Every single workday of this week has been busy and I absolutely despise it, but it’s not actually a bad thing. It’s just ugh. But I got Friday off and now I’m home and looking out the window at a cold world.
There’s a new book about the Middle Ages that’s been making rounds called ‘The Bright Ages’ and it sounds very good, but I can’t get the copy the library has because it’s new and it won’t allow that.
Also, Meat Loaf passed away? That’s a shame.
We’re going to take a short break from the ‘Adapting Books’ theme for this week so that instead we can talk about SoulCalibur VI.
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SoulCalibur VI and the New Story Mode
I recently started playing SoulCalibur VI, and am steadily working my way through the game’s story mode. And there are a couple of things that I’ve noticed while playing the game:
FIRST: the main story, at least in the story mode that I’ve started first (there are two story modes in the game) is a retelling of the events of SoulCalibur.
SECOND: the individual character stories all try to more or less add up to a cohesive whole.
That second part might sound like a ‘duh’ but that’s not how the story mode works in previous games in the series I’ve played. And to be fair I haven’t played all of them–only III, IV, and V. SoulCalibur V does have a main story, with two protagonists, and not many variations of it. It’s also fairly forgettable and pretty dumb, and one of those protagonists (Patroklos) is both dumb as a rock and incredibly trigger happy.
So let’s just not talk about it too much.
In III and IV, the story mode went something like this: You pick a character. You are given some text describing how this character is looking for the evil sword Soul Edge, the holy sword Soul Calibur, or some other goal that is related to the Soul Swords. In III you get a bit of text explaining what your character is doing and why, and occasionally you are given choices about where you want to go. After you arrive somewhere, you fight someone, on your journey you probably go to a clock tower in Germany and fight Zasalamel (the character trying to manipulate the entire Plot) until you get to the Cathedral of Water and Light and fight either Siegfried or Nightmare. And then Zasalamel pops out, absorbs some magic fluff or something, and turns into Abyss and wrecks the place with magic and you have to fight him again. After he’s defeated, you get a cutscene which may or may not involve you making a choice, and you see how your character ended up.
While it’s cool to see how different characters end up, it’s also very annoying because each character essentially takes the same path. You can switch up where the character goes, but for whatever reason you’re almost always going to end up fighting Zasalamel in the clock tower (even if you are playing as Zasalamel) and then having a final showdown in the Cathedral. You can make some choices if you’re given a guide on how to do it that lets you go to a weird set of stages in the Labyrinth and fight secret character Olcadan. And if you make the correct choices and never take any damage you can fight the secret character Night Terror at the end instead of Abyss.
SoulCalibur IV doesn’t even really do text between fights. It gives a text introduction, has a series of seven or eight fights, with the last one being a fight against Algol at the top of the Tower of Souls. Finally there’s an ending cutscene in which you see what happens to the character you’ve selected. Why has your character gone to the Tower of Souls or what that even is? That’s never explained.
As you may have worked out, in both of these games, the story modes can conflict with each other. Mitsurugi’s story mode in SoulCalibur III ends with him finding Soul Edge and becoming its new master. Setsuka’s story mode ends with her killing Mitsurugi. Taki’s ends with destroying Soul Edge forever.
It’s also very frustrating because if you’re wondering which character has the “real” story, you’re out of luck. Basically, none of them do. Generally, when the next installment rolls around, you’re given a declaration of what happened last time, which isn’t what any of the game’s story modes showed off.
This was getting a bit ridiculous, especially with the release of Mortal Kombat in 2011, which had a single definitive story mode, with fully rendered cutscenes and an engaging story (for a fighting game, at least). That the Soul series refused to do that was a bit baffling. SoulCalibur V did have a definitive story, but again it had a terrible lead, and it wasn’t fully rendered cutscenes, but art panels with narration and voiceover dialogue.
So people wondered if there was going to be a VI, and if there was if it would fix things. Turns out that it went for a reboot, retelling the stories of older games while making small adjustments to the timeline. Most of the cutscenes in the story modes are still art panels with dialogue over it, albeit character profiles will go in and out of frame and change expressions as conversations go. But the main story is a single, consistent thread, and all of the characters’ individual stories all fit into different points on the timeline, where they intersect but never outright contradict it. Heck, the story mode screen is a big timeline page, and it tells you in what year different parts of their story take place in.
[There is another story mode that I haven’t explored yet but apparently it explains the reboot business.]
I’m a little bit excited because it looks like, for once, the story of these games is actually moving forward? As in, you can play a game and actually feel like you have progressed in the story of the series, and that the next game will build on what was established rather than ignoring what you were shown and making up something new instead. I know that most people who play these games don’t do so for the story, fine, but I also don’t think that a game series should ever make it feel like the progress you made in the story, the moments you got attached to in your gameplay, never actually mattered. You should care about the story if you’re going to include it in the game. Yes, fun gameplay is important, but one shouldn’t neglect story between games to do so.
And so right now, even though I’m disappointed at the lack of rendered CGI cutscenes, I am much happier with this game’s approach to story mode and what it might tell for the future of the series. Fans seem to like this game, and it proved to be a success, so hopefully they’ll expand upon this model going forward.
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