yet another franchise who seems to willingly embrace a product line with exponentially increasing suckiness...
I had a bad feeling when the opening scene came in. A sword fight between nightmare and siegfried...OOOOOOO how surprising, that NEVER happens in this fighting series...
No animations of other characters...ok, let's give it a shot...
After several hours of gameplay, I have yet to find a shop, weapon statistics, tutorial for the new mechanics, nada! This game is LITERALLY choose a character, fight another, and pick your nose during some fluff if you so wish.
This game totally favors those who have an XBOX live account. Even then, I can't imagine how fighting people online is any more fascinating than the offline play, which isn't fascinating if you didn't realize so already. So for those, like me, who has other expenses and blew their free money on this game, trusting the series franchise, you're outta luck! Judging by the economy and the target audience (minimum wage earning teenagers to 20s) do they realy expect us to balance the cost of a new video game plus a live membership. If you make the game sucky enough for it to use online play (which still isn't good) as a crutch, then you're crazy.
On the flip side, the element of fighting with cool characters, snazzy moves
but how snazzy are these moves? The characters move fluidly, even though custom clothes do not...but still the graphics are nice, its all very pretty, but snazzy enough to forgive lackluster design everywhere else? Are Ivy's boobs real? the answer to both is the same. Also, where did the finishers go? Granted, the mechanics were broken, but they could have wasted less time in other needless elements, like the excessive depth of character creation, and poured that into polishing mechanics and into a not-laughable plot.
which reminds me! the plot, the amazing storyline meant to rectify SC4s blunder...
HA. HAHA. HAHA. HA.
don't get me started. They were smart enough to realize that abuse of cutscenes is a no-no and a great way to embarrass the person playing the game. But their idea of a good story mode was a series of seemingly endless episodes where you're unfairly limited to the character you choose. You practically make love to patroklos, and maybe pyrrha when he isn't looking. Did they really believe there wasn't a possibility for someone to not like, maybe even HATE patroklos.
and besides his gameplay style, which isn't for me, you have to listen to corny, melodramatic, poorly constructed dialogue scenes with plot holes large enough to leap through. Patroklos, who manages to question his silly motives just in time when episode 1 starts, listening to his poorly developed whines, is embarrassing to hear. And pyrrha, who whines every five second s about not wanting to kill, not wanting to die, would just jump in the fray and kick ass (while protesting, of course!) at the whims of tira, "the ring blade girl." (they got clever with the names....)
and speaking of names, this just emphasizes how sucky the dialogue is, the amount of title/name dropping is agonizing, like it was written for five year olds. "I, the holy warrior...I am the holy warrior. the abominations, the malfested..." and goes on. Every term needs to be explained with an appositive as if the reader couldn't infer (or was too busy muting the screen and closing his eyes)
and my final complaint about story mode is that besides the lack of story, the "scenes" before and after every 3 matches of an episode consists of laughable charcoal sketches with laughable exaggeration in facial features and perspective. I could have done better, all I need is 10$ worth of willow charcoal and iMovie
Story mode would have been better if they recycled the old format, which SUCKED. I don't understand this, sc3 and sc2 stories where applauded, and chronicles of the sword would have been worshipped if they programmed it right so as not to corrupt your file every time you did a data transfer. If it ain't broke, stope trying to make it worse!
I don't understand it.
-they get criticized for a sea story mode in the previous installment...why make a crappier one?
-they add a price to guard impacts
-there's nothing to do when your offline except fight a computer, make a character, or play the demonic "story" mode.
-recycled and filler characters
the only redeeming quality is that the core element of fighting is fun, if that sucked I would have returned the game. I'll unlock the standard unlockables (weapons, characters, maybe some armor) but after that Id probably sell this, not worth 60 dollars, at all.
congrats namco, you've disenfranchised me, and others.