by: John Olin

October 19, 2008

In the beginning of the last console generation, Sega Dreamcast offered plenty of innovations, and the games themselves set the tone for the entire generation spanning from Dreamcast, GameCube, Xbox, and PlayStation 2. One of these games was Soul Calibur that at the time was an incredible breakthrough visually, and gameplay wise when it came to fighting games. You had the katana wielding Mitsurgi that used cunning, and his blade to bring foes down, Ivy a femme fatale with a crazy sword that would turn into a razor whip, and hulking fighters such as Astaroth with his giant axe of doom. This wide variety of fighters all had varying speeds, and strengths with their weapons, and it all depended on how big they and their weapons were, but if the weapon would cause a lot of damage, the fighter himself was very slow. If the weapon caused little damage, the fighter was nimble, and could maneuver much quicker. The ability to block an attack with ones weapon, sending them reeling, then striking added extra depth to the game. Not to mention being able to maneuver to the side on a 3D plane, and the chance of getting a ring out or getting knocked out of the ring yourself.

The best thing about the game though is that even though it was incredibly deep and a pleasure for fighting fans, anyone could pick it up and learn the simple controls without memorizing, it felt more like you were free styling the fighting as you went along. Another great addition to the Dreamcast version was a Story Mode, which basically amounted to a bunch of random challenges but when there was no one else to play with it was a very enjoyable experience by yourself, and made it the deepest fighter of its time. Unfortunately, that mode did not make it into the XBLA version; instead you have a bunch of time attack modes and survival modes to choose from. Another dream that Dreamcast fans had was the ability to take the modem equipped Dreamcast online and play the game online to fight others after they got tired of fighting their friends with a second controller. While you can fight a friend with a second controller on the Xbox 360, you cannot go online, something that seemed like a no-brainer for the XBLA version of the game, and ultimately why it is completely pointless to purchase the game, especially when the newer, and only fifty bucks more Soul Calibur IV includes a decent online mode.

The most the game lets you do is compare your time attack mode scores with a Live leaderboard, but who really cares about that? The sick thing is that it is almost feels as if though NAMCO was afraid that Soul Calibur IV wouldn’t sell unless they kept Soul Calibur on Xbox Live Arcade crippled. So as a port of the original Dreamcast version in terms of gameplay and graphics it is fantastic, but even the Arcade mode they take the joy of unlocking a lot of the hidden characters away from you and make them instantly available, even the boss character.

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If you are a fan of the previous game and your Dreamcast is long gone then it would probably be worth the ten bucks for you to play this, otherwise just save up a little more and opt for the fuller, sexier, Soul Calibur IV.

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