holy shit, what a fucking trainwreck this game is. the fact that people even enjoy this game is baffling to me when it has some of the worst singleplayer content i've seen in any fighting game. i cannot fathom how it is that people enjoy this game competitively either when the game added supers (which do NOT work at all in this format) and characters who can combo you for 35-40% damage off of one hit. who is defending this game? why is this average rating this high?
on all fronts this game really just outright fails. the story is infamously bad (as well as infamously incomplete (https://train2game-news.co.uk/2012/03/26/train2game-news-soulcalibur-v-story-mode-one-fourth-of-planned-size-each-character-was-to-have-own-story/ )), and patroklos as a character is just not compelling enough to warrant the plot centering around him. yes, stories with characters that do morally reprehensible things early on can work (see: final fantasy iv), but they have to grow and change and atone for said villainy. patroklos just slaughters innocent people left and right because a character we see in maybe 3 scenes max told him to. pyrrha is insufferable too, she's such a noncharacter whose emotions are "fragile vase that can break if anyone so much as looks wrong at it" and "WAAAHH STOP BEING MEAN AND TRYING TO KILL ME I'M SO LONELY". and the antagonists aren't much better off, if at all. elysium is just... such a forgettable and generic villain with basically no motivation and nightmare might as well just have "Contractually Obligated Mascot Villain" branded onto his armor for this game.
you can really see the "1/4th of the planned content" aspect when you see the cutscenes. the majority of them are just storyboarded scenes that were clearly intended to be modeled in 3D but they just ran out of time. so you'll get some cutscenes arbitrarily modeled (usually if they involve patroklos or pyrrha) but not more important ones, like major character deaths, plot twists, etc. etc. some part of me does feel like i'm punching down because this is very clearly not the story that they wanted to tell, but, by that same token, it is the story that we got. we get "viola is tied to amy and will be very important in the story" and she ends up speaking literally twice. we get a cool new character introduced in ZWEI and aren't even told what happens to him at the end of the story. we get to see the offspring of xianghua and kilik for two minutes and they barely get any time to do or say anything. ivy, maxi, and siegfried all show up with basically nothing to do other than to communicate "we are in this game", which is more than you can say about favorites like mitsurugi or yoshimitsu. on every level, this story fails to be satisfying to fans of the series, and i can't imagine newcomers would be very enticed by the likes of patroklos and pyrrha. again, punching down, sure, but i would rather they have not even bothered with a story mode if it was going to be this poorly implemented and boring.
all of this would be fine if the arcade mode was at least serving something palatable for the player but arcade endings don't exist in this game! no, instead of getting individualized character endings, you get nothing. no intro cinematics, no rival battles, no character profiles, nothing. what is even the point of including an arcade mode if it provides 0 new content to the player? this game is in such an unfinished state that it's legitimately a grift on namco's part to release this. i get that fighting games don't necessarily need to have extensive and complex singleplayer campaigns to be good, and some of my favorite fighting games of all time (CVS2, MVC2, SFIII) don't even have much beyond arcade modes. but this is such a step back for the series. SC established itself as a series that takes its mythos very seriously and builds on that with every iteration by developing the characters and how their lives intersect with each other as a result of soul edge and soul calibur. instead, we're left with a hollow beta arcade mode. kotor 2 and chrono cross may have been unfinished and had endings that are notoriously unsatisfying/poorly done, but at least they were (arguably) good up until those points. at no point while playing this game did this feel like a soul calibur game. sure, it has SCIV's engine and characters use weapons to fight each other, but this video game legitimately feels alien when compared to any other game in the series.
i'm still gobsmacked that this game doesn't have a worse reputation. i really try to find things to like about the content i consume, but there's literally nothing here. it doesn't even make me sad, really, because while i know the game should've gotten more time in the oven, it's absolutely deplorable that it would be released in such an unfinished state. this goes beyond "the game is rushed and has moments that don't work/need development", there's just like... legitimately no content here. again, this shouldn't have even been released if this game was going to be so much nothing condensed into a $60 price tag, and i'm likely going to hesitate on any future namco purchase knowing that this met their bar of quality.
