Soul Calibur VI: General discussion

Personally, I’ve always found Yun Seong more fun to play than Hwang, though that’s probably due to Yun having more evasive moves and (except in his SC4 version) better mobility.

Also, completing ZWEI would require more effort in my opinion as turning him into a fun, not bottom tier character seems more difficult than reworking a character with three games worth of moves to work with (and Yun did make it to mid tier in at least one of the versions of SC3).
Well Yun’s placing in the series in terms of tiers has never really been that great. He sat at the bottom of the barrel in SC2. Lower mid to low in SC3 (vanilla iirc), mid in AE, and back down to the lower wards in SC4. Never has been much of a reason to use him unless you just want some swagger with Crane.
 
Should ZWEI make a return in season 3 or next game?
Next game... keep him away for now. I know it's very opinionated of me to put it this way, but being blunt and honest: I find his design vomit-worthy and I'm not a fan of his spirit animal Wolfy being part of his fighting style. It's so stupid to me. I want to keep him away as long as possible.
 
The last thing they did with this game was releasing a bad last season 2 character in december last year. Its been 7 months since then dunno man. Id say im pretty confident that this game is dead. They dont even bother making online playable.
 
Hahaha! Your hatred for this character is an iconic staple of this forum. Since they've already confirmed that a teenage Zwei is around, and strongly hinted he'll be in SC7, I'm hoping he'll be less of an edgelord in his youth. Grøh is an edgelord too, but aside from the anime hair his design is tame in comparison. Maybe they'll redesign wolf boy with the same level of restraint, and rework his characterization during the events of the new timeline.

I'm also hoping they'll give Acht Viola's moveset, and turn her and Zwei into the "iconic" pair, since they're both number themed... warrior... things (the Soul lore is sillier than ever). That way they can separate Viola from Amy, and have two unique movesets in the game at the same time. I'm sure when Acht gets a little older she can adopt Viola's fashion style, and begin speaking exclusively through pretentious, middle school grade wattpad poetry (I hate Viola's personality as much as you hate Zwei's design). Maybe after the heroes defeat her she'll sustain severe brain damage.

I personally don't care about the lore at all, but clearly Project Soul does, so I'm hoping they utilize the migraine inducing timeline shenanigans to undo dumb, unnecessary stuff from V, like Amy's transformation and Sophitia's death. The Viola cameo in Amy's story should be a little nod confirming her fate in the V timeline and nothing more. Meanwhile, Sophitia should suffer two miscarriages, or somehow become barren. Some people have said that V's events should receive proper buildup, but no amount of "plot development" could ever justify replacing the iconic roster of characters with their lame successors.
Yes, it will be interesting to see how they play out the Viola situation. Like you, I'm really not concerned with the lore but can see that it is clearly a preoccupation for the current Project Soul senior developers to synergize the narratives of the previous games into something parse-able--or, ok, as close to intelligible as Soulcalibur can get, given how byzantine and nonsensical the plots of the previous games have been. In that sense, there does seem to be one obvious possibility that has seemed probable to me before, just based on what we knew from SCV when Viola=Amy was still debatable, and which seems still very much a possibility based on what little foreshadowing we got in Amy's SCVI soul chronicle:

Specifically, my best guess is that in the new telling Raphael and Amy becoming psuedo-malfested (circa the events of SCIV in the original run) will turn out to be something that is orchestrated by Azwel. Then, playing upon what little remains of Raph's humanity--bound up in his fatherly affection for Amy as it always has been--Azwel will offer to cleanse Amy, which will involve Viola's orb and her amnesia as a side-effect (or a further machination on Azwel's part). Obviously if this does happen, it will in some convoluted Soulcalibur fashion (involving the typical vague allusions to mystical energies and dark seeds and so forth) benefit Azwel, who will be simultaneously leveraging Raphael into transforming into the next Nightmare for similar reasons, explaining much of the previous unexplored plot of how Raphael and Amy were separated and ended up going down their respective transformation arcs that have already been settled by the point in time that SCV opened.

