Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

To those who've played the Setsuka story, do you think that female "voice" at the end hints at a new character for SC6 or SC7? Or probably an npc?
i think it was a young boy's voice, at least thats what it sounded in Japanese. (yeah i play this game with Japanese voices sue me)
and yeah and to be honest that hints as a season 3 character to me, cus it makes no sense if he/she picks up the soul edge shard and while he/she makes an appearance out of nowhere (while sounding evil AF) just to never be seen again. it might as well have been a peasant picking up the shard if he/she would have not been relevant at some point in the coming events of the SC world.
 
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Is Iaido. You DON'T need an umbrella for it.

Umbrella is just an extra flavor.
Again, iaido is not Setsuka's fighting style. Iaido is merely the martial art concerned with the sheathing and unsheathing of the sword in a smooth and effective manner: it was studied by swordsmen from many different schools of swordsmanship in Japan and in relation to many different types of weapon--indeed, in a more abstract sense, it is something that historically swordsmen all over the world would have studied--they just would not have called it iaido and would not have drilled the same forms as were relevant to unsheathing a katana or other Japanese sword.

Now there are apocryphal stories about certain schools of kenjutsu that required the practitioner to unsheath and sheath a sword for each strike (which is kinda-sorta what Setsuka does) or opponent. But putting aside that this would be pretty impractical in actual combat (unless you managed to kill the opponent in one strike, which would have been the goal of course, but not one always attained) and that these stories are likely just exaggerations that have grown in the telling (or miscommunications as the art has been described in the west), that's just not what iaido means--iaido, again, is just the art of effectively unsheathing the sword--nothing more and nothing less.

Now, to be fair, I do realize that the confusion here isn't arising with the fans themselves--it is actually baked into how the game talks about these subjects in it's usual pop-fantasy fashion. For example, the most recent game (and for all I know, older ones as well) refers to Setsuka's style as a form of "battoujyutsu", which is just them using archaic spelling conventions to say "battojutsu" in a manner that drops the diacrtic that usually goes over the o; battojutsu is in essence an older term for iaido. This is a pretty hilarious thing for Soulcalibur to do in particular, because (aside from the fact that they are using the historical term incorrectly in terms of what it actually refers to) they seem to be suggesting a sword fighting school based in that apocryphal idea of every technique needing to have an unsheath and sheath component.

That idea would be highly impractical in even the real world, where a single strike very frequently could kill, but wouldn't necessarily be successful. But it's an absolutely asinine strategy in Soulcalibur's fictional world, where you can stab someone through the head and torso twelve to twenty times and they still might prevail in the duel. In that universe, it makes particularly little sense to devote yourself to a sword combat tradition where you spend half of your time pulling out and putting away your sword for each strike or series of strikes--obviously in that universe you would want to pull out your sword, use it to stab and slash at someone however many dozen times it took to put them down (to say nothing of how you'd need it out to parry effectively, or at all), and then put it away.

Seriously, if that is the basis of the Kokonoe clan's fighting style, it is no wonder that Mitsurugi cut through them like a fart through cotton pajamas. Setsuka is ironically going to have to go find a second master to teach her how to fight properly before she goes after Mitsurugi to try to avenge the death of her first master.

And of course, obviously Soulcalibur has always been more wild anime-inpsired art than anything predicated in realistic armed combat, but to the extent that we are going to be using real world terminology to discuss its simulated forms within side-discussion describing what it is meant to represent, it's helpful to know what the terms actually mean to use them appropriately. So I have to nuance the first sentence I opened this post with: even if the game tells us that's what her style is (which it sort of does by labeling her style "battoujyutsu"), this doesn't actually match up with the real-world use of that term--and it is thus problematic when we use it in the same fictional manner the made-up world does, but to describe the topic in an abstract fashion from outside the fictional world, looking in.
 
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I see her as leaning way more into the assassin aspect than the oiran/geisha of SC3/SC4 (though not completely removed)

She's the disciplined / vengeful /disguised assassin while Tira is the unpredictable / psychotic assassin.
O and now Setsuka actually has some super powers, so he's climbing the in-universe canonical power levels.
 
