SoulCalibur Legends

"Fans will like it, but everyone else..."

Soul Calibur on the Wii, alright! Oh wait, this isn't the next SC game, it's... a hack and slash? This game came out about a year ago, and I'm finally going to review it.

I'll get this out of the way now, it doesn't compare to the fighting games at all, I'm not saying it's bad, but it's not all that good either.

Story
You begin as Siegfried, who is on a quest to find the Soul Edge for the 50th time already... Or is it his first? I have no idea where in the SC timeline this game takes place, it may not even be part of the timeline at all. It doesn't matter, because it's the same story as the other games: Find Soul Edge and get powerful!

This game features old favorites like Siegfried, Sophitia, Mitsurugi, and others as well as new characters. There's a few twist and turns, but they are kind of expected if you know where to look. Standard SC story pretty much.

Gameplay
Here's where this game shines, gets moldy, and gets left in a landfill... You first turn on the game and your Siegfried! You can run around freely, swing your sword, sidestep, powerup your soul gauge and unleash power moves! It's like the fighting games but with more freedom! This is the shine part. That new control feeling is nice while it lasts, so enjoy every moment because once it's gone, you will never get it back!

Midway through the game, I was doing the same thing over, and over, and over again. You run up to enemies, attack them, they die, move on to the next wave. It's also very linear in progression with magical barriers blocking every way you can go except to the next room. This game encourages beating levels in the fastest time possible, so you there really isn't any exploration. It's fun, but gets stale.

This game also features a rank system, where you get new ranks and titles as you progress through the game by getting high combos, fast times, and other such things. These titles don't do much except unlock new weapons, which I'm unsure if they even do anything. Each character has 4 weapons, but I don't even know if there's a difference in power in them or not. In addition to new weapons, you can also level them up as well to a maximum of level 3. Like I said, I don't think they get any stronger, if they do, there's not a big difference for it to matter.

Funny thing about that though, to get a higher rank in a level, combo count will be the decider more than anything, and the more you hit enemies, the higher your combo. This is annoying to do anyhow, as you have only a split second between changing enemies to keep the chain going. I managed to do a 22 combo once by attacking a very powerful enemy over and over with a weak weapon. Yeah, the stronger your weapon, the LESS combos you'll be getting as you'll kill them before you rack up your numbers high enough and you'll lose it before getting to the next enemy.

Control
Ugh... the control in this game is just terrible! It's one of those things that doesn't rear its ugly head until later in the game, but when it does it rears at full force. The game plays nicely early on, and the lack of camera control is fine, it stays where you need it to most of the time and doesn't bother you, but then later in the game it's like everything just goes haywire!

To start with controls, sometimes in the game you need to activate switches which, the game gives you NO idea how to do. You get stumped for a bit, and then figure out you need to attack the switch with a horizontal swing in the right direction! If you need to pull the switch to the right, you swing right. This is fine and all, until you need to pull switches with cannonballs that can murder you in 1 go if you're not careful enough. This should be fine too, but the motion sensitivity really gives headaches at this point. Most of the time I'm trying to attack one way, and it just moves in another direction. When attacking, it's possible to to go into a vertical swing from a horizontal one, but not the other way. I can do HHV but when I try to go VVH it decides to through in one last vertical. Not like it matters, even though there are a ton of different moves you can pull, just swinging the Wiimote in any way you desire will get you through.

Now theres the nunchuck, well like most games that require shaking the nunchuck, it's never perfect and can kind of mess you up. This game is just like that, but worse. You can sidestep dodge with the nunchuck by shaking in the direction you want to go, but in the heat of battle doing this may end up sending you into the wrong direction and does more harm than good. You can also do attacks by shaking the nunchuck and the Wimote at the same time, but it doesn't work too often and you never need to do this to beat the game. It's nice that they took the time to put this in, but they didn't bother fine tuning it, so it's just useless.

Now the camera... ugh... I don't even want to talk about it. When the levels get more complicated, the camera really starts to get in the way, and you can't accurately see traps and other such things that get in your way. I'm not going to go into detail with it, I'm just saying to say that the controls and camera really bring this game down the most.

Difficulty
This game goes from easy, to almost impossible. This game is about 10 hours long, but should be about 7, but I end up repeating levels over and over again because of how insane things get. The hardest enemy in this game are falling boulders. The developers have some weird boulder fetish or something, in almost every level these things come at you, and can do more than 1/2 of your health in a single hit. This is more than even the last boss can do to you. How can falling rocks be more dangerous than... well, anything that comes after you with an intent to kill? Maybe I'm exaggerating, but falling rocks are a pain to deal with, and most of them can only be dealt with by attacking them AT THE RIGHT TIME. You need to be perfect with this, or goodbye life! Ugh...

Final Words
This game is decent if you like Soul Calibur, and probably the same if you don't too. I want to say that the SC characters don't really add or take from this game, but I think fans of SC will like this game more than someone who doesn't know much about it at all. But I have to say, even if you're a fan, this game is a rental. Today this game is probably about $20, so if buying it wouldn't be that big of a loss, but if you're unsure, just rent.

I rate this game a 6/10 for a good concept, but repetitive game play and bad controlling.

Additional Comments
Wheres my SC4 for the Wii featuring Mace Windu?

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/02/08

Game Release: SoulCalibur Legends (US, 11/20/07)