Now mind you, I will admit to having speed-clicked through large chunks of Hilde and Setsuka's soul chronicles (I only have the one life, and only so much patience for how many hours I am going to allow SCVI to consume from it for the purposes of painfully written lore gibberish, which patience ran out half 1/100th of the way through Libre of Soul), so I cannot attest to whether the new characters based in a German numerology fetish make any of the above theory more or less likely. But insofar as what we saw in SCV and Amy's soul chronicle in SCVI, something like the above would seem to fit very well (in both narrative and thematic terms) to link the two stories and fulfill the foreshadowing in the SC in particular.

Bringing this back around to the important topic (the actual game part of the game), I personally would have no problem with Amy and Viola appearing in the same game as selectable options--in much the same way we had Patroklos/Alpha Pat, Pyrrha/Pyrrha Omega--whether that is SCVII or a title even further down the road (though I'd be surprised to see Viola introduced later than SCVII in the rebooted timeline). Again, I'm not really acquainted enough with the newest plot developments to speak to the possibilities when it comes to where Acht's story is going, but I'd kind of be surprised if they took another character's moveset and just gave it to her. I think if we see a return of Viola's moveset (and I hope we will--it was one the major silver linings of SCV, balance issues not withstanding) it will be attached to Viola still. As to her personality, I'll confess that I can't remember very much about it from SCV, but I'll confidently take your word on it that she was obnoxious and over-the-top, because...well, Soulcalibur...

But I'll also confess this, as someone who has railed against the movement of the franchise towards magical anime nonsense and away from movesets designed with more of a nod towards real world weapon arts: I nevertheless (as I alluded to immediately above) really like Viola's moveset, and I'm kind of hoping for an accelerated Viola arc that ends with Amy recollecting her identity...and then wielding the crystal ball and her epee-de-coure in a unified two-weapon moveset at some point. With the right approach to the design, I think such a moveset could be pretty boss.
 
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But I'll also confess this, as someone who has railed against the movement of the franchise towards magical anime nonsense and away from movesets designed with more of a nod towards real world weapon arts: I nevertheless (as I alluded to immediately above) really like Viola's moveset, and I'm kind of hoping for an accelerated Viola arc that ends with Amy recollecting her identity...and then wielding the crystal ball and her epee-de-coure in a unified two-weapon moveset at some point. With the right approach to the design, I think such a moveset could be pretty boss.
I doubt Amy's fans or Viola's fans would be pleased with such a moveset. Nobody would win in that scenario (with the exception of you). As someone who enjoys Amy's style the way it is, I'd certainly be pretty angry. Honestly, I'm really tired of Amy transforming into Viola being treated like some absolute necessity. We have a new timeline, and tons of nonsensical lore. Viola can exist as a clone, or something else entirely.

Amy's entire character existing for the sole purpose of being a prelude to Viola is genuinely infuriating. The popularity polls prove that she has a large fanbase of her own, and replacing a character that has a devoted following all for the sake of some story BS would be absurd. I'd boycott a Soul game that excluded her moveset on the basis of "plot".

I really hope the devs are using this timeline stuff as a way of undoing V, but for some reason Japanese game devs seem to have a really hard time being critical of any misstep a franchise has made. If the FF7 Remake is being respectful towards an abomination like Dirge of Cerberus, and including it in the lore, then I can't see Project Soul turning their backs on V's story out of some sickening reverence for the hack/s who wrote it, and chose to ruin the roster.
 
I doubt Amy's fans or Viola's fans would be pleased with such a moveset. Nobody would win in that scenario (with the exception of you). As someone who enjoys Amy's style the way it is, I'd certainly be pretty angry.
Well, just for context, I'm historically an Amy main since SCIII:AE, logging probably in excess of fifteen hundred hours with her alone between AE and IV. Her absence from SCV was a major disappointment and you can well imagine how excited I was when she was finally announced for SCVI:S2. But what we ultimately got with her was not really what I would call a purist's Amy moveset regardless. IMO (and granted, some bias here), she is arguably the most garbled of all the numerous gimmick-ified returning characters in SCVI, relative to the traditional flow of (and the overall overlap with) the original moveset. I want a badass little counter-striking epee maniac darting in and out and we got...a flower girl, sitting back and checking off colors from a petal list and waiting on that criteria (rather than the traditional organic pace of combat) to decide when to attack...once the homework is done. So, while we can hope that this walked back a little in the next entry, the ship has already sailed on a truly classical Amy moving forward anyway.

