My issue is not that you didn't like it for YOUR personal reason, My issue is that you are not reviewing the product for what it is intended. It's like reviewing a Ferrari and complaining that it doesn't serve your fuel efficiency needs for trips to the grocery store. SC5's selling point IS the multiplayer and online, that's where all the effort went in. Yes people miss some of the old modes, but those are fluff. A fighting game is a fighting game because of mechanics. Fighting an AI isn't the same as they do not follow the rules that make the game work such as mind games, reads, and reactions. It's never fair to judge a fighting game based on story/modes unless that's the selling point of the series, such as MK9. When SC was announced it was stated it was for competitive play. It was also stated as a way to bring in casual players with easier move sets and fresh mechanics. SC5 delivered in a lot of ways on what they promised.
Due to the nature of the game when you give a review it is ABSOLUTELY necessary to isolate different aspects of the game. A fair review would target single player content (which is bad! Agreed), online (which is insanely good, way beyond expectation), and mechanics (most like them). Your review is aimed at 1 very small part that is not the direct focus of the genre, and ignores giving it fair voice to all audiences interests.
If I were to review Mass Effect. I would need to address the gameplay and the story and make a declaration that speaks for both. I would write, the story is great, but the action is lacking. So for people who want a story: yes. For a great FPS: not for most. This review of SC is not doing that, it's taking a complaint most view as negligible and saying the game as a whole is bad in the face of how much they got right that simply doesn't interest you.
I think another point to make, and what I accuse all review sites of doing in the face of competitive games, is that the reviewer MUST no something about high level play. The reason is that they can give a fair review on ALL aspects of the game for both pros and casuals. A casual however cannot address thing beyond their limited scope of the game and is regarded as not actually knowing how to play the game by most people. Casuals have a right to love a game for their own reasons and a review should include their interests, but neither pro nor casual should be the pure focus and what we see is FGs constantly reviews by people who barely understand the basics.
Yes but your review would not address other peoples concerns. A review should cover all basis, not just one person's agenda. As well the review needs to respect the intent of the game and base it on that and single player is secondary in most fighters since there are flaws to the concept. They are generally added as a way to include more people, they are always ADDED on.
Why should a review cover all basis? Seriously. How many reviewers are even capable of doing that, and can also manage to convey it in a way that can reach every reader in any useful sense?
No one is stopping us from reading more than one review so I don't see any reason why every review has to be done the same way. As long as the reviewer makes it clear what aspects of the game that they experienced and gives us their honest opinion I don't see a problem.
Congratulations for having the balls to just say it out loud. Soulcalibur IV was way better than V. I can't believe the amount of people who are praising this version over the previous. It makes me think there's something else involved other than a simple matter of taste.
Tom, in this Soul Calibur game, blocking is in fact put on the back burner so to speak, but it's not something you want to forgo altogether. For one thing, almost every move is -frames on block. Just Guard just makes the -frames more and guarantees juggles in most cases. I don't know anyone who can use them regularly and only a few who can land more than one in a match against actual players. These guards are going to be what separates the pros from the casualties. It's also worth noting that you don't need to Just Guard every hit, but just the last one.
With that said, I can see your complaints about the "RPG" system and customizing from IV, but those were part of what made the game so unbalanced. One could work on customizing a character to work for their play style, but when they went out to a friend's house or to a tournament, their custom character crutches would be missing and their lack of skill would shine through. Ultimately, I would love to see a fighting game that allows customization like that, but keeps the balance for tournaments. Sadly, a game like that would take forever to develop and even then would launch with balance issues.
Thanks for the comments, Bloodspoor. And I totally get what you're saying about the balance issues when you throw open the character stats, as SC4 did.
But is that mode really something used competitively? I see that as something separate from the real competitive play. Compare, for instance, how a shooter might restrict certain modes for certain playlists, but they throw it all open for private matches or LAN games. That might not be a good comparison, but I think I'll lose what little fighting game cred I might have if I bring up another comparison. In Super Smash Bros. Melee, the single player game let you put stickers on your units to modify them. But in multiplayer, you had to use the default characters.
