Rusted Blade
[14] Master
Agreed as to both: I don't think Viola is at the top of the list for inclusion in SCVI, but she's certainly vastly more likely than a new original character. Zwei hasn't the faintest chance, which is definitely just as well: having both Groh and Zwei in the same game could cause SCVI to get the dreaded parental advisory label: "May cause your child to become more emo, create lame fan art, and get way too in to My Chemical Romance."
I think we need to be a little more reasonable as a community in how we describe the story of SCV as the element which was lacking in SCV; personally I do not think the story was particularly lackluster--not when grading on Soulcalibur's goofy-as-shit/low-stakes/comically underdeveloped characters operating in a Dragon Ball Z-esque setting curve. Consider the following:
- SCV actually had, for my money, the most compelling plot in the series (again, given the relative yardstick): the story introduced permanent death for major characters (rather than just background/lore characters utilized to give cheaply-arrived-at motivations for major characters) for the first time in the series, meaning there were, you know, actual stakes to events that transpired (ooooooo!). In fact, the tone of the story overall is a little more mature (again, very much speaking with regard to the relative metrics of a series where a wood-based cyborg ninja demon robin hood bandit fights with windmill haymakers) and, had the game been more capable in more areas, could have inched the series towards some more serious storytelling, rather than the lazy, cookie-cutter fighting game nonsense we have once again returned to in SCVI. This can be seen in the fact that SCV actually had resolution of various plot threads that had long before gotten boring and stagnant, because every previous game in the series (like most fighters) more or less just re-established the same status qou ante for each and every character.
- I believe that the choice to focus on such a small handful of characters in the story modes was (at least in part) a conscious decision to allow for deeper development of the story, rather than just give every single character equal time so as to make sure each group of fanboys was satisfied with the screen time given to their favourite character (i.e. the approach of every other game in the series, including SCVI, which has helped to keep the story fairly generic and unimpressive). I think @DanteSC3 is probably right that there were certain other characters who (had the budget and development period been more robust) were meant to get fuller stories as well, including Raphael and Viola/Amy, but I don't think it was ever meant to follow the typical 'spread around the attention' plot mold of previous SC games, and I think that was for the better.
- The production values/presentation were leaps and bounds above anything ever done in the series before, and contrast particularly strongly with the half-baked, tedious, campy, low-budget and poorly-written content of SCVI's storymodes, with ts unending, inane, pointless filler, wherein any rational person with a modicum of standard for the writing in the media they consume just ends up speed reading through (or outright skipping) dozens and dozens of hours of generic dialogue with paper-thin NPC bandits, pirates, townspeople, ect.. All told through mediocre visual novel presentation, with occasional utilization of some of the lowest-quality voice acting this side of 1980s anime dubs. Give me SCV's marginal increase in quality over SCVI's quantity any day.
Well, we'll never really know how much SCV's mediocre performance actually pushed back SCVI's development/release. When you consider that every single mainline game in the series, for its nearly 25-year history, has taken more than a bit longer than the previous one to be released (paralleling trends in all contemporary game development), SCVI is not that late. Particularly when you consider that Project Soul was temporarily diverted into cash-grab efforts like Lost Swords and Unbreakable Soul. For a certainty, as I always said at the time, I don't think Namco ever really considered shelving the IP permanently. Rather, I think the delay probably had much more to do with the runaway success of Tekken over the same period, since PS is not a standing internal studio at Namco, but rather an ad-hoc team that is constituted whenever a new Soulcalibur game is to be made; you don't leach talent out of your cash-cow to develop a title that has been performing much more poorly--even if that poor performance can be put down to your own previous mismanagement.
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