And it may be that you are imaging something more radical than I intended to imply. I'm thinking first of all that if this ever happened, it would be after a main entry game or two (so, ten years down the line, let's say) after the whole Amy becomes Viola thing has come and gone, with (in narrative terms) Amy having her memory back. And even then I would hope that it would be a rapier/epee flavored moveset, first and foremost, with the dashing orb used to create opening here and there. Honestly, it couldn't be more out-of-sync with a classical approach to Amy than the roses, and I presume it could actually be made to look and feel quite a bit more stylistically consistent, meaningful and, frankly, cool than "throwing flowers". And as for other people getting upset over it, I think the devs of this franchise are well beyond that at this point, when it comes to experimenting with the classic formula of characters and being willing to risk the ire of the devotees to that style. And at least this would make some kind of thematic sense.

I also think that the biggest part of our community, at least insofar as the less casual players are concerned, are inclined to reserve judgment on a moveset and judge it on its own merits once it has been developed: certainly there is no shortage of fanboys who would get their pants in a bunch over losing "pure" Amy or "true" Viola, but I think if you made a hybrid style effective, stylistically consistent, aesthetically appealing, and (above all) made sure that character sat in the pocket of their own gameplay niche in a balanced and unique fashion, the balance of players would embrace it. Also, let's remember that Soulcalibur is returning to viability as a blue ocean game, meaning the intractability on the part of legacy players is probably less an issue now than it has been at any point in the last twenty years.

Honestly, I'm really tired of Amy transforming into Viola being treated like some absolute necessity. We have a new timeline, and tons of nonsensical lore. Viola can exist as a clone, or something else entirely.

Amy's entire character existing for the sole purpose of being a prelude to Viola is genuinely infuriating. The popularity polls prove that she has a large fanbase of her own, and replacing a character that has a devoted following all for the sake of some story BS would be absurd. I'd boycott a Soul game that excluded her moveset on the basis of "plot".
Eh, I don't know, man: without staking out territory on whether or not it should happen, I think that Amy's soul chronicle didn't come into existence in a void: I'm pretty sure we have all the indication we need about what the current devs intend to do with her, given the chance. Mind you, a lot can change for Project Soul before the next title comes out, but I think the writing is on the wall for where Amy's plot is headed. All that said, I see no reason why we can't have Amy and Viola as separate characters in the selectable roster as the same character at different points in time. It's been done before, in this and other fighter franchises.

I don't think I'd boycott any SC game based solely on decisions made regarding the roster, but I'd agree that removing Amy for purely lore-oriented causes would be a monumental mistake. Luckily, I think we're talking about too experienced and business-savvy a team here for that to be likely to happen. Even SCV's ill-fated roster shake-up was more a strategic choice to try to appeal to demographics than it was something that the development team of that game felt was required by the plot. Their reading of that situation was, as we all know, tragically inaccurate, but I think the plotline was moved to the future to serve the new young variants, rather than the other way around--and some of the scarce quotes out of that development cycle seem to support that.

Anyway, I do think Amy=Viola (again) is rather more likely than some random character appearing in a soul chronicle being boosted to main roster status and given a former character's moveset. That's just not something the series has ever done, nor indeed something I've seen any fighter do, aside from V itself, in the very course of action most criticized, and even there it wasn't a wholecloth transfer. There are many earlier cases (including in this franchise) of clones or near-clones diverging over time, but swapping someone else's moveset over to another character? Seems way too awkward and unwieldy when there are better options. And as to those lore nerds, that feels like the move that would really infuriate them.

