You might be wondering what such a popular and mainstream game is doing
on Lunatic Obscurity, the world's greatest obscure videogames review
blog, but don't worry, it's just an April fools post (although Patreon
subscribers will be reading it on the 30th of March). Rather than do a
pointless prank that no-one would ever fall for, I've decided to write
about a popular game, but hopefully from a slightly unusual perspective.
I actually like Soul Calibur V a lot, though it's not the mechanics that
really excite me, nor do the game's characters and story do anything
for me. You might be wondering what else there is in a fighting game to
like, and in SCV, that thing is the character creation mode. Now, this
game's character creation mode has a lot of problems, from the
segregation of a lot of the clothing and hair items by gender, and the
narrow choices of items available compared to other games with character
creation modes. But there are other factors to take into account.
When we look at other games with character creation modes, the main
three cases that come to mind (for me at least) are wrestling games, the
Saints Row series and most modern Western RPGs. Now, the things all
these cases have in common are restrictions on the stories that can be
told with the characters the player puts into them. Wrestling games have
a tradition of character creation and customisation going back to the
SNES, and the big two series, the WWE games and the Fire Pro Wrestling
games are famed for the ability they give players to create an amazing
variety of characters. The downside is that they are just wrestling
games: the characters will only be wrestling in arenas, playing out
wrestling storylines. RPGs and Saints Row have a similar problem, only
moreso, in that whatever character the player creates can only ever play
the part of The Boss or the Lone Wanderer or whoever.
Soul Calibur V, however, is set in a heavily romanticised, fantasy
version of the early seventeenth century, and has an excellent mode that
has the unassuming title "Quick Battle". What quick battle mode does is
allows the player to take their characters and fight against a couple
of hundred pre-made characters, who range wildly in appearance, from
monsters to might soldiers to beautiful women to members of royalty. So,
in tandem with the character creation mode, SCV allows players to play
for hours and hours and hours without interacting with any of the game's
characters, or participating in its storyline.
Thanks to all this, I tend to think of Soul Calibur V not as a fighting
game, but a little escapist fantasy story-telling game. Each character
I've made in the editor has a simple one-line backstory, and when a
fight begins, I look at the opponent and the stage (and all the stages
are rendered with almost decadent detail and grandeur), and come up with
a similarly simple description of what's going on. The mighty warrior
who eternally seeks stronger opponents hears tell of a demon lurking in
an old, disused temple. The young traveller is led astray by a
mischievous fairy with a taste for human flesh, or she has to fight off
an agressively xenophobic city guard. A soldier for hire is paid by a
magic school to test one of their promising young students in battle, or
hired to expel a malevolent spirit that has been haunting the wooded
hunting grounds near a village.
This all probably sounds incredibly lame, but I just think it's a nice
way to enjoy a game, and to enjoy storytelling through gameplay. And it
wouldn't be possible if Soul Calibur V didn't have this exact blend of
creation mode, setting, and a mode full of characters with just the
right amount of genericity that they can act as puppets for the player
to tell their own stories.
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