Soul Calibur IV

Offending Material

Now I’m a fan of Soul Calibur. Have been for a while. I played Soul Edge in the arcade a few times, Soul Calibur itself on the dreamcast. I bought SC2  for the Gamecube, and I own SC III, which is only for the PS2. I know characters have been pulled in from other games and such before. But they always did it smart. Yoshimitsu gets toned down to a one armed samurai when we all know he’s a cyborg pirate ninja with a laser sword. At least up until Tekken 4 when he has that freaky bug costume. They’ve brought in Heihachi also from Tekken, he’s a fist fighter as pretty much everyone in Tekken is, so again no problem. Spawn, Link none of them break the games setting of a world somewhere between the middle ages and the renaissance. So what’s my problem? Easy, Soul Calibur IV plans to bring in Darth freaking Vader and Yoda… yes, star Wars characters. It’s stupid it’s ludicrous and it completely sends the games world to the crapper. The jedi powers are fine it’s the fact that Vader is still his cyborg self and both of them tote lightsabers. Now we’ve seen the movies we know you can bloodlessly remove someone hand with these. Carve through spaceships and anything in between. Yet Mitsurugi and Vader clash ’swords’ during the trailer and what’s this Mitsurugi’s sword isn’t cut in two along with the rest of them like we all know he should be. So they just toned down the weapons. Great, way to screw up Star wars now too. The only other time SC has done this is with 3’s create a soul mode where you could make a character that looked like KOS-MOS but at least she didn’t whip out her gatling guns or those laser blades she has. No, you had to equip her with a practical (mostly) melee weapon. Because that’s what is available to everyone else. Adding these two like they did kills that and any of the credibility the story had. I mean aside from the demons, zombies and sentient shape shifting mind controlling swords among a few other things. They had a setting they’d been adhering to for the last what seven years, eight counting this one. There does look to be a new character using a spear style, she has a very ornate armour that some people find nice but well I don’t care much for it either way. Astaroth I find looks spikier than usual but as I mentioned in a post somewhere else at least he doesn’t look like a hardware store exploded all over him. Siegfried, my personal favourite character through every game aside from 2 which made me play him as a re-skinned Nightmare is also on my do not like list. They just made his armour look, blah, very blah. All they really did was extend the shoulder armour and make it a bit spikier and ornate but I really dislike how it looks. Siegfried always had functional armour, which is probably why I liked him. Soul Calibur 4 was one of the titles I was looking forward to seeing released. If I bought a system it would probably be one that included this game. Now I’m not so sure, if I do get it you can bet your marbles I’ll have demo’d it first. But right now I’m just upset that the setting in one of my favourite games just got raped by people from the future.