I really hope the devs are using this timeline stuff as a way of undoing V, but for some reason Japanese game devs seem to have a really hard time being critical of any misstep a franchise has made. If the FF7 Remake is being respectful towards an abomination like Dirge of Cerberus, and including it in the lore, then I can't see Project Soul turning their backs on V's story out of some sickening reverence for the hack/s who wrote it, and chose to ruin the roster.
So, I promise I'm not trying to be disputatious here, disagreeing on so many points--I really am just enjoying discussing this points with another old hand--but two things here:

One, I actually liked Dirge of Cerberus: I think it's one of the more underappreciated games that Square ever made--or at least I remember it that way. Yes it's story was a bit tacked-on to the existing lore in a way that felt redundant and over-the-top, and its villains were two-dimensional and seemed to leap out of the pages of a comic book, but I thought that game did a bloody brilliant job of bringing the environmental design of FFVIII into three dimensions, decades before Remake did it in a frankly less impressive fashion (relative to the time at which each game was made and their comparative budgets). It was also a more than passable shooter on the gameplay front. Of course I realize from your wording that you are probably speaking to it's lackluster plot more than anything--which, yeah, fair enough.

But that leads into my other difference of opinion: I think SCV probably has the most respectable plot of any game in Soulcalibur cannon. Or let me qualify that: I think that Soulcalibur's narrative is bonkers and silly on the whole and that (paradoxically) this has been a part of its success: the early games encouraged you (whether this was intentional on the part of the devs or not) to just give up on any sense that the backdrop to your staged battles between warriors wielding weapons as big as themselves (who never, ever die or so much as suffer serious permanent injury) would have any kind of consistency or firm logic behind it. By being one of the world's most outrageous, nonsensical, inconsistent narratives (even by gaming standards) it did a great job of facilitating the spectacle that was the gameplay and the brilliant character and stage design, which then were beholden to nothing but the devs' imaginations.

But of course we live in a world where something simple and working can never be left alone indefinitely and--largely as a consequence of nerds who did take that whimsical story too seriously--commercial factors and staff turn-over were bound to push the series towards taking itself more seriously than it's legacy of storytelling could ever justify. So the trend has been towards making a more serious and self-consistent story. Well, alright, fine. But we've really only had two games in the series that have attempted to do this in a full-throated fashion: SCV and SCVI. And if I have to pick the one that did it better, it's not even a contest.

SCV, for all it's famously undercut budget, attempted to tell a fairly (in Soulcalibur terms) mature and cogent story with emotional resonance. It did this by actually becoming the first game in the series to (gasp) have longterm consequences for characters and events that weren't instantly reversed the next time you needed one of the same characters to show up on screen for another fight. It actually attempted to have some degree of emotional resonance, told it's story through fairly well produced cinematic techniques, told one fairly cohesive and stripped-down story, and (gasp again) kinda sorta made you feel for some of these characters for once, in a way that has never been justified by the "Here comes a new challenger" slapped together stories of the franchise before or since. Yeah, it's not worth all of the other dubious design choices (particularly the roster shake-up) that were made in that game. But when you stop to look at each individual game and how it told its story, this was clearly the most mature approach any Soulcalibur took, and the closest any game in the series has come to having something we might call narrative depth.

SCVI on the other hand, went in the opposite direction on almost every call when it comes to the design and presentation of the story and has got to be one of the most tedious, trite, obnoxious, poorly told narratives I've ever come across in any genre or medium. It is truly, epically terrible. Once again we go back to an era where the same forty people are constantly running each other through with their weapons and dropping each other off of thousand-foot precipices in increasingly pyrotechnic anime displays, but without any kind of lasting consequence--only this time around there was some perceived need to make several games worth of alternate timelines fit together into one "cohesive" narrative, leading to tortured summary of all the lore previously relegated to cut screens, museum modes, and promotional materials.

