It’s simply just extremely hard to go wrong with having this game around...
The story of Soul Calibur II revolves around an evil weapon, named Soul Edge. Its legend is known around the world, but not everyone understands the sword’s true power and nature, as there are those who see it as something capable of doing good for them. However, Soul Edge is a blade that manages to consume and take over the souls of its wielder and anyone it slays. Still, there are over a dozen of the world’s best warriors who want the sword, either to use it or destroy it. These weapon-mastering characters are what makes up the game’s playable cast.
The core gameplay of Soul Calibur II is probably very familiar to anyone who has played a typical fighting game. Two characters will face off against each other and use a number of moves to deplete his/her opponent’s health. The winner of the fight is the only who manages to either get rid of the opponent’s health completely, have the most amount of health at the end of the time limit, or manage to knock the opponent out of the arena. What may appear to be different in the formula to some people would be 3D field that you have to fight around, but even if you’ve never played a 3D fighter, it won’t take that long to get familiar with as far as controls are concerned.
What further separates the Soul Calibur series from most fighting games, though, is the fact that the game focuses less on hand-to-hand combat and more on using weapons to deal damage. This may seem intimidating at first, or it maybe even put you off on first glance. However, once you start playing, you’ll soon realize that it’s a game that’s very easy to pick up and play and nothing is lost from the hand-to-hand norm. In fact, Soul Calibur II is just as fast, fluid, and technically sound as any other fighting game around. This is a huge compliment to the gameplay, and perhaps even more importantly, the game’s superb controls.
The fact is that Namco has done a great job of making sure there is a nice variety of fighting styles in the game. Whether you like to fight with speed, range, power, or balance, you’re likely to find at least one character to you liking. At the same time, the balance between the characters is done very well to the point where you never feel like a character is cheated. This is very impressive, considering that each character has dozens of moves at his or her disposal. As a player, it allows you to play different ways, even with the same character, if needed. Also worth noting is the game’s fighting system, which allows many ways to attack, counter-attack, throw, and defend against your opponent, but doesn’t lean greatly toward any method of fighting.
Soul Calibur II offers a great variety of modes for players to enjoy. On top of the usual “Arcade” mode, which pretty much allows one-on-one player vs. CPU fights, with another player being able to join in at almost any point, the game also offers the modes that is now expected out of fighting games, like “Time Attack,” “Survival,” and even “Team Battle” modes. The game even offers variations of these modes for a greater challenge, but they have to be unlocked. The game also features a “Practice” mode that you can use to learn and master your care, and it has also been done extremely well.
Perhaps the most impressive mode the game has, though, is “Weapon Master” mode, which is a single player campaign that gives the player many different challenges, while providing a story and a feature that allows you to buy different weapons for your character featuring different properties, among other things. The beauty of this mode is that it not only allows you unlock most of the games special modes and features, but the challenges that are presented to you makes it easier to master the complexities of the game that may seem very tough at first. You’ll soon figure out that it’s sometimes a matter of how you approach a battle that will determine the battle, and there’s a nice feeling of accomplish when you beat a tough challenge.
Presentation-wise, Soul Calibur II provides menus that are pretty easy and quick and navigate. It won’t take long to get the hang of where you’re going, once you started playing. This is complimented very well with a nice layout of the menus and really good loading times between fights (even the PS2's loading times aren’t bad, but the GameCube’s and Xbox’s loading times are easily better).
Visually, SCII is an amazing accomplishment. It’s one of those games where you have to actually look for problems with the game in order to say something negative about it, and even so, you’re bound to find even more things great about it. For a multi-platform game, the characters are displayed with great detail and their animations are very smooth. Hit detection, for the most part, is also right on the money in this game, and since you will be able to switch different variations of weapons with the characters, this is super-important. Last, but certainly not the least, are the great stages in which you on. For a game that’s much more focused on what you’re doing as a player than what the stage is doing, the levels are very lively and beautiful.
Even the sound in Soul Calibur II can be something to brag about, and this is not a genre that you usually go crazy about when it comes to fighting games. The background music does a great job fitting the theme of the level and/or moment, and it’s doesn’t appear to be something that was just made without any care. The characters themselves have also been treated well, by having a great amount of taunts and grunts that have been done with really good voice-work, in both English and Japanese. It’s even fun going back and forth between the languages every now and then, even if you can’t understand what the characters are saying at times.
As if the package wasn’t great enough as is, Soul Calibur II even goes a step further than most multi-platform games by offering characters exclusive to each version of the game. All three of the console versions of the game have an exclusive characer, created by the famous comic artist Todd McFarlane, named Necrid. On top of that, the three versions also get another character exclusive to that version alone. The GameCube version of the game gets Link from the Legend of Zelda, while the PS2 version gets Tekken’s powerhouse Heihachi, and the Xbox version gets McFarlane’s very popular comic character, Spawn.
If Soul Calibur II has anything not going for it, it would be the lack of an online feature. It won’t take long to realize that it’s such a shame that you won’t be able to take your abilities to a bigger stage. With that said, though, SCII is still an excellent multi-player game that has the potential to give you hundreds of fights with your buddies, if you are able to play with them. Add that to easily one of the best single-player fighting games ever, and you now have a game that can pull you in and keep you entertained for hundreds of hours. It makes you almost forget online play isn’t even around.
While Soul Calibur II may not do much new to re-define the fighting game genre, what it is able to do is provide one of the greatest all-around fighting experiences ever. It’s simply just extremely hard to go wrong with having this game around, as the game just feels special from the moment you play it. Namco deserves all of the credit in the world for making sure that a lot of people have a chance to experience one of the greatest fighting games ever created, and it’s not exaggerating to say that about this game.