SoulCalibur Requests Your Presence… The Guest Characters

With the fourth rendition of SoulCalibur on the way a lot of the focus has been on the inclusion of Darth Vader and Yoda as playable characters. Sure its garnered a lot of attention for the game but has it really been for the actual game and has it really been the right kind of attention?

Granted the idea sounds good but the fact that they can’t even fight each other takes away some of appeal. Surely a SoulCalibur Vs Star Wars game would have been a better choice. Think about it you could still have your normal SoulCalibur series untainted with outsider characters and have your Star Wars connection included. Namco could literally have their cake and eat it too.

I guess you don’t have to use them but when reports come in that some attacks won’t affect Yoda due to his size you’ve got take notice. That is game breaking mechanic right there but at the end of the day you’ve got to put your trust in the developers.

This isn’t the first time outside characters have been included in SoulCalibur though as back in 2002 the release of SoulCalibur 2 saw unique guest characters for each version of the game. Playstation 2 saw the inclusion of Heihachi from Sony’s Tekken series, Gamecube saw the well known heroine from The Legend of Zelda known as Link join the action and finally the Xbox version saw Todd MacFarlane’s character Spawn get his Axe on

The fact that the 3rd edition of SoulCalibur was poorly received could be due to the lack of exclusive characters although it did offer Gilgamesh from Tower of Druaga and KOS-MOS from Xenosaga. These are hardly big well known characters like Link or Spawn.

So why have the Star Wars characters been poorly received so far? It could be down to the fact they are massive names that should have their own title. It could be that they are making the Xbox look like the good side while the Playstation 3 appears to be the dark side. It could also be the fact a light-saber would easily rip through swords but in my opinion its because there is no reason to spilt them up on separate consoles. Before you could see why this was the case because apart from Spawn each character belonged to the platform holder while in the case of Yoda and Vader these are free for any platform.

This combined with the facts that there are only two characters and a separate Star Wars Vs SoulCalibur game would have made a whole lot more sense. It also sounds like a desperate attempt to re-inject some interest into the series when a spin off versus game would have worked just as well.

SoulCalibur 4 still looks like a great game and people need to remember that the addition of a few guest characters shouldn’t change anything despite how bizarre their inclusion is.