Words Of Wisdom on 20 November 2007
1-UP's review - 6 / 10
Soulcalibur Legends is not what Death By Degrees was to Tekken. It's not like what Mythologies was to Mortal Kombat, nor is it a spin-off in the form you might expect if you've played previous fighting-game side stories. Divorce yourself from the idea that Legends is an action game and you'll probably like it a lot better -- it's much closer to an action-RPG anyway. But in regard to overall quality, yeah -- it's a lot like those others.
For the majority of the game, you spend time moving from room to room (or outdoor area to outdoor area), fighting enemies that appear in said room (or area) until the transparent blue wall disappears, moving on to the next room to do the same thing, and repeating. There's a ton of environment and enemy repetition, lots of weapons and weapon upgrades to unlock, and a light story that plays out in the background. The game mixes things up a bit here and there with boss fights and simple puzzle-solving (rotate statues, blow out fire by swinging your blade), but if you don't like the combat, you're not going to find much else to redeem the game.
So it's a good thing that the combat is fairly decent. It will likely be a polarizing issue amongst players, with those who don't like the idea of playing a button-masher using the Remote for every attack hating the game, and those who are open to the idea of motion control finding the execution of them to be satisfactory.
With movement on the analog stick, sidestepping and parrying using Nunchuk motions, and attacks using Remote motions, it's a workout to sit around playing for hours, but the controls are precise enough that it was hard to blame them for any mistakes. Swing the Remote left and you'll swing your weapon to the left in the game; pull the Remote back and you'll pull your weapon back to launch enemies into the air. It's a solid execution that holds up well and doesn't mess with the camera nearly as much as it could thanks to a solid lock-on system.
Considering the new genre, the game has a good-sized roster of different playable characters -- seven, barring any secrets that might pop up postrelease -- who change the way it feels. If you choose Siegfried (Legends' main character) your attacks will be slow but powerful; go with Taki and you'll get the opposite. This is no surprise given that we've had slow/strong and fast/weak characters in hundreds of games over the years, but it's notable here since the faster characters tend to work better with the motion controls because you get immediate feedback with their moves connecting shortly after you pull them off -- it feels more like you're actually performing the moves.
Unfortunately, it seems as if the developers spent their money working on aspects like the characters and the controls, and then funds dried up when it came time to populate the rest of the game.
Step one in this budgetization is that there's not much to see. You fight the same five or so enemies in the same five or so locations hundreds of times, and there's not much to do in these environments -- we got excited to simply come across an area that actually let us jump on something (platforming!), and then promptly went back to the flat running around that is the rest of the game. Additionally, the enemies you come across seem pretty random in relation to the story -- I have no idea why I fought tigers and rock monsters for 10 hours.
Which leads us nicely to step two -- the narrative (or more appropriately, the text that shows up on the screen) doesn't add much beyond a few laughs. If there's a better example of the developers taking the budget route than the writing, I'm not sure what it is, because the great majority of the story plays out in dialogue pages decorated by character art as you scroll through words. It's not like this is some Nintendo-style "we don't want Link to have a voice" approach either, because the characters do speak in the occasional in-game cut-scenes (a favorite quote: "Don't cower. Don't you dare cower!"), but when it comes time for the longer between-mission story sequences, it's all text and very dry, random, boring, and repetitive. This is the kind of stuff that's been hard to find in games since the SNES days.
So while we found ourselves sticking with the game, it was more for the unlockable weapons and weapon upgrades than the story, and to return to the whole action-RPG concept -- that's where the game succeeds. It would be great if there were more to track down than just weapons, however, since the game feels pretty simple as is -- and that would be where it fails.
The main problem here is that it feels like Legends should have been a side mode in a proper Soulcalibur rather than its own game. There are some good ideas, but it doesn't feel like a complete game. You can count the multiplayer stages as extras that fill out the package, but they're pretty awful and tend to show that the combat works better against groups of dumb enemies than it does against one smart one. I can appreciate the approach to create an action-RPG rather than an action game, but it's difficult not to wonder if it happened in such a simple form because the developers simply didn't have the budget to come up with anything better.