Quick-draw umbrella swords > pedantry
Yeah, no doubt, but one can like what Setsuka brings to the table and even everything that they've done with her with regard to both mechanics and aesthetics--and indeed, I for one do--and yet at the same time find the terminology they use (and the confusion it sows among players as to what those words actually mean) weird and ill-considered. I mean,no one is thinking about this stuff when playing with or against her, presumably. But when talking about the topic in the abstract and suddenly people are calling her weapon an "iai sword", the inaccuracy becomes much more center stage.
 
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Oh, yeah. One other thing they should've added to the game is the ability to use in-game NPCs as a preset in CAS. Like, if you just want to be Lyla or Rothion or Han-myeong or Fygul Cestemus guy #6, pop open a menu and load it up.

Make it happen, Project Soul.
I mean, this is a thing that should have been a thing since SoulCalibur III. I feel like if they were gonna do it, they'd have done it by now. The problem, though, is that in literally every game, they've always had at least a few (if not a lot of) characters who are blatant cheaters to the system. The biggest offenders in SoulCalibur VI are the Ancients from Libra of Soul, due to their prominent feature of leg tattoos, which we can't do, because... reasons.
 
It seems pretty likely for a few different reasons, but yeah, we won't know until it's actually announced. Any fan of the series would certainly hope for one, but if we don't get a season 3, that just means they might possibly be shifting gears to SoulCalibur VII, taking it in the best possible light. Though considering how Tekken and SoulCalibur usually come out a bit midway to late in a console generation's lifespan, it seems more reasonable that we'd do a season 3 instead. There's still a pretty big want for Aeon and Yun-seong, I feel like, another guest would drive the show, and then we might even get a new character, it's certainly possible, if Tekken is anything to go by. Either way, keep your hope low and you won't be disappointed.
 
Any fan of the series would certainly hope for one, but if we don't get a season 3, that just means they might possibly be shifting gears to SoulCalibur VII, taking it in the best possible light. Though considering how Tekken and SoulCalibur usually come out a bit midway to late in a console generation's lifespan, it seems more reasonable that we'd do a season 3 instead.
That's a bit of a false choice: it could very, very easily be neither of those options. It's virtually certain that we are many years off from them beginning development of SCVII, if 25 years of franchise history are anything to go by (literally every game in the series has taken significantly longer to be released than the one before, even at the franchise's greatest heights, matching a general trend in the industry at large). And a Soulcalibur game has never entered production until after the most recent Tekken game has been released and is well established--this being because Project Soul is not a standing internal studio at Namco but rather an ad-hoc team that borrows much of it's staff from other Namco projects, with only a core team of developers kept on the team consistently from early pre-development all the way through (these days) late DLC support--both interviews with senior developers and the timetable of DLC make this pretty clear. So, pipe dreams aside, we're looking at the middle of this next decade (at earliest) for SCVII.

At the same time, it's certainly possible that between where sales are at for this game's continuing DLC (and we don't really have any concrete sense of what those might be) combined with the fact that we are headed unerringly into what may prove to be the largest global recession of a generation...it's entirely possible the season would be scrapped--and again, if it is, its not likely to be because they are "shifting to SCVII", but rather because their sales figures and market research suggest profit would be too marginal to make it a priority among the companies large and competitive profile of titles all clamoring for attention.

I remain cautiously optimistic, for a number of factors, including the example of Tekken 7, the fact that Japan seems to have contained COVID to an extent, for the present anyway (this won't change the demand and other economic factors much, but it doesn't hurt in terms of the possibility they can return to the easier and more efficient in-office production), and because I feel they had probably already planned a season three and this may carry some organizational intertia, despite setbacks. Of course we don't know what state the game will be without after Hwang drops--it could be they will add a ton of free bonus content to shore the game up around the same time. But I feel like a third season really is essential to help this game feel like it reached its full potential in a truly satisfying fashion. But we will have to wait and see. One thing we can do in the meantime is, every time we engage with a feedback questionnaire, make a point of saying that we will happily buy another season.
 
During the 4 month waits it feels miserable, like the series is finished. But then they somehow manage to surprise us one way or another.

I am cautiously optimistic for a season 3 given the strange updates like giving Groh more story content, adding brand new create a soul voices for creation, spending time to expand not only setsuka but also mitsurugi....why add such things if the support is drawing to a close? A season 3 perhaps?

This definitely doesn’t feel like SCV and it’s zombie DLC and support though....
 
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