As you fight through the Tower, each round will begin by giving you some words of wisdom. These are little hints that will allow you to unlock hidden treasures and ultimately present you extra items to customize your own characters with different abilities and styles. The character creation at first sounds like a mediocre idea, but once you realize the depth of creating a character, it’s not unusual to find yourself spending mass amounts of time trying to make your character as powerful as possible, not too mention stylish as well. You have the ability to choose the characters fighting style, weapon, abilities, physique, clothes, colors, name and just about anything else you can imagine.

As powerful as you make your characters, you still won’t go far unless you learn the finesse of the moves each character possesses. Each character has a massive amount of moves they can perform and like so many other fighting games, there is a training mode to practice with, but unfortunately not a mode that tells you when you are performing the moves you want to or should be required to. Learning the specific moves and trying not to fall into classic button-mashing can also be quite the confusing and frustrating feat. Why is it that a fighting game stilluses button labels that don’t correspond to the buttons on the controller? How difficult would it be to make X and Y in game equal X and Y on the controller? To pull off a move that requires combo of AAB, you need to press XXY and when you start getting into more complex maneuvers, it can be maddening.

Along with the new modes and customization, players now have several new minor abilities at their disposal, but the major addition is known as the Soul Gauge. The Soul Gauge basically stops players from “turtling” and blocking every attack that an opponent throws at them for an extended period of time. If a player tries to sit back and block hit after hit, one of two things will happen: Either their armor will start to get destroyed and eventually fall off forcing the player to fight in their skivvies or their Soul Gauge will start to fill. As the Soul Gauge fills, it will start to turn red and then eventual flash. Once it is flashing, the player is open to a Critical Finish from their opponent, which will annihilate them in one massive attack. The Critical Finish – as spectacular as it is to watch – is mighty tricky to pull off and unfortunately, in battles against real opponents, chances are you won’t see it all that often.

From the gorgeous arenas to the assortment of returning and new characters – even the Star Wars ones – found in the game, Soul Calibur IV is exactly what the series needed to step up and compete in the next generation. With the all-new features, online play and the involved character creation, fighting fans can’t go wrong by picking up the game and experiencing it for themselves.

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