I'm really showing my age with this post. But let us start with a little story.
My mother use to work in a mall. I practically grew up in malls and hair salons so I never found the big joy in going to one on the weekend with my friends. As you can imagine it was boring. So I would spend my time at the arcades, the movies, Suncoast, and at a later mall Sears because they had the game play demos and I could play on the escalators.
There at Sears I got to try out the Nintendo Virtualboy and witnessed for myself what prolonged game play did to a person then came one day to see that it was gone, not selling well and causing headaches.
I also played Star Fox on the Nintendo 64, but none of it sold me like the Playstation with its demo of Battle Arena Toshinden 2. That was the first PS game that I had played and had later bought when I was finally granted a game system of my own. No more sharing the Sega just me and my PS, my personal step into the gaming community although I had been apart of the gaming world years and years ago with my family's Atari.
Now Battle Arena Toshinden was like Street Fighter with weapons, in 3D, and... well okay not Street Fighter. It dealt with a secret organization hosting a fighting tournament with people fighting for personal reasons, glory, or money. Sort of like Tekken but not as elaborate with plot and characters although I would have loved to have seen Toshinden evolve as Tekken had. The character designs and graphics would have been badass with the modern times.
You may be wondering how does an old forgettable game like that had anything in relation with the Soul series and the newest SCV game. Well here it is.
BAT had 4 games with a few spin offs, Soul Calibur has 5 (6 if you count Soul Blade) with a few spin offs.
For BAT the second was the best. For SC I think that the 3rd was the best that we've had in terms of action, plot, game play and choices.
For BAT the third game was so so with the enemies being basically redesigns of the main heroes holding the same moveset and same weapons with only a few modifications. There were a lot of new characters with only a few old character replacements and those replacements weren't anything major. But the plot was just too thin and the graphics seem to have suffered since the 2nd installment.
For Soul Calibur the 4th game was also so so especially with the rumors that it was to be the last. The great create a soul system seemed to have been hampered a little giving us less choices. Sure the graphics were great but the story was blah and too liner, the stages were few and nothing really special. And the new characters weren't anything to be really excited about since they had the same moveset as characters that we were used to. Even the Star Wars tie in wasn't really that great given people just found it way too unbelievable and saw no reason for them to be present.
For BAT 4th and final game sadly never made it to the US leaving my collection forever incomplete. The 4th game made an attempt at a plot to make up for the lack of a solid on in the 3rd game sadly all of the characters who we had become accustomed to was gone with only two familiar faces remaining. They were replaced with strangers, relatives/friends of old fighters, and the like.
The graphics had improved greatly from the 3rd game from what I can see and things looked good. I just wish I could have played it to give a more personal review of it.
For Soul Calibur five we got something of a the same thing. So many familiar faces and favorites had been removed replaced with relatives/friends of the people we knew or just complete strangers. To me they reek of appealing to the younger Japanese idol look with a hint of visual kei, they all look like teenagers hoping around and spitting out corny lines, lacking in this sort of maturity.
When I saw that just about all of my favorites had been removed I decided to wait to buy it from my Gamestop on the used self after it had dropped to about $20 and hope that the previous owner doesn't write "I ******** hate you!" on the disk with a Sharpie.
The graphics are great with a few stages looking messy and meshed, gameplay has improved but at the same time changed in a way that seems like it wants to be like a different game though it does not need to be MK.
To some the story is just too short and dumb with no personal character ending, no real improvement from the previous game's story. No big bad boss character, the personal stages with environment interaction, weapons exhibitions, and well the things we use to do that made us play over and over and over again to earn cash and points to purchase certain things are gone. No teams, no more...well just too many things that kept us playing are gone!
Though the create a soul has gotten a few upgrades. And for a man in his 70s now Voldo still has a nice firm a** and is flexible as hell. If I was forced to screw some old guy Voldo would be the one. I might be sick for it but Voldo is my senior I'd like to freak.
SC5 seems like a .5 or an expansion version of a game, that was given to fans as the original could not met the deadlines or there was so much more that they had left over that it would not fit to put it for DLC only. It seems that it's not really the whole thing just something to tide us over until the real deal comes about.
Really in my opinion the cast should have been cut a bit, old characters retained, and used this to have a vs game with some other game, time continuity be damned.
If this isn't fixed then we're going to see SC fall the way of BAT or Bloody Roar (They need to do a new one ASAP!).
Lady Bern Community Member 
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