| Legend11 said: Do you think Soul Calibur is the 4th best game of all time? Yes or no? |
As you point out, best game of all time is not what gamerankings judges, best reviewed is. (otherwise small improvement sequels like MP:3 which are clearly superior to their originals but not nearly as innovative and groundbreaking and newer games with better graphics would dominate).
IMO, Soul Calibur definitely deserves to be the 4th best reviewed game of all time. For those who are wondering why --
First, of like many of the highly ranked games, it was the first of its genre, fighting, to successfully implement 3-D gameplay through its 8-way run system. Other fighting games had 3-D graphics, but none had a decent 3-D gameplay. This alone made the game incredibly revolutionary.
Second, it had an incredible depth of modes, especially the mission battle mode. It also had the now standard plethora of silly modes and even more: Time Trial, Survivor, Team Battle, Spectator, Martial Arts demonstrations, and opening cinema direction but the Mission Battle is what really stood out. You picked missions from an overworld map, each one introduced by a few paragraphs of second person narration that introduced the setting and advanced the story. The battles themselves had all sorts of interesting properties, such as only being able to damage your opponent while they're in the air, to having your weapons be invisible, to having little rats that scurrying around gnawing at your feet. Again, such a mode is now standard for super high production value fighting games (Super Smash Bros. Melee has a similar challenge mode but without the narration-story or overwold map) but at the time it was unheard of. For what its worth it also had a great image gallery that included the endings from the previous installment, as well as tons of additional artwork giving you more incentive to play through all the modes and missions in the game. Again this was not that common of a feature at the time.
Third, it was incredibly impressive graphically for its time. It was definitely the first game I played that actually had clothes that were separate from models and had impressive lighting effects and particle effects for many special moves. Instead of palettes swaps for characters, each character has three entirely different costumes. Furthermore, unlike most other fighting games, where combos literally cancel the animations of the fighters, all the animations of the fighters of Soul Calibur are completely seemless.
Fourth, it had great gameplay. Its tough to describe this without going into specifics, but the Soul Calibur franchise is to this day the only successful weapons-based fighting Game (afaik).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Soul Calibur [Correction: and Zelda:OoT] are the only games to ever recieve 10 out of 10 from IGN. It was that ahead of its time and virtually introduced or made standard all the additional content people now expect from top notch fighting games.
Sorry for the digression from the thread topic but I couldn't resist.
