Soul Caliber 4

Aug. 24, 2008

I've got no reasoning for picking this game, besides that it's a big budget title.

The battle system represents something I can truly understand. Vertical/horizontal attacks are better than strong vs. weak, in my mind.
I just can't handle most customizations in games, so it is great that creating characters is in no way key to playing this game - it's just flavor on top.
Plenty of characters to choose from, which is awesome.
Game is incredibly pretty and runs very smoothly.

Text should never be presented in super-slow scroll mode. Some of us read faster than 3rd graders. That the story mode's story depends on this slow scrolling text is awful - it took minutes to read through what is essentially a few paragraphs.
The cutscenes themselves were extremely slowly paced, which seems out of place for a fighting game.
Story mode is strangely devoid of story - I usually couldn't tell what was going on. Strange that you have to go to another place in the game altogether to get it.
Normal difficulty on story was too easy, hard was too hard. I wish there were more difficulty modes.
All attacks are abbreviated with a letter, but some of those letters are the same as buttons on the 360. This makes reading instructions confusing at first.

This game would be fun to play with others, but the single player alone will get very repetitive very quickly.