Well, at least it's better than 6.5. Looks the controls are well-done too by this review. This may simply turn out to be a budget title rather than a total failure.
For the majority of the game, you spend time moving from room to room (or outdoor area to outdoor area), fighting enemies that appear in said room (or area) until the transparent blue wall disappears, moving on to the next room to do the same thing, and repeating. There's a ton of environment and enemy repetition, lots of weapons and weapon upgrades to unlock, and a light story that plays out in the background. The game mixes things up a bit here and there with boss fights and simple puzzle-solving (rotate statues, blow out fire by swinging your blade), but if you don't like the combat, you're not going to find much else to redeem the game.
So it's a good thing that the combat is fairly decent. It will likely be a polarizing issue amongst players, with those who don't like the idea of playing a button-masher using the Remote for every attack hating the game, and those who are open to the idea of motion control finding the execution of them to be satisfactory.
With movement on the analog stick, sidestepping and parrying using Nunchuk motions, and attacks using Remote motions, it's a workout to sit around playing for hours, but the controls are precise enough that it was hard to blame them for any mistakes. Swing the Remote left and you'll swing your weapon to the left in the game; pull the Remote back and you'll pull your weapon back to launch enemies into the air. It's a solid execution that holds up well and doesn't mess with the camera nearly as much as it could thanks to a solid lock-on system.
Considering the new genre, the game has a good-sized roster of different playable characters -- seven, barring any secrets that might pop up postrelease -- who change the way it feels. If you choose Siegfried (Legends' main character) your attacks will be slow but powerful; go with Taki and you'll get the opposite. This is no surprise given that we've had slow/strong and fast/weak characters in hundreds of games over the years, but it's notable here since the faster characters tend to work better with the motion controls because you get immediate feedback with their moves connecting shortly after you pull them off -- it feels more like you're actually performing the moves.
Unfortunately, it seems as if the developers spent their money working on aspects like the characters and the controls, and then funds dried up when it came time to populate the rest of the game.
Step one in this budgetization is that there's not much to see. You fight the same five or so enemies in the same five or so locations hundreds of times, and there's not much to do in these environments -- we got excited to simply come across an area that actually let us jump on something (platforming!), and then promptly went back to the flat running around that is the rest of the game. Additionally, the enemies you come across seem pretty random in relation to the story -- I have no idea why I fought tigers and rock monsters for 10 hours.
Which leads us nicely to step two -- the narrative (or more appropriately, the text that shows up on the screen) doesn't add much beyond a few laughs. If there's a better example of the developers taking the budget route than the writing, I'm not sure what it is, because the great majority of the story plays out in dialogue pages decorated by character art as you scroll through words. It's not like this is some Nintendo-style "we don't want Link to have a voice" approach either, because the characters do speak in the occasional in-game cut-scenes (a favorite quote: "Don't cower. Don't you dare cower!"), but when it comes time for the longer between-mission story sequences, it's all text and very dry, random, boring, and repetitive. This is the kind of stuff that's been hard to find in games since the SNES days.
So while we found ourselves sticking with the game, it was more for the unlockable weapons and weapon upgrades than the story, and to return to the whole action-RPG concept -- that's where the game succeeds. It would be great if there were more to track down than just weapons, however, since the game feels pretty simple as is -- and that would be where it fails.
The main problem here is that it feels like Legends should have been a side mode in a proper Soulcalibur rather than its own game. There are some good ideas, but it doesn't feel like a complete game. You can count the multiplayer stages as extras that fill out the package, but they're pretty awful and tend to show that the combat works better against groups of dumb enemies than it does against one smart one. I can appreciate the approach to create an action-RPG rather than an action game, but it's difficult not to wonder if it happened in such a simple form because the developers simply didn't have the budget to come up with anything better.
Well, at least it's better than 6.5. Looks the controls are well-done too by this review. This may simply turn out to be a budget title rather than a total failure.