And yet, at the same time, presumably out of an understandable perceived need to cloak the fact that all of these "destiny defining" encounters between the principal cast lead to exactly zero lasting consequence for anyone, they are surrounded by the greatest aggregation of filler content ever to be included in a fighter: just unending tiresome hours of banal encounters with cookie-cutter ninjas, bandits, pirates, and corrupted knights, smashed between days worth of pointless dialogue with one-dimensional townspeople/common folk on the road. And even when the plot is more pointed, it's the same old mystical energy / anime / power of destiny nonsense that was perfectly well described in little dialogue tidbits in earlier games. As to the dialogue itself in VI, "tin-earred" doesn't even begin to describe how vacuous and unnatural it all is, or how poorly delivered on the whole.

Worse yet, to accommodate the sheer volume of this insipid nonsense, the entirety of it is delivered through low budget talking-head visual novel format. Because, well, water finds its own level and the level of SCVI's storytelling is precisely that of a dating sim targeted at teenagers and others who never developed more discerning tastes. But what a monumental waste of resources that could have gone into developing content for the actual game itself: characters, stages, weapons, CaS items, netcode improvements, debugging, additional modes of play, cinematics--almost all of the categories of content were lackluster at launch and some remain anemic even now. So instead of legions of Lizardman fans getting their main back, I get to meet five tradesmen in Goa who need the conduit's help in fetch quests, find out exactly how Maxi's crew feel about him (he's a great boss, guys!), and get hamfisted cannon "explanation" for why Ivy dresses like a fetish model. Whooooo....

And here's the thing: I can't even say as it was the wrong call for PS/Namco: they are only cow-tailing to consumerist demands from legions of uber nerds who demand that every game, no matter how predicated in multiplayer competitive play, must always also serve the interests of those interested in single player content--and more to the point, are more than willing to waste their timing organizing to blow up the social media sphere surrounding a game if it dares to try to do something more tailored to a hardcore egaming cohort. One can only pray that the movement to counter bloat in game design will continue to gain some traction--and if it does, let this trashfire of a storytelling experience never be forgotten, because this is truly one of the most hackneyed, laborious narrative experiences I've ever had to wade through by virtue of its proximity to a game I was more or less enjoying on other levels.

Now of course I recognize that SCV kind of cheated/threw SCVI under the bus to do what it did: in order to have a story with some slight impact to it, its developers leveraged it into a place where it was at a clear end point for the story, forcing whoever developed the next game to either undo all of that, and make the events inconsequential afterwards, or just reboot the whole damn thing--because one way or another, you had to bring back the significant majority of the old favorites after SCV's reception. So you can argue that to some extent SCVI was the game it had to be, relative to the point in time it arrived at--in the franchise history and in the timeline of the industry at large. But not even that can account for how bad it's story is, from every angle you can analyze it from, other than maybe giving a hard-on to lore nerds with more tendency towards obsessive compulsive traits than ability for critical appraisal of the quality of the total package.
 
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I don’t see why we shouldn’t allow Amy and Viola to coexist within the same game as one another. Fighting games have done this stuff before. Plus Viola in my opinion has one of the most unique fighting styles in SC history quite possibly the first “puppet” style we’ve had in a SC game. I’d hate to see her go to waste.

And if Nightmare/Siegfried in SC1 and 6 and Pyrrha/Pyrrha Omega in SC5 can coexist in a game so can Amy and Viola.
 
Viola's style will return at some point, just not Viola herself. It'd be stupid to have both her and Amy together. I'd much rather they give her style to someone interesting like Acht.
 
I don't see any problem with Amy and Viola coexisting in the same game much like Siegfried and Nightmare. As of now the events of SC6 span a decade so it's not as if character's ages and motivations have stayed the same within the same game, plus all characters can fight each other even when they've never met because gameplay is king at the end of the day. Remember, the retelling of the golden era will come to an end at some point which means all character arcs will come to an end. Regardless how many of us liked or disliked the direction SC5 went into, I'm sure 99% of us liked that the golden era concluded in SC4 and are expecting SC7 or SC8 to do the same. That means new characters in the future will be "integral to the main story of the Soul and Spirit swords" while golden era characters can remain on the roster without any story because again, gameplay is king.
 
