Amazon.com: Soul Calibur IV: Xbox 360: Video Games

54 Reviews

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

Average Customer Review

4.3 out of 5 stars (54 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What's Within Your Soul?, August 4, 2008

By	citan-uzuki "citan-uzuki" (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

What's within your soul? Do you have what it takes to defeat the deadliest warriors in the universe in order to possess the awesome power of the Soul Calibur? Are your mental and physical skills up to the challenge of facing other warrior-wannabes in online play?

If so, then I highly recommend that you purchase this game. One play-through and your soul will be changed forever. Complete the missions, and you will be on your way to becoming a TRUE WARRIOR!

Ok, enough of the corny stuff. Soul Calibur IV is an awesome game. For solitary players, it offers the following adventures. Story, Tower of Lost Souls, and Arcade. The Story mode is similar to what we've known over the years. Each fighter goes through his or her unique story, fight battles, and then reach their own unique story ending. Arcade should also be familiar to most soul calibur veterans. Basically, you pick your fighter and fight through stages until you battle The Apprentice. Upon beating The Apprentice, which is easier said than done, you get to fight this strange guy (strange, even by SC standards!) called Algol. Algol reminds me of Necrid from SC2. Tower of Lost Souls is an advanced stage. Basically, you want to be very comfortable with your chosen characters' move sets before you set out for the Tower. I suggest that you play through Story and Arcade modes with your favorite/created characters before going to the Tower. You want to be able to use helpful skills, as well as the best weapons, in order to play through the Tower. The weapons can be expensive to purchase. Hence, the need to play for cash first. Tower of Lost Souls is somewhat similar to Weapon Master from SC2. Basically, you play against the CPU.

Character Creation is back! This time, your model will look like one of the main characters in the game. You can outfit your model with armors, head gear, etc. You can even strip Sophitia and the other ladies down to their bikini, if you want! Bear in mind though that although that's eye candy, leaving your character without armor will lower their stats. In SC4, the armor affects the character stats.

Are the characters "balanced", in terms of fighting effectiveness in versus play? From what I have seen so far, they seem to be. My experience in Versus play is limited though. Does the CPU play fair in single player mode? Ofcourse not, this is Soul Calibur! Fight The Apprentice in Arcade and you will see how this works against you. Even a good Soul fighter will find themselves repeatedly off-axis. A lot of your moves, especially vertical ones, will miss. However, The Apprentice will usually be on-axis. And he can pull together a long string of moves that is very, very hard to interrupt. I found that a character like Amy, with her 4B is much better against this guy than say, Sophitia. But that's just my style of play, perhaps. Using a player with hard to pull combos, like Ivy, required me to use a lot of throws just to beat The Apprentice. But I lost many, many more battles against this guy than I won.

I have always been a fan of Namco-Bandai. They seem to release games that appeal to me. From Xenosaga, Baten Katos, Eternal Sonata, Tekken, and all the way to the Soul Calibur series. They have a way of making even the characters in a fighting game very endearing.

Yoda or Darth Vader? I have the XBox version of the game, so I get Yoda with my edition. Yoda is fun to play, however, I have read other reviews from people who have both PS3 and XB360 versions of the game that say they prefer Darth Vader on the PS3. I do not have the PS3 version, but let me just say that for fighting games, I prefer the playstation controller to the 360 controller. I have SC2 in PS2 and Xbox versions. I much prefer playing the PS2 version due to the design of the PS controller. But that's just a personal preferrence on my part.

To sum up, this is a great game. SC4 is more technical, and the move sets are a lot deeper than in previous versions of the game. I believe you could play this game for a year, and still find ways to improve your game during the second year. And maybe beyond. The replay value is endless. And if you are very technical and enjoy complication, you will just simply love Ivy. If you thought her move list was extensive in SC3, think again. Learning how to pull off Summon Suffering is a major hobby unto itself! Yeah, I love Soul Calibur! I believe you will also.

Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid release from IMHO, the best fighting game series out there, but not worth $60, July 29, 2008

By	Shann Yu "Go Rice Owls!!!" (Nashville, TN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars

If you've played any of the other Soul Calibur games, this game plays pretty much the same way. The reason this series is so much better than the other series out there I feel is the ability to, blow-to-blow, attack your opponent with series of attacks that do not involve memorizing a long string of commands like in the Tekken series. That said, this game is basically Soul Calibur III plus some small enhancements (outside of HD graphics) that I personally don't notice that much.

