Soul Fighter

"When you look back on what it is that you've played and replay it again, it only makes it worse the second time through!"

Welcome to the wide world of Soul Fighter, based in a Kingdom that is being overrun with monsters of an evil Queen and her son, this sets you on a quest to stop her madness before it destroys your homeland. That is about how far you'll get before you realize that you just made a rental, or in my case, a purchasing error of judgement. Games such as this one were very easy to come by in the first few days of the Dreamcast release. With the lack of characters and overall botch of the RPG slash Action genre, you’ll find that Soul Fighter is one of those mistakes that still leaves a bad taste in the mouth of Dreamcast fans from its days of infancy!

When you really dive into the game play, you’ll have to wonder if the developers were drinking the day they made this game. It's difficult, even in easy mode (which I played first to get a feel of the game) you have 4-7 enemies surrounding you not allowing you to get up from the ground. Trying to perform a combo (the highest is 4 hits) plainly sucks, because once you start, you can't stop. You knock one creature down with a combo, getting half way through it, and then rush past the fallen monster, only to get nailed by the creature that has come up behind you. Talk about cheap! There is no block, you have to hit the A button repeatedly to knock away moves, which works only half the time anyway. You take a walk around the stages, collecting souls, all right, that sounds cool. You beat monsters up to collect these souls...all right, bonus. You get cornered and then beaten into the ground by 6 monsters, with no escape…all right, cheesy! When you go a little further into the game play, you’ll find that battling is something that takes plenty of practice and if you’re really not on key with everything that is going on around you, you’ll end up dead.

Where this goes on, it leads into the overall control of the game, something of which you won’t really have even after you’ve practiced a little bit. Fighting with the other creatures takes precision timing and plenty of find-tuned aiming just to get right. When in battle, you’ll find that the fumbling fingers will take place, causing you to jump when you want to attack and you’ll attack when you want to jump! The combo system in the game is also a little screwy with the learning curve on some of the more powerful and long hitting combinations taking more time to learn than what is worth. The analog feature of the game doesn’t help matters either, because the more you move, the more the camera moves with you and you’ll find that fighting and moving around makes for a dizzying situation. With all of those factors in mind, you’ll ask if there is a redeeming quality in the control features and to be honest, there really isn’t!

Okay, are we supposed to be playing a serious based game, defending a Kingdom against the mad Queen and her offspring? Or a cartoon show of Ronin. I tried to figure out what I was fighting for about 30 minutes before I realized it was a type of pig creature, and then a merman in the swamps, a fox like figure in the town square...all of which look like Saturday morning cartoon strips out of a newspaper. Even the main characters, the heroes that are suppose to look big and brave, look like play-dough with fists that spin around knocking animal creatures into the ground. Cut-scenes were the worst I've seen in a long time, they come out of nowhere, and then disappear just as fast, it interrupts the game play, and highlights the stupidest things! You would probably wonder where the Dreamcast would come in and really show you what it is that there is to see in one of the launch release titles for a supposedly awesome system. Take my word for it, or don’t when I say that Soul Fighter is really the last game that you want to look at to see the real power of the Dreamcast system.

The audio is just another feature that drives more nails into the coffin of the game itself. Can we say: ''Stupid is, as stupid does.''? The sound in this game sucks, grunts from the monsters when you knock them down to the swish of the fists against your characters skull all sound like they come out of a computer generated nightmare. The music is enough to drive you up a wall, and maybe, if you're definitely sick of it, you'll drive your head through the wall. Again, another poor attempt at music sound track. I would have figured that they could have done something right. The stage music blends together in a choppy type of pace keeping track but doesn’t offer the goods when it comes to keeping it fresh and originality! You may find yourself wanting to turn off the sound, but in some cases the game is so sound intensive that you can’t turn it off for fear of missing something important along the way.

It got a 2 for one reason, the visuals, but nothing else. This game is another example of a gaming system, (Dreamcast) trying to out do their competitors, (Sony), with rushed titles, (Soul Fighter and Mortal Kombat Gold) in an attempt to corner a market. But if this game is a prelude to future games, I'll stick to my Sony, and watch Dreamcast go into the dark hole that Saturn did! If you want to replay this game, it's because you only have a Dreamcast, and can't afford another game and in that, my apologies. This game has nothing to offer but the assurance of downing an entire bottle of aspirin after the headache you receive from watching play-dough like characters and listening to tin-box carnival music for 8 hours! Don't rent it, don't buy it, and don’t even look in its direction.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 01/22/00, Updated 11/20/01