The main point is that I can't imagine hardcore SCIV players expected the RPG system to be balanced anywhere near as well as the default set of characters. You're right that's not really a viable approach to tournament level play.
I have every game on my shelf from the Soul series, and I had to return Soul Calibur IV. I felt stupid for having purchased it, to the point where I still haven't picked up V since I'm afraid they've taken it even further steps back.Soul Calibur IV was basically "we upgraded the graphics, and threw in some horrible ideas to justify this HD remake."Don't get me started on the gimmicky, broken Star Wars tie-in.
That's "bases," not "basis." But I'm agreeing with mirumu here- I'd rather read 3 reviews that exhaustively approach a game from 3 different perspectives/priorities than one that tends to generalize across all priorities. In a lot of ways it's more useful to note how individuals react to a game than having someone tell you how he thinks you're going to react.
And "respecting intent" is something that videogame developers, film students, and absolutely nobody else expects you to do with their art. "You're playing the game wrong" might be an ontologically valid argument, but it's not one that's going to get me to buy the game. If I don't enjoy the game and the response is "you're not respecting the intent," I'm just going to spend my money on a different game that doesn't require me to have a correct preconceived notion of what it should be.
If single-player in a fighting game is primarily an extra used to add on more potential users, then I appreciate a reviewer like Chick telling me why a particular game doesn't succeed at attracting those additional users.
At the same time, it is the responsibility of any game to show its players how to play it. Previously Soul Calibur's did this through extensive and replayable single-player games, one way or another you would develop the skills needed to get better and the games kept the super-tricky command inputs in there strictly for the most hardcore. Guiding the player to its superb mechanics through an in-depth single player and not being particularly fussy about the little things was part of Soul Calibur's identity. I think in this light, Tom's criticism makes sense.
This is an outrage! Your review does not reflect my preconceived notions of which arbitrary number should be assigned to indicate the quality of this game!
Awesome job ignoring most of my points and focusing purely on a simple guideline (and blow it out of proportion) that IN MY OPINION is required to create a review people actually can use in their judgment whether they should get the game or not (isn't that what reviews are for in the first place?). No bibles involved or anything.. a simple rule: approaching the game from a fresh perspective, no preconceived notions.. Is this so crazy? My CoD example shows my point. Again it's what happened in this review as well.
You talk about having no preconceived notions, which sounds great as a phrase, but in your original post you actually advocate the opposite. You say that you would give a Call of Duty game a 2.5, but this would somehow be wrong because of a predetermined idea that it doesn't deserve this. That entails bringing an outside consideration into your review, which to me is the very definition of a "preconceived notion." So your experience of a game has less to do with the review than outside considerations (a lot of people like the game, it sells well, critical opinions are favorable etc).
Game reviewers seem to be under a lot of pressure to produce what I would call "consensus reviews", which resemble scientific review articles in which the writer's perspective is only part of the review, and the reviewer serves as a kind of referee of other people's experiences, putting the game itself into an overall context, rather than being a critical evaluation of one person's experience. I understand all the reasons for this, including a need for validation of one's personal opinion, an adolescent audience's need to associate strongly with a product, brand, or group as part of emotional maturation, and a protective instinct in an immature industry, which already is insecure and feels misunderstood, to keep it from being misunderstood further. It's not surprising. But it's disappointing, because until we all move past this, and can get comfortable with individual critics having unorthodox opinions, and discuss these as ideas rather than transgressions against a received wisdom, gaming (and especially game writing) is going to stay ghettoized, because while I mean no offense, the collective everyday experience of 20-something gamers is mundane, homogenous, not very insightful, and certainly isn't very interesting to read about. Which is exactly the state of most game writing. The sooner this tyranny of convention is abolished, the better.
If you're a "competitive" player(who doesnt play Ivy since she got grossly simplified), you'll probably like SC5. The only major concern is that just guard might be overpowered, but if i recall older SCs had mechanics like that and were still considered quite good.
If you want single player content, then what matters is how much you value modes versus how much you value gameplay. I felt that even though SC4 had a lot of modes, the base game didnt stay enjoyable for long. The way sc5 is redesigned combat wise means that it is a lot more enjoyable to me in single player, even with less modes.
