Game Discussion of The Week: Soulcalibur series

SoulBlade, SoulCalibur and SoulCalibur III are fantastic, the memorycard file corruption bug in III is the only complaint I have across the three combined and it can be circumvented if you are aware of it beforehand, so not a big deal anymore, it did ruin my original savefile back in the day though, very sad.

SoulBlade on PlayStation was one of the first fighting games I really enjoyed a lot, not being a fan of the genre at the time it was rare for me to enjoy a fighting game as much as I did with SoulBlade, I liked a handful more back in the mid-to-late 90s, like Battle Arena Toshinden 2 and Bloody Roar for example, but the genre itself was just not to my liking yet.
Whenever I played SoulBlade I'd usually pick Cervantes, I found a burning skull pirate with guns and huge swords to live up to the minimum level of badassness required for me to have a good time.

SoulCalibur on Dreamcast was a gorgeous game for the time and alongside Dead or Alive 2, Psychic Force 2012 and Virtua Fighter 3tb are some of the earliest fighting games I feel still hold up today, not just in gameplay (there are plenty older titles that hold up just as perfectly in that regard) but also visually and technically, showcasing how great the Dreamcast truly was.

SoulCalibur II was a great multiplatform game for the time but it offered nothing special to stand out in the highly competitive 3D fighting game genre. It's a solid game but lacks identity.
Necrid and Spawn were good guest characters but Link and Heihachi were just embarrassing, effectively making the Xbox version my favorite of the three, PS2 coming in second and GameCube in third.
Thankfully I have a PS2-to-Xbox/GameCube controller adapter so I can use my Dual Shock 2 controllers on Xbox and GameCube, for fighting games especially it's a must have, without it they're virtually unplayable and completely unenjoyable, and if I didn't have it I'd be forced to rank the PS2 version as my favorite by far, Xbox in distant second and GameCube in a very VERY distant third.

SoulCalibur III was a masterpiece when it came out and it's still a force to be reckoned with as barely a single new game even tried to put up a fight, some slight pun intended.
The visuals are still stunning, the gameplay is flawless and endlessly enjoyable, the additional content is well made and greatly enrich the game and I absolutely love the customization.
It's one of my top favorite games of all time.

SoulCalibur IV however was a huge disappointment for me, especially as a follow up to SCIII.
I got my Xbox 360 copy just a few months ago after having been interested in it since it was new but never found a copy cheap enough to warrant a purchase.
It's held a consistently high price since it was released and I just don't feel like paying that much for such an old and common game still, especially not a fighting game as they by rule don't valid such high prices content wise, with games like Mortal Kombat Deception and Armageddon, SoulCalibur III and Tekken 5 being some of the rare exceptions to that rule offering tons of great content and value for your money while most other fighting games just have their basic tournament/story and arcade modes and to me that's not enough in this day and age to want to cough up that much dough.
Anyway, SoulCalibur IV was barely even a heavily trimmed back lite version of SCIII, with slightly enhanced visuals as the only and very minor positive point, it lacked the good story and additional gameplay modes that SCIII offered and the customization was not the upgrade I had hoped for, the fact that it relies entirely on reaching impossible goals to unlock a vast majority of the customization content was the final straw for me, I don't see myself playing it much ever unless they release a patch that unlocks everything or at least allows everything to be unlocked fairly without paid online services and such.
Shoehorning in Yoda (and Darth Vader) from Star Wars was below even SCII's Link/Heihachi/Spawn levels of waste potential.

SoulCalibur Broken Destiny on PSP was pretty good, but sadly similar to SCIV it was a bit lacking in content compared to SCIII, so I never bothered getting myself a copy.
It looks good and plays good, so it's not a bad game by any means, it just had way too much to live up to following in the wake of both SCIII on PS2 and Tekken Dark Resurrection on PSP.
Simply put, had Tekken Dark Resurrection not set the bar as high as it did, SoulCalibur Broken Destiny would've impressed me a lot more overall, not just on the technical and gameplay levels, now instead it felt like a great game with lacking content.
It's a really great portable fighting game however, as portable consoles have much less competition in that genre even to this day it's still a great way to play SoulCalibur on the go.
I'm not on the active hunt for it but if I can find a copy cheap enough some day I'll definitely buy it and give it a proper chance for sure.

I haven't played any of the other newer ones and probably never will, SCIII is more than great enough to last a lifetime and they don't seem interested in making a game better than that anyway, at least if SCIV is any indication of what path they'd rather go down.

What an amazing series. I was first drawn to the Soul Calibur series when I heard that Link would appear in the GC version of Soul Calibur 2. At the time, I had never even heard of this series before and only got the game because I was a HUGE LoZ fan back then. But once I played it, I was completely blown away by the jaw-droppingly awesome character designs, fun gameplay, and drool-inducing graphics, as well as the sheer amount of features and content the game offered, and quickly fell in love with the series. To date, it is still the most impressive 3D fighting game series I've played all-around (especially from an artistic perspective), and one of the best of all time period.

Like I said, Soul Calibur 2 was the first one I played. It played so beautifully with the GC controller, which is much better suited for these types of games than Xbox or PS2 because of the arcade style 8-direction thumbstick. I quickly found out that Link was, unfortunately, a pretty lousy character to play as, and instead chose Nightmare, Yoshimitsu and Mitsurigi as my mains. The graphics and production values are the absolute best they could possibly be, which is all the more impressive considering the game was released in 2003! And running at a silky-smooth 60 fps, it was true eye candy.