This is a really simple fighting game to pick up for first-timers, and there is almost always a character and a fighting style to suit your desire. Really, the only two very similar characters in the game are Siegfried and Nightmare, apparently for a good reason if you know a bit about the forgettable story.

Some specific notes:

Gameplay: Single player - A- ; Multiplayer (local + online) - A
First off, I don't believe games like these aren't really meant to be bought for single player. Clearly, you'd expect to practice your game in your time so that you can lay down the law against your friends on multiplayer modes.

AI is reasonably intelligent in this game, outside of being very simple in the earlier levels on the Normal difficulty setting. Higher up in difficulty, the AI plays defense very well, and this can get really frustrating, sometimes even forcing you to abandon normal attacks and to go for grapples, which for some reason the AI is pretty bad at countering.

Otherwise, when playing your friends, this is not exactly one of those fighting games that you can button-mash and expect to win. Definitely some skill and practice is involved, and the smoothness of the fights and the transitions from blow to blow make this THE fighting game to get.

Online gameplay is smooth and overall as good as the local multiplayer experience. I have not experienced any issues with lag or skippy gameplay. My only complaint here is how selecting "Quick Match" in ranked has the tendency to just match you with someone who has an open game. As a game creator, you can select the level of players you intend to play against. As a level 1 trying out the online game, I got put into too many matches against level 60+ and got slaughtered.

-----

Story: C
This is the the only reason I am giving this game four stars. For a game that seems to promote its story about the struggle between an evil sword and a cleansing sword (assuming I even understand it right), especially from the moment the trailers hit TV screens nationwide, this game does a terrible job of incorporating the story into the game. This said, most fighting games that even have storylines do terrible jobs at integrating the story into the game as well.

If you are looking for a fighting game with a pretty nicely integrated storyline, the best that I can think of are the WWE Smackdown series. In this game, the story consists of short cutscenes between fights that hint at the location of the next fight, and maybe short snide remarks that the characters say at each other right as the fight is about to begin (that in most cases don't even seem to make any logical sense together).

-----

Overall, this is a great fighting game to have. It's purely that and nothing more. Expect to play single player mode quite a bit in order to unlock characters and items. The real fun of this game really comes from multiplayer modes. I think that fronting $60 may be a stretch for this game unless you're really into this series.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A great fighter nonetheless, but otherwise disappointing, September 10, 2008

By	Pa4d (Jacksonville, FL USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars

2008 is definitely the year of the fighters. With Super Smash Bros. Brawl already released, and Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters XII, Tekken 6, Facebreaker, and Mortal Kombat VS. DC Universe on the horizon, anyone itching for a fight are definitely going get their fair share of bloody knuckles this year. But for now, everyone is focusing on the latest instalment of one the biggest fighters around. Soul Calibur, IV!

The tale of souls and swords is retold once again with warriors from all corners of the Earth coming head-to-head to do battle for the legendary soul swords; Soul Edge and the Spirit Sword, in order to...you know what? Who cares about the overall story or each characters' individual plot lines. The only reason any plays this series is because it's one of the best fighting games ever made!

Besides always having breath taking graphics for a fighting game, Soul Calibur has always been about terrific controls. Number IV is no exception. Soul Calibur is one of the very few fighting games that can be played with skill or with just random button mashing, and the combat will still look fast, furious, and otherwise, awesome. With controls this good, a huge list of fighters to choose from, and in-depth character creation, you're going to need a second controller. Soul Calibur just isn't Soul Calibur if you don't play with a friend. Or you could you log on to Xbox Live or PlayStation Network and fight someone online. A first for the series.

The 8-way movement that the series has built itself upon still works better than ever in IV. Other familiar gameplay mechanics have returned such as guard impacts, attack throws, guard breaks, and the like. Soul Calibur IV also introduces some new mechanics like a Skills Page. This feature will allow you to assign certain perks and abilities to all characters, even your custom ones. These perks will have you take less damage, avoid falling out of the ring, or do more damage to an opponent's Soul Gage, another new mechanic. The Soul Gage is your overall defence. Whenever you or your opponent blocks an attack, the gage will go down slightly, while the attacker's gage will go up. Once the gage reaches zero, the attacker will be able to perform a Critical Finisher, which is basically a much cleaner version of the [in]famous Mortal Kombat "fatalities".

Right now, it might sound like I really love this. But sadly, it's the total opposite. At the end of the day, I found this game disappointing on a lot levels.

