Done with Fighting Games

[Originally published on Sub Cultured as The Aging Gamer: Done with Fighting Games?]

You can count on my having been an all purpose nerd for pretty much my entire life - to the tune of getting the call at age 10 to hook up my friends' new SNES. And after I made the recommendation of A/V cables over the RF switch to connect it, he pulls out a shiny fresh Street Fighter II cartridge to bless the console with. Thus started the age of fighting games, round robin style - friends in a room where the winner victoriously clenches a controller, while his/her defeated adversary reluctantly passes theirs on. Now, take into account that this was 1991. I didn't have a fast internet connection let alone a computer. So this was social gaming for us - no XBOX Live Lobby or PSN connections. Trash talk was live, and we were absolutely hype out of our minds.

This continued through college (fast forward 10 years to 2001) where Soul Calibur became my new jam. My next door neighbor and I both became so good at it that we used to play in versus mode using Edge Master vs. Edge Master for added challenge to see who could hit 99 wins first. The only time we ever made it that far we were tied at 98-98, and when tension was at maximum on round 197, we double KO'd each other. We shook hands and decided never to do that again.

Sodas and chips turned to beer and pizza as we got older, but trash talk and admonishing each other for cheap ring-out victories stayed the same. But of course there were times when ridiculous things like classes and homework and labs got in the way. During those times, if you couldn't get a quorum together, then you played alone. And that was OK! Most of the fighters I played had a built-in arcade or story mode, where you could follow a selected character's storyline through after beating a final boss and seeing an ending. Characters were actually, well, characters. And you had a favorite, not necessarily because you "owned" with them, but just because you liked them.

And up to a point, if the arcade mode wasn't enough for you, the Soul series went a step further in SC2 and SC3, by giving you a full scale additional single player campaign, allowing the player to create a character for a full scale RTS-type experience. And it was excellent. I could sit alone when the weather outside was frightful and go knuckles deep into a solo mission.

But then the decay started. Soul Calibur 4  replaced their secondary single player mode with some strange tower game. Then Namco robbed me of my money that I spent on the Soul Calibur 5 Collector's Edition for what started off as a story mode but fooled me good. There was no story. Characters just came from some sort of abyss with no explanation and no backstory. I dubbed the game "incomplete," but became clear to me later that this was intentional, and was tuned for online play in PvP.

Street Fighter V did the same thing, by entrancing me with FMV video in their commercials leaving me to guess all the character relationships and who was fighting who else for what purpose. It pointed to some sort of story mode in the game, but as we all saw earlier this year, Capcom opted to not include single player arcade content. This was again, clearly intentionally incomplete. The quicker a PvP version of the game came out the quicker it could be played in video game tournaments. Problem is, that leaves out the con-competitive player in a series of games that traditionally had something for us - especially on CONSOLES, I mean come on. And if they'd advertised as such, I'd be ok with it. But that's where it seems like it's going with 2 of the major fighter franchises purposefully omitting single player options when they used to be (at least in the Soul series) extremely rich and deep.

I'm a cranky old man now, and I've always enjoyed fighters to play with my friends - or even moreso - play alone. I don't want to pull a pro-level gamer who does this 10 hours a day to trounce the hell out of me to "lol"s. Screw that. I have a job and other things to do, and it may be old fashioned to say so but I'm only willing to buy a game if I'll get an hour enjoyment out of each dollar I spend. I'm set in my ways, and when I can't play a fighting game on a console with people I know then I'd like to have a option to satisfactorily play alone. And that's what the story/arcade modes have always been. I want my gaming downtime to be enjoyable, not frustrating on the so called Capcom Pro Tour. So if this is the way fighting games are going, well then I may be done with them.

Yoshinori Ono, Street Fighter Producer, did however say earlier this month that he underestimated the popularity of single player features." Now if something comes from that, I'll consider strapping on the gi and red headband once more, Ono San.

Why I was Done with Soul Calibur V in a Month

[Article first published as Why I Was Done with Soul Calibur V in a Month on Blogcritics.]