I later played Soul Calibur on Dreamcast and Soul Blade on PS1. The first Soul Calibur on Dreamcast, while an amazing game, is definitely outclassed by its successor, Soul Calibur 2, in just about every respect (graphics, variety, content, etc.), so it comes across as a bit dated. Still fun, but there's little reason to seek it out today if you already own Soul Calibur 2 or don't own a dreamcast.

Playing Soul Blade was a fun experience, but it doesn't hold up in most respects; unlike Tekken 3 on the PS1, playing it today after having played its sequels just isn't very rewarding, and it just comes across as rather clunky. But, like its sequels, it has a great imagination, and layed the groundwork for the series.

Never played Soul Calibur 3, but I've heard very good things about it. I was very disappointed that it was only available on the PS2, as I only had a GC back when it was released, and I never understood this decision. I mean, why wouldn't Namco want to release it on the other 2 consoles? It would been lucrative for them to do so. At any rate, it seems to be a great game, and according to reviews, the character creator system was extremely good. I'm sure it's a fun game, but I have little interest in seeking it out.

Played Soul Calibur 4 a little, but decided to sell it once I realized that I wasn't interested in playing it any further. The inclusion of the Star Wars characters was an even more bizarre choice choice than having Spawn in the Xbox version of SC 2, and I've heard the game has balance issues in competitive play. It didn't seem like Namco was that interested in addressing these balance issues, because I don't recall them ever releasing patches to fix them, but I could be wrong. Oh well, at least it's still more of a fighting game (and less of a let down) than Brawl was...

Soul Calibur 5 I haven't ever played, but it seems to be the low point of the series' non spin-off titles. I know that critical reception wasn't very positive, but I can't remember the reasons why that is. It seems to be very polarizing among longtime Soul Calibur fans, with some calling it the worst game in the series, and other defending it as being worthy of the series' legacy. At any rate, I have seen some game footage, and noticed that it has a much stronger anime influence in its graphics than previous titles, which is something that I honestly don't like. I prefer the realistic character models of the earlier titles; it just seems more fitting for a medieval fantasy setting.

I've never played any of the spin-off titles or handheld titles, and don't plan to. I just don't feel any need to play them.

But in the end, Soul Calibur is an amazing series and an incredible artistic achievement in game design. And, in my opinion, it is among the best fighting game series in existence, despite the later titles being a bit underwhelming in some areas.

I award it a 5/5.

What I know about the game:

Spirit Bomb I know there are a few games with similar issues alongside SCIII. I have some of them and have had the misfortune of them ruining entire memorycards for me.

SoulCalibur III specifically can be fixed rather easily by simply having the SCIII savefile as the first file on the memorycard before saving anything else on it.
From what I've been able to understand SCIII files only corrupts themselves if an older file from another game gets updated with more data, and then if the SCIII file gets updated with more data after that then the fragmentation of those two files combined messes up the data structure of the SCIII file so the game can't read it anymore, making it corrupted, it doesn't seem to corrupt the rest of the memorycard though like some other games tend to do.

Some other games with memorycard corruption bugs on PS2 are:
Resident Evil 4 and God Hand both have a high risk of corrupting the entire memorycard, this has happened to me with both games (they use the same game engine and have the same exact bug, it seems to be random if it happens or not and is seemingly more likely to happen on third party memorycards though I've had it happen on Sony original 8mb cards as well)
Jak X at least corrupts it's own file for me on third party memorycards but I've heard others say it corrupts entire cards and can happen on Sony original 8mb cards as well, though my Sony 8mb original card seems to handle it fine so far and I have not yet had it corrupt and entire card even once
Midway Arcade Treasures 3 refuses to save more than 99% of the time and if it manages to save it only created a corrupted file that can't be loaded and freezes the game when booting it up (MAT3 also has problems on Xbox with not saving the data correctly, but it doesn't cause the same problems as the PS2 version does)
Sonic Riders Zero Gravity creates corrupted files on third party memorycards but seems to work fine on Sony original 8mb cards

I know there are more but those are the ones I know for sure and have personal experience with it happening, there are also a few on GameCube and Xbox but I haven't ran into any of those myself.

I only played the first game (Soulcalibur, that is, not Soul Edge), but it was ace: at the time, there was no fighting game as beautiful as it. I played it the first time in an arcade machine, and I could actually beat it only using three credits, so it wasn't that hard - and one of the credits was lost to another guy that challenged me, I lost, then I challenged him back and won. Later, I played it on the Dreamcast and the port was spot on. At the time, I was into the Virtua Fighter series, but Soulcalibur (and even DOA 2) was so much more impressive than VF3.

I was very interested in playing SC2 on the Gamecube when I knew that Link was a guest fighter (I was a huge Zelda fan at the time), but I never did it. The series has kinda faded nowadays; from the 3d fighter genre, I think only DOA retained its celebrity status, with even Tekken having lost most of its popularity. Hell, Virtua Fighter 5 is eleven years by now and there's still no sign of VF6. That's too bad, as I prefer the 3d fighting genre over the 2d one.

Keep in mind I'm talking about 3d gameplay, not just graphics, so the newer Street Fighters don't count.

Great series, i've played most of them bar Soul Edge and the first SC. It isn't as deep as, say, VF or Tekken, so i didn't spend much time with it.
The 3D fighting genre is an endangered specie, as Cervantes mentioned, VF5 is 11 years now. Tekken 7 has been in the arcades since 2014 and is releasing on consoles this june, while DOA5 returned with a bang with vanilla DOA5 and DOA5 ultimate, its now a cosplay simulator with Last Round.

Since we're talking fighting games, i highly suggest Tekken as the next game discussion.