Soul Calibur V(Playstation 3) Review

Normally, I don't really talk about fighting games that much, all I wanted to do was just play SCV, have a quick and good time and move on to something else. Maybe even enjoy the game and consider it one of the many, "disliked game in popular game series that I enjoy". When it comes to fighting games I do enjoy Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, Tekken 4 and 6, the Mortal Kombat games after MK9 and MK vs. DC by extension, and Dead or Alive 6. Only Street Fighter 5 being the exception. I didn't come into this game with high expectations.

However, upon playing, a large part of me can't help but slowly get annoyed. The story mode is pretty bad and of course you don't play fighting games for the story, however the writing is bad even by those standards. The new characters are insufferable and only a few of the legacy Soul Calibur characters are even around. Whole thing feels like a bizarre fan fiction. Something that really annoyed me was when you played as Z.W.E.I and a had very challenging fight against Nightmare just to lose in a cutscene.

The AI is very inconsistent one minute they are pushovers and another minute they are overly aggressive who feel like they can read your moves before you make them.

However the thing that really annoyed me was the 3 round system, I can't for the life of me why this system was here. Even if you manage to win 1 round and your opponent wins 2, it's still going to be an uphill battle trying to get two wins in to become the victor.

I also dislike playing as many of the new characters since the appeal of SC for me was how since it's a weapons based fighting game, your attacks have far more reach than fighting games with fists but many of Patrokolos and Phyrra's combos don't really have this and they feel short ranged, I could've looked up the moved list but when I play as Nightmare and Kilik in other SC games, I never had this problem. Playing as any of the characters in the story mode despite having so many fights never made me feel like I was comfortable with them.

Still, I didn't find the gameplay that repulsive or insufferable since making a truly unplayable big budget fighting game from a casual standpoint seems almost impossible to do at the same time, it's a hard game to geniunely reccomend outside of Soul Calibur completionists or people who want to try out as many installments in a popular franchise that they enjoy as they can out of curosity.