on all fronts this game really just outright fails. the story is infamously bad (as well as infamously incomplete (https://train2game-news.co.uk/2012/03/26/train2game-news-soulcalibur-v-story-mode-one-fourth-of-planned-size-each-character-was-to-have-own-story/ )), and patroklos as a character is just not compelling enough to warrant the plot centering around him. yes, stories with characters that do morally reprehensible things early on can work (see: final fantasy iv), but they have to grow and change and atone for said villainy. patroklos just slaughters innocent people left and right because a character we see in maybe 3 scenes max told him to. pyrrha is insufferable too, she's such a noncharacter whose emotions are "fragile vase that can break if anyone so much as looks wrong at it" and "WAAAHH STOP BEING MEAN AND TRYING TO KILL ME I'M SO LONELY". and the antagonists aren't much better off, if at all. elysium is just... such a forgettable and generic villain with basically no motivation and nightmare might as well just have "Contractually Obligated Mascot Villain" branded onto his armor for this game.
you can really see the "1/4th of the planned content" aspect when you see the cutscenes. the majority of them are just storyboarded scenes that were clearly intended to be modeled in 3D but they just ran out of time. so you'll get some cutscenes arbitrarily modeled (usually if they involve patroklos or pyrrha) but not more important ones, like major character deaths, plot twists, etc. etc. some part of me does feel like i'm punching down because this is very clearly not the story that they wanted to tell, but, by that same token, it is the story that we got. we get "viola is tied to amy and will be very important in the story" and she ends up speaking literally twice. we get a cool new character introduced in ZWEI and aren't even told what happens to him at the end of the story. we get to see the offspring of xianghua and kilik for two minutes and they barely get any time to do or say anything. ivy, maxi, and siegfried all show up with basically nothing to do other than to communicate "we are in this game", which is more than you can say about favorites like mitsurugi or yoshimitsu. on every level, this story fails to be satisfying to fans of the series, and i can't imagine newcomers would be very enticed by the likes of patroklos and pyrrha. again, punching down, sure, but i would rather they have not even bothered with a story mode if it was going to be this poorly implemented and boring.
all of this would be fine if the arcade mode was at least serving something palatable for the player but arcade endings don't exist in this game! no, instead of getting individualized character endings, you get nothing. no intro cinematics, no rival battles, no character profiles, nothing. what is even the point of including an arcade mode if it provides 0 new content to the player? this game is in such an unfinished state that it's legitimately a grift on namco's part to release this. i get that fighting games don't necessarily need to have extensive and complex singleplayer campaigns to be good, and some of my favorite fighting games of all time (CVS2, MVC2, SFIII) don't even have much beyond arcade modes. but this is such a step back for the series. SC established itself as a series that takes its mythos very seriously and builds on that with every iteration by developing the characters and how their lives intersect with each other as a result of soul edge and soul calibur. instead, we're left with a hollow beta arcade mode. kotor 2 and chrono cross may have been unfinished and had endings that are notoriously unsatisfying/poorly done, but at least they were (arguably) good up until those points. at no point while playing this game did this feel like a soul calibur game. sure, it has SCIV's engine and characters use weapons to fight each other, but this video game legitimately feels alien when compared to any other game in the series.
i'm still gobsmacked that this game doesn't have a worse reputation. i really try to find things to like about the content i consume, but there's literally nothing here. it doesn't even make me sad, really, because while i know the game should've gotten more time in the oven, it's absolutely deplorable that it would be released in such an unfinished state. this goes beyond "the game is rushed and has moments that don't work/need development", there's just like... legitimately no content here. again, this shouldn't have even been released if this game was going to be so much nothing condensed into a $60 price tag, and i'm likely going to hesitate on any future namco purchase knowing that this met their bar of quality.