Soul Calibur 2

[Guest KoR Fungus]

So, Playland *finally* got SC2 in today, so I figured I'd celebrate by starting an SC2 thread, heh. Unfortunately, there were too many people there for me to really get a chance to just sit down and experiment with it, but I'll post my first impressions.

 

Graphics: Eh, not the most important feature to me, but some people care. The graphics are beautiful, although that's pretty much the norm with games today. Still, these were pretty impressive. The character models are very elaborate. The polygon count is obviously higher than it is in TK4, and you can tell. The character movement is really fluid, the framerate is high, everything you'd expect. The characters have very nice looking outfits. Nightmare in particular looks like a total badass, heh. The weapon trails are back and in full effect, and look as cool as always. A lot of characters have new throw animations, and some of them look absolutely brutal. Lots of oohs and aahs from the audience after some of them. The backgrounds are much improved. The addition of walls makes everything look a lot less flat. It also just looks like a lot more time was spent on backgrounds, and it paid off. A church background with really intricately rendered stained glass windows sticks out as being particularly nice, but all the backgrounds look really good. Overall, nothing to complain about here. The graphics are excellent, as everyone knew they would be.

 

Sound: Eh, it's an arcade, so sound's a little hard to judge. The sound effects seem to be about the same, but they were really good before, so that's no problem. I couldn't hear the music all that well, but it seemed to be in line with the rest of the series, which is a good thing. The one thing that really did stand out were the horrendously funny taunts. All the characters begin and end each round with unintentionally hilarious comments. They're around 0.8 Virtua Fighter on the cheesiness scale. Everyone watching was laughing at such hardcore taunts as "My name is Mitsurugi!" or "Please..... don't cry!". And it seems like each character has several of these, so it adds up to hours of amusement. And to top it all off, the announcer is back in all his glory, and has more to say than ever. Excellent!

 

Gameplay: Thoughts after my very limited experience with it...

 

The Good: The most important change is that those horrible, awful ring outs are much less prevalent than they used to be. There are now several walled or partially walled stages, and moves don't seem to throw you back as far as they used to, so you don't see ring outs all that often. The fact that they still happen at all annoys me, but it's a big improvement. You have to really go for a ring out to get one now, and that only works on certain stages. Yay.

 

The new characters seem pretty cool. The truly new characters are a fencer and a girl that uses the weapons that the hero uses in Suikoden 2. The other "new" characters look like Sophitia and Hwang, although they play differently enough that calling them new isn't so bad. They're certainly more different than Christie and Eddy were. Anyway, the fencer and Suikoden 2 girl (I forget all their names, hehe) are pretty different than anyone else, which is nice. I really like the fencer, his moves really fit the fencing style. Quality. More interesting new characters than we got in TK4, and there'll be more time released.

 

The old characters seem to have been pretty substantially tweaked. Lots of new moves and stuff, about what you'd expect from a sequel. There's probably not as much change as there was between SB and SC, no total style overhauls or anything, but it's enough to keep it interesting.

 

The Bad: It's very much Soul Calibur. While everything's been tweaked and improved as much as you'd expect, the game plays very much the same as it did before, and that was one of the first things that pretty much all the spectators noticed. If you didn't particularly love SC before, there's not much that's going to get you to love it now. The TK4 community was all lined up to play it today (and we're all horrible, lol), but I imagine we'll all be back to TK4 in six months.

 

Other Stuff: The game has multiple one player options, which is a really cool feature. IIRC, it had normal arcade, but it also had survival, practice (one quarter gets you five minutes of practice time, a very interesting idea) and some other mode that I didn't get to see. It's *very* cool to actually have one player options on an arcade machine, kudos to Namco for that.

 

Otoh, the versus mode, at least on our machine, was nonexistant. The machine kept putting our fights in arcade mode, which meant no stage select and no character change. I'm hoping that's just because our arcade operator did something wrong, because it's hard for me to believe that Namco would leave that out after having it in SC and TK4.

 

Oh well, that's about it. Pretty surface level review, but then I only played it for two hours.

[Guest areacode212]

Hmm, so this out in the arcades too? I was always under the impression that it was direct-to-console, since every article I've read--which wasn't many--always talked about the multiple console versions that were coming out.

 

Anyway, I only played SC on the DC, so I never really had any good comp to play, and thus improve against. I suppose I'll be in for a rough time when I head to the arcade

[Guest KoR Fungus]

<<<Hmm, so this out in the arcades too? I was always under the impression that it was direct-to-console, since every article I've read--which weren't many--always talked about the multiple console versions that were coming out.>>>

 

Yeah, mags never seem to realize that all fighting games come out in the arcades first. They never seem to play the arcade version either, at least judging from the TK4 and VF4 previews that said nothing about actual gameplay, even when the games had been out in the arcades for months. EGM previews of TK4 in 2002 were saying stuff like "We hear there are slated to be three new characters, Steve, Marduk and Christie!". Well no shit, and all arcade players have been using them for the past six months, derrr. Stupid mags.

 

<<<Anyway, I only played SC on the DC, so I never really had any good comp to play, and thus improve against. I suppose I'll be in for a rough time when I head to the arcade>>>

 

Heh, if it's anything like our arcade, it'll just be a bunch of TK4 players having no clue what they're doing, and you'll fit right in, hehe. Seriously, the SC arcade community isn't too big, I doubt you'll be very far behind everyone else.

[Guest Black Lushus]

honestly, and don't kill me guys, but I haven't been really interested in a fighter since Super SF 2 Turbo...Tekken 3 was nice, MvC2 was alright, but Capcom really went into overkill with the fighters...Darkstalkers 3 owned though!

[Guest Sakura]

I really liked Raphael(the fencer). Great look and moves. Also had fun with Yunsung, the new Hwang.

 

I only played one 2 player fight but I was able to select the stage. What I liked is that after the match I was able to select a new character to go through one player.

 

I got to Inferno. It kinda sucks he is boss again but he does look neat. Flames are everywhere, it's almost hard to see. Several times during the fight a cut-scene starts up and he gets a new fighting style.

 

Right now there's Arcade Mode, Practice, Survival, Time Attack and one mystery slot. It looks like the time release slot is going to be some kind of a mission or Kumite from VF mode. You get points for beating up people or something and it keeps track of it.

 

and word from Japan is there's only 3 Time release characters. Yoshitmisu, a mimic character named Charade, and then Cervantes.

[Guest EQ]

I can't wait for this game to come out on Gamecube... Did you hear that Adult Link is a hidden character? How much is that going to OWN

[Guest Sakura]

It looks like the Adult Link stuff was just BS. Guardimpact.com says Namco denies it.

[Guest EQ]

Oh dammit...

 

=(

[Guest CED Ordonez]

I thought Soul Calibur II was pretty good. Never played the original as much, but having being forced to play MvC 2 for a while, it was a refreshing change.

 

I think the only thing that was annoying was the fight with Inferno. The flame effects were cool and everything, but I had a hard time figuring out if I was making contact with him. I also lost both times I faced him because of his mid-match weapons changes, which pissed me off greatly.

[Guest MarvinisaLunatic]

With or without Link, it looks to be the best 3d fighting game on a nintendo console ever.

 

Im still waiting for Rare to do Killer Instinct 3, which would be awesome.

 

Mortal Kombat DA is gonna flop.