I really hope that for the next SoulCalibur we get both timelines. One with the characters of V where everything goes to shit and they have to use time travel to prevent it. And the other being the continuation of VI.
I do really enjoy characters like Patroklos, Xiba, Aeon and Viola, so I don't want to see the story denying their existence. Also, the veterans where in some places of their life that i considered really interesting, like Siegfried, Hilde, Raphael, Kilik (he could be a cool version of Necrid), etc...
 
SCV, for all it's famously undercut budget, attempted to tell a fairly (in Soulcalibur terms) mature and cogent story with emotional resonance.
I actually agree here. The execution was horrid, but I liked how they attempted (emphasis on attempted) a more focused narrative, with more morally complex characters. However, at the end of the day I don't care much about the story of the Soul series, outside of Raphael's plight. Unfortunately the presence of Azwel is ruining Raphael's story by giving a narrative about a man misguidedly doing whatever it takes to "protect" his daughter (while failing to see what she really wants) a one note villain pulling the strings.

Even if they butcher Raphael's narrative, as long as the gameplay remains solid, and my favorite movesets remain in the game, I won't be bothered. Even if Amy becomes Viola, as long as she's still selectable I won't be bothered. I like Viola's moveset, and I want her fans to be happy. My primary issue has always been the strong emphasis on the narrative and roster being tied together. V's story would be kinda respectable if every member of the pre-timeskip roster was still playable, but because they aren't I hate it.

VI's story is a mess, but it's a mess precisely because they're trying to fit everyone into the roster, which means fitting them all into the story. I'd rather have a bad story and a good roster, than a good story and a bad roster. It's a fighting game, not A Song of Ice and Fire. Project Soul tried to please everyone with VI, which I respect far more than V's "risks". If they try to "advance" the story in the same direction as V, they'll lose sight of what truly matters once again.

One, I actually liked Dirge of Cerberus: I think it's one of the more underappreciated games that Square ever made--or at least I remember it that way. Yes it's story was a bit tacked-on to the existing lore in a way that felt redundant and over-the-top, and its villains were two-dimensional and seemed to leap out of the pages of a comic book, but I thought that game did a bloody brilliant job of bringing the environmental design of FFVIII into three dimensions, decades before Remake did it in a frankly less impressive fashion (relative to the time at which each game was made and their comparative budgets). It was also a more than passable shooter on the gameplay front. Of course I realize from your wording that you are probably speaking to it's lackluster plot more than anything--which, yeah, fair enough.
I was indeed talking about Dirge's awful story, and how despite absolutely nobody liking it Square is hellbent on inserting crap from it into the Remake's narrative. I think the Remake's story has bigger problems than that, but I was merely pointing out another example of a Japanese game company failing to read the room.

The gameplay of Dirge was pretty horrid too though. It was RPG devs attempting to make a third person shooter around the same time we got Resident Evil 4 (the best third person shooter ever). I like Dirge's environmental design too, but that can't save... literally everything else about it.
 
Viola's style will return at some point, just not Viola herself. It'd be stupid to have both her and Amy together. I'd much rather they give her style to someone interesting like Acht.
And yet, it really wouldn’t. Fighting games in the past have had multiple versions of the same character be in the same game. Like in MK9 where you had both normal Sub-Zero and Cyber SZ. Or in Smash games (specifically Melee, 4, and Ult,) you have both Mario and Dr Mario. Or even in MvC2 where there were two Wolverine’s. Both the adamantium and the bone claws.

So no, it really isn’t stupid…
 
Hey i got a solution. Just kick Amy then. We get viola back and remove the most cancerous playstyle in series at the same time. Win WIn
 
Yeah, unbelievable. Just like Siegfried and Nightmare, a really stupid and illogical move. Kappa

I'd prefer an original Acht than her getting Viola's move, just like Leixia, Natsu and Xiba were, imho, not really welcome for that.
So no, it really isn’t stupid…
I can't believe I have to clarify this but here we go: saying something is dumb =/= saying something is impossible to happen or never happened in the past.

I just don't see why they would bring back Viola. Amy's story chronicle feels like it's a sign that Amy wouldn't turn into that again. Either come up with a brand new interesting character or give it to someone like Acht, who is also interesting.
 
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