Soul Calibur IV

Fighting with coworkers usually isn't fun.  But when you're fighting in the honorable ring of combat that is Soul Calibur II, it has its appeal. 

I recently picked up a copy of Soul Calibur IV for the XBOX 360 at store-closing event in Covington.  I'm notoriously picky and stingy when it comes to buying games, but I couldn't pass up a solid fighting game with character customization for $14.  I've been playing with it for about a week, seeing what they've done to my old favorites (Mitsurugi, Seung Mina) and discovering new favorites (Yoshimitsu, Nightmare).

Overall, I'm a big fan of any game that lets you customize your character's appearance.  So, one of the biggest draws for me to Soul Calibur IV was the character creator.  For those who aren't familiar with how it works: you can either modify and existing fighter or create a new fighter based off the fighting style of an already existing one.  You then get to equip the character with various costume pieces (headgear, shoulders, shirt, etc.) and select the colors of the individual pieces of equipment.  Presto chango, you have your new character.

...or so I thought.  In actuality, it's a bit more complicated than that.  Each character has three base stats (Attack, Defense, and HP) as well as five special stats (Power, Impact, Gauge, Boost, and Special).  Those stats depend entirely on 1) what weapon the character is using and 2) what individual pieces of equipment he or she is wearing.  As you can imagine, what I thought were simply nifty cosmetic options quickly became the key components of properly min/maxing characters for their utmost fighting potential.  And of course, new and better pieces of equipment are earned by playing the game and unlocking achievements, so you can upgrade your character's equipment and complete more difficult achievements, and so on.

D'oh!  It's the MMO gear grind.

Now, it's not all bad.  In fact, what I haven't mentioned yet are the skills you can earn and equip.  Skills are unlocked when you level up with an individual character (leveling seems to be based on how many rounds you play with an individual character).  Each character can equip a maximum of four skills and each skill uses up a certain amount of a special stat or two to equip.  For example, to equip "Guard Shave B" on Yun-seung, you must have achieved Level 3 with Yun-seung and have 50 Power to spend on equipping the skill.  Skills may do things like give a chance to automatically ward off an opponent's throw attempt, steal a minor amount of HP when you strike an opponent, or increase the damage you do to your opponent's guard meter ("Soul Gauge") when he blocks your attacks.  In short, these skills can affect how you play a particular character or deal with an opponent with a unique skill set, and in that regard, they add a welcome amount of depth and dynamism to a typically flat genre. 

One more gripe: none of this is ever explained.  Not in the game, not in the manual.  While some of it is rather intuitive ("Oh, when I equip this sword my Attack stat goes up by 5%!"), it took me a little tinkering to figure out the connection between leveling up, skills, equipment, and special stats.  It's possible all this was introduced in Soul Calibur III (I skipped it), but a brief tutorial about character creation, leveling up, and unlocking equipment would have been helpful at the beginning. 

Finally, it's worth pointing out that you CAN play certain modes of the game (Arcade, Versus) with skills and equipment effects turned off, so you can be stylin' without worrying about being a statistical gimp.

All in all, I've been enjoying the game and it looks like it'll be more than worth the $14 I spent on it.  I'm looking forward to unlocking all the equipment and skills, but you'd better believe I'm doing it with a walk-through at my side.