izigame.me

What have they done to my boy?
I'm sure the people with 200+ hours will vehemently disagree with this review, but this just isn't a game that is representative of the series I fell in love with back in the 1990s with the original Soul Edge at the arcades and Soul Blade on the PSX. I absolutely adored that game, and fell in love with the strong focus on ancient eastern sword fighting techniques and moves. Li Long was my main followed by Mitsurugi, and to this day there still isn't a song in the series that's as good as Li Long's theme song. But I digress.
What makes me dislike Soul Calibur VI so much? Because you can't do normal fighting. If you were a fan of the original three games or so, with a strong focus on fast attacks and fluid animated techniques with buttery smooth combos, you won't find it readily here. Granted, there are SOME characters who retain that element, such as Kilik, Talim,.Taki, Seong Mina and a bit of Raphael, but trying to just do normal, neutral, basic techniques is actually a challenge here. Why? Because of the funky controls.
Only Circle provides you with neutral normal combos, everything else does something else. Triangle for some characters provides you with a heavy attack that can also be used for combos in conjunction with Circle, but not for all characters, only certain characters. Square does a grab, and 'X' does a deflect/block. Triangle can also be used as a break. It varies per character.
The biggest offender of having no neutral normals is Geralt. Imagine my surprise when I tried making a character and wanting to use his sword fighting style and testing it only to find you have NO neutral normals. Who thought this was a good idea for a fighting game? Circle has Geralt perform a rune attack and Triangle makes him roll. So you can only start a combo using a special move. Why? Just why...?
This makes some characters impossibly difficult to use for no discernible reason.
Now I'm sure the players with 200+ hours will be quick to say, "Hurr, you just have to use the guard cancel into to the special neutral and then it's easy to start a combo so long as you use an air cancel juggle, durr!" No. That's not how normal people play.
Plus, the stop-and-go nature of the game since it's so heavily focused on guard breaks, special attacks and that awful soul clash mechanic where everything slows down, just ruins the flow of the game horribly. If the clash was something that only happened at critical moments of the fight and with a full meter, I could forgive it, but it's just a normal attack when you hold down the right bumper, which is something you can end up doing inadvertently when just attempting to deflect attacks.
For some characters this also means that their very smooth and almost flowery-fighting styles are completely disrupted and made extremely disjointed, such as Ivy, where before she had an almost ballet-style rhythm to her attacks thanks to the sword-whip and how it could be used. But now you have to do a lot of stop-and-go attacks to transition her moves, mostly relying on specials rather than the free-flowing combos you could string together that made Soul Calibur and Soul Calibur II feel so fluent.
And that's really where things fall apart: the fighting just doesn't feel fluent like the older games. Having to rely so much on special attacks and all those annoying fluttery special moves and super attacks just greatly diminishes from how the game feels and the pace of the fights.
I used to feel like Soul Blade was a good companion fighting game to Bushido Blade, as it was more arcadey while Bushido Blade was more sim oriented, but both did a fantastic job of respecting the traditional sword-based martial arts and feeling fluid and fun to play without over-indulging in the special attacks and flurries of super moves that games like Street Fighter and Fatal Fury were known for. However, now Soul Calibur VI is more super/special-move oriented than even Street Fighter!
What happened?!
This stood out to me a lot more after recently getting back into Virtua Fighter with Sega's re-release of Virtua Fighter 5 on Steam, and just how good that game feels. It's definitely a difficult title to master but it's easy to get into and hard to master in all the right ways. It's also very heavy on focusing on the technique rather than just super specials and flurries of screen-obscuring special effects.
It's sad because Soul Blade used to feel like a sword version of Virtua Fighter, even though Namco had published both Soul Blade and Tekken. But where Tekken was more fantastical, Soul Blade felt a lot more grounded, again, very similar to the Virtua Fighter series but with swords/weapons. Heck, maybe if Sega revives Fighting Vipers on Steam it will rekindle what the original Soul Blade/Calibur games used to embody?
Anyway, if you really want a good sword fighting game that feels closer to what the original Soul Blade was, you're better off with Hellish Quart. If you want an exercise in frustration feel free to give this game a try, but the over-reliance on complicated special moves to perform basic attacks for some characters will quickly put off some players.
Oh, and some of the character's stories cannot be completed unless you buy the DLC characters, which is really unfortunate as I have no desire to buy DLC for a game that I'm just not enjoying that much.
EDIT: Quick update, so I don't want to be too negative here and after completing the Soul Chronicle mode for all the characters, I just wanted to say that Yoshimitsu is one of the worst mechanically designed characters in ALL of fighting games here. He has NO normals, NONE. 75% of his neutrals leave him open for punishes or hurts himself. I'm not even joking. I almost threw the controller at the wall after losing in 10 seconds to Sophitia when I turned away, did some flips, spent around and did a Hari-Kari. Like... what?!
The thing is, it's one of the EASIEST combos to pull off for Yoshimitsu. What were they thinking? Voldo isn't too far off from this either, but at least half his moves don't take his life or restore his opponent's life (imagine doing a grab and giving your opponent back a fraction of their life? Yes, not only does most of Yoshimitsu's moves take his own life but sometimes his grabs will GIVE his opponents life. Insane. I spent an hour on his story alone because I died so many times... and not because the CPU beat me but because I was beating myself...!!!!
Anyway, one last thing: Namco should make a Soulsborne clone starring Siegfried. He has the most compelling story of any character and a game made in similar fashion to Code: Vein starring Siegfried would be an instant seller if it stayed as story focused as his Soul Chronicles journey. I really enjoyed that and his heroic rise, fall, and redemption arc. That's great stuff, and it's a shame Namco sat on his character and this series for so long without exploring that option. Could you imagine a final stage of storming Ostrheinsburg Castle, fighting nightmare, and then finally challenging Inferno? Could have been real epic.
Oh yeah, and Geralt has the best stage music in the game. That is all.