I was seriously looking forward to Soul Calibur V before its release last month.  I’ve been a huge fan of the Soul series since their first entry (not counting Soul Edge), and have a ton of fun memories playing with my friends in a number of “loser passes the controller” sessions, starting with Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast.  So in this iteration there were promises of better combat and gameplay, amped graphics, better character customization, and finally a decent guest character in Assassin’s Creed’s Ezio Auditore.  All pluses in my mind.  I went so far as to order the collector’s edition with a gift card I had so I could get the art book and soundtrack (as I love me some game art books).  I should have noticed, however, that while listing all the great new features, a great story was not mentioned.  

So I cracked it open and the loaded up the story mode.  It opened with a gorgeous cinematic, which was great for one main reason –  and that was that the majority of what followed as “story” was not much more than sketched stills in sepia tones instead of full motion video between fights.  It follows the current story of Soul Edge and Soul Calibur, walking you through it as Patrokolos — Sophitia’s son, Pyrrha’s brother, and the new series protagonist.  You switch characters every few rounds.  This gave me some hope that maybe they finally did story mode right, forcing the player to get a taste of playing with every character, but sadly I was wrong.  After the culmination of story mode in episode 20, I had only played with Patrokolos, Pyrrha, (and their variants) and Z.W.E.I..  Sigfried and Nightmare acted as fightable NPC’s along with a slew of generic “custom” created characters.  The story is mainly driven by Tira, with cameos were made some of the other characters in one or two of the still shots and that is it.

 The 20 episodes of story mode can be done in well under a day after purchase.  Then you’re done.  No more story.  No more character explanations.  No more character at all, really.  What you are left with after story mode is a roster with absolutely zero back story and zero personality.  Which means you have a list of marginalized characters who don’t plug into the story ever.   Let’s take a look.  All we know about Natsu is that she’s Taki’s student, and fights kind of like her.  All we know about Leixia is that she’s Xianghua’s daughter, and fights kind of like her.  What about Z.W.E.I.?  He can summon a werewolf to fight for him.  What?  And Xiba is like a half monkey / half human version of Kilik.  Oh and he’s always hungry.  I guess that’s cool?  What’s going on?  Who are these characters?  Is Viola actually Amy?  What’s with the orb?  Where did they come from?  How did Ezio enter the picture? Just what in the infinite hells is going on here?

That’s how I felt.  Confused and cheated.  Story mode left me with hundreds of questions the game clearly had absolutely no intention of answering.  I have a big problem with that.  In my opinion, in a game that’s a continuation of a lore as rich and deep as it is in the Soul Calibur universe, it's owed to the player to provide a fleshed out story for all of the main characters.  Without back story and personality, the characters simply become empty.  There’s no depth or mythology to buy into.  That means the player's not going to care.  This isn’t an FPS where the player is just a guy on the team, or a sniper or medic — the Soul Calibur series has always gone into not only the characters, but the relationships between them.  This is a shame really, because with the amazingly fluid gameplay and combat this could have been a magnificent game.

I think part of what makes a game good, especially with franchise games such as this, is the world they’re set in and the mythology that they provide.  And a lot of what allows the player to buy into that is character development.  It’s the reason I became so entrenched in RPGs like the Final Fantasy and Xenosaga series.  But this trait isn’t reserved just for RPGs — series like Devil May Cry and God of War got it done in the action/adventure genre, and Namco themselves did it quite well in Soul Calibur III.

So what am I left with?  A game built for nothing more than online or versus play.  You can make your character, assign a fighting style to it (oh right, you’re restricted to only the main characters’ styles and less options than SCIV), then hit Xbox Live or the PSN.  I’ll call it the console fighter version of Unreal Tournament.  Now don’t get me wrong, that definitely carries some value on its own, being able to play with friends online or in your living room is part of what makes gaming fun.  In college my friend and I would play Edge Master vs. Edge Master to see who could win 99 rounds first.  We had a ton of fun (and as a fun and true side story: we once tied 98-98 with a double KO in the next round).

It’s still fun, but without the media gallery or single player story modes or really much of anything to unlock, the game is sadly a shadow of what it could actually be.