the flow of battle. I really cannot stress enough that this is my biggest complaint with SoulCalibur VI, and it's a far-reaching problem that affects literally every mode of play, online or offline. New stages would be nice, tweaking the existing stages to be more involved and interesting would also be nice, but if the gameplay to utilize those stages isn't on point, having the same flow as SoulCalibur I-II, it's all kind of moot, in my opinion at least. I feel like the nerf to Reversal Edge in the latest update is maybe a good sign that they might be willing to reel back on things, but at the same time, their apparent need to also nerf Guard Impact, that wasn't needed at all, makes me wary. I'm hopeful, but still not expecting major change in SoulCalibur VI. SoulCalibur VII, though... we'll see. I have faith.
