Nick Adams Games Blog

In the build up to Namco-Bandai’s fourth installment of the Soul Calibur franchise, they’ve decided to release the original Soul Calibur onto the Xbox 360 Live Arcade (XBLA). Soul Calibur was originally an arcade game at the turn of the Millenium before it was given a new lease of life on Sega’s Dreamcast. This home version was a complete remake, boasting new groundbreaking 128bit graphics and an exclusive character, Cervantes – an undead pirate and the boss of Namco’s Soul Edge (released on PS1 as Soul Blade).

But enough of the history lesson! How does this XBLA game play? In short, extremely well. Its easy to understand why the original Soul Calibur is rated as such a balanced and polished game when you can revisit it the best part of a decade later and still find an amazingly playable, fluid, deep fighting experience.

To the utterly uninitiated, Soul Calibur is basically like Namco’s Tekken fighting game franchise but with swords and set roughly around the 17th century. The characters use a range of edged and blunt weapons ranging from a hulking battle axe to an experimental mechanical sword that can break apart into a whip.

An inviting thing about Soul Calibur are its controls: there’s 1 button to block, 1 button to kick and 2 buttons to swing your weapon either horziontally or vertically. Like all brilliantly designed games, its easy to grasp the basics but will take you a long time to achieve mastery. This is aided by some well thought out mechanics.

The 8 way diagonal running system meant that for the first time 3D fighting games authentically ventured into the third dimension as you side stepped and danced around your enemies. Also, the fact that every single character in the game was able to interrupt their opponents attack with the correct timing made for some very deep tactics as players thought many moves ahead.

Visually its still very much a pretty game, and it feels very authentic – complete with slightly dodgy physics when people bounce off the edge of an arena during a ring out. A virtual museum in the game also allows you to read character biographies, browse concept, developer and fan art and look at some impressive weapon demonstrations as each character fluidly shows exactly what they’re capable of doing with their weapons of choice.

The XBLA version comes with all of the secret characters, costumes and arenas of the Dreamcast version unlocked so you can get started straight away. Although the scoreboards have online functionality, there is no feature to play against other people over Xbox Live. A lot of people may find this disappointing, but given the rushed and totally flawed online experience of other XBLA fighting games (Streetfighter II Turbo, I’m looking at you here!) I’m actually quite glad they haven’t tainted an otherwise fond memory of this fighting classic.

9/10