For starters, the Star Wars characters are a huge let down. I haven't played as Darth Vader, but I can tell you for a fact that Yoda and The Apprentice are two of the most seriously unbalanced characters in a fighting game. When you play as them, it's pretty cool. Yoda's attacks mostly consist of him jumping around and doing some cool aerial moves. While The Apprentice can use some amazing force powers and pull of wicked lightsaber combos. It's all fun and games...until you fight against one of them. Yoda, as almost any can tell, is tiny. So it's almost impossible to hit him with high and mid level attacks. Heck, you can't even execute a throw on him! This is a real problem since these kind of attacks are what mostly take up the moves list of all other characters. So your best bet of beating him is to use what ever few low attacks you know.
Fighting The Apprentice is a whole other story. He is fast, WAAAY too fast. Sometimes before you'll land a hit on him, he would've already landed three strong combos on you.
I'm not saying having too much challenge in a game bad. But when regular fighters are harder to beat than the boss of the game, then you got a problem.

Another thing about IV that disappointed me was the lack of modes. In previous Soul Calibur games, the menus were flooded with almost too many modes to even think about using. Modes like Tournament, Chronicles of Swords, Coin Match, Time Trial, and Timed Survival are nowhere to be found in Soul Calibur IV. Even their multiplayer counter parts are MIA. Some of the modes the game does have leave much to be desired. The Story mode only consists of five stages. Sure there are multiple opponents in some of the levels, but come on. Five stages? In Soul Calibur III, it's story mode had branching paths. So you had to decide what the character would do next (e.g. Follow the strange hermit or investigate the area). Basically, it had a huge amount of replay value. And when ever there was a cutscene, you had to be on your toes. For you never knew when a button sequence was going to come up. This is not the case with Soul Calibur IV. It's just straight up, "fight until you beat the boss". The End.
The Tower of Lost Souls is the only worth while mode in the game. In the mode, you have two choices on how to tackle the Tower: Ascend or Descend. if you choose to Ascend, you move up through multiple floors and try to defeat wave after waves of enemies. You can unlock treasures for each floor you complete, only if you accomplish certain requirements of the floor. The treasures are mostly pieces of clothing for your custom characters. The "Descend" choice is basically Survival mode. But the coolest feature that Tower of Souls and Story mode share is the ability to switch out fighters during combat. In a nut shell, when your fighter is taking a beating, at the press of the RB button, you can switch out to another character you've chosen to accompany you and pick where your previous fighter left off. Only this time you have more health. This is a fantastic feature! So...why is it not in multiplayer? If it was in multiplayer, people online would probably have Yoda and/or The Apprentice in their team. So, in a way, it's probably for the best.

Aside from having more faces to choose from, practically infinite color options, and 'tweakable' body structure and voice pitch, character creation has been down graded this time. Very little of the items you can put on your creations are original pieces. Instead most of them are clothes and accessories you'll find on the regular cast of characters. Also, depending on what you put on your character will effect it's heath and defence. So for those of you who prefer the "less is more" approach when making a character are going to have to tweak your creation's skills if you're to last a minute in a fight. But my biggest complaint about the creation system is the character development. In SC3, you could select a "Job" for your character; like Gladiator, Ninja, Pirate, Dancer, etc. Depending on what job you select, you'll be able wield certain weapons. For example; Gladiators can wield great swords, axes, and hammers. While Ninjas can wield daggers, katanas, and kunai blades. You get the picture. But in SC4, the jobs have been replaced with "Souls". Meaning you have to select the soul of a character (Soul of Siegfried, Soul of Taki, Soul of Nightmare) When you choose a soul, whatever that soul's weapon or style is, that is the only one that the soul will allow the character to have. So that's a big let down.

My last complaint is the character Tira. She was cool in SC3, but now she is my least favorite character in SC4. Simply because she has the absolute most annoying voice ever created in a video game. Seriously, it's enough to make anyone go insane.

I could go on longer telling you how disappointed I was with this game, but you're probably on a busy schedule, so I'll spare you. I wouldn't say Soul Calibur IV is a bad game, it's actually really fun to play, it was just executed poorly. If you've been a fan of the series since the first Soul Calibur, you might love it or share my opinion. If you're a new comer, you're definelty going to love it, but I recomend playing Soul Calibur III (PS2/Xbox) first, then try out IV. The soul of the series is still burning, just not as brightly this time.