not everyone who knows me well knows how much i love soul blade. or soul edge? i dont know what this game is called. i think the north american version was soul edge, which makes more sense than soul blade, considering the sword in question is called soul edge, but whatever. i digress!!!
i am not a fighting games guy. i know how to play smash brothers at a decent casual level, and thats assuming you're happy for me to call smash brothers a fighting game, which you're probably not happy about! soul blade is the one for me though. and to be explicitally clear, soul blade is the one i love. i LIKE soul calibur, i think it can be quite fun, but you have to understand that there is a world of difference between blade and calibur. the three main differences in combat are the reasons i prefer blade to calibur too. to start with, jumping. this is the smallest one, but in blade you have bouncy shoes which means you can jump about 10 feet high with quite a lot of horizontal direction. that means you can easily jump over your opponent. in calibur, your jumps are short hops, meant only for jumping over low attacks. second difference is the ease of movement on the axis. in blade to go down on the axis you double tap down, and to go up you tap down then up quickly (or you can buttonmap L2 to go up which is what a smart person would do). moving axis is not smooth and it doesn't feel like taking a step; rather it feels like shifting onto a different angle to face your opponent. it's a much more considered decision than in calibur. because jumping is more important in blade, you have to be able to jump easily, so up is jump. in calibur this is less true, so up moves you up the axis. moving axis is therefore easier, and in fact smoother. it's less considered and has less of an impact on gameplay. this makes a huge difference in whether you go for a horizontal attack or a vertical one because the axis is more committed and jumps are higher! the difference between attacks ends up mattering a whole bunch. to be clear about calibur, this shit matters too in calibur, just i feel the movement in blade compliments the horizontal/vertical question far better than calibur does. the last difference between blade and calibur's combat is more of a personal thing, and i respect that i probably only prefer it because i'm 1) not that good at fighting games and 2) blinded by nostalgia. basically soul blade's combos have a hard ending to them that essentially resets the combatants positions to neutrals. you can combo someone onto the ground, punish them once, maybe twice if you predict their roll, but you can't really juggle. there's no rush down in soul blade the same way there is in calibur, or any fighting game really. for me that makes it far more inviting because it's SO much slower. not that it is slow necessarily, but actions are more deliberate nad it's easier to see exactly what each character can do, what they will or might do, and how they respond. despite blade and calibur's combat maybe looking really similar on the surface, they are completely different games.
that's not even talking about the tone and story either. the first thing to understand is that soul blade is a mid 90s japanese fighting game whose story was written for the playstation port. it was practically non-existant in the arcade version. soul blade has this thing about "the war age" and the feeling of these fighters travelling the world on their own personal quests, which i find really delightful. despite being set in a historical period in the real world, it feels like this exciting fantasy world. there's a lot of colour to the stages, and a lot of colour to the outfits. the music is similarily epic, something calibur also wants to do. the supernatural hovers on the horizon in blade: it's the thing we have been chasing throughout our journey. we travel the whole world looking for this legendary cursed sword, and when we find it we get the hardest boss of the game, cervantes de leon, as well as souledge (or inferno) itself. the mechanical difficulty of these two bosses compliments the fiction that soul edge is all powerful, and the supernatural has no place in the world. caliburs story is much more anime and explicitally fantasy; not necessarily a bad thing but it is different. the way the world is understood is so different. you have motherfuckers like zasalamel, lizardman, astaroth, and tira, all of whom scream fantasy and the supernatural. it's no longer something on the periphary, it's the here and now. the fantasy of the world is the thing that's important, not the historical context. in SC4 Siegfried is this giant crystalised knight who wields the crystalline version of the sword Soul Calibur. in blade, where the historical fiction matters more, he is not a fantasy character, but a man whose motivations come from ego. the blonde germanic and handsome young knight is actually one of the villains in soul blade, which feels fantastic! his hair is short and trim, denoting his age, and his voicelines are cocky and egotistical. when siegfried embraces the supernatural it only ends badly for him. i love that the canon ending for a character you just beat arcade mode with is that he turns into a fucking monster. it's delightfully tragic. i love the siegfried of blade SO much, because he becomes the biggest wet blanket in the world from SC1 onwards.
blade's storymode has these book like segments that are entirely unique to each character. they're pretty simple, and not always written in the best prose, but i always loved the start of them, which sets the historical setpieces up. it's not just "mitsurugi is the son of a farmer who goes to war", it's "he's the son of a farmer who joins the seto inland pirates" who were real pirates around that period! siegfried's castle stage isn't just some fantasy castle, it's a castle for a feudal lord at war with a nearby marquis. it's populated with terbuchets and we see crumbling towers in the background. this world feels real and lived in despite the small writing.
it's all nostalgia to me i know i know i know, i KNOW that this game probably isn't as good as SC2 or SC6 (better than SC5 though lol) but i do think it's really special. it has two completely unique soundtracks, the default arcade one and a second called the Khan Super Session which is better than literally any of the soul calibur soundtracks. they go insanely hard, 5 minute long tracks for fights that will barely last two minutes at a push. the voiceacting is cheesy and fun, and it's sweet that the european characters speak english but the asian ones speak japanese (although it would have been better if they all genuinely spoke their own languages) but nonetheless, it's neat
i acknowledge that there are some problems! edge master mode, as conceptually fun as it is and as much as i like the story, is bullshit at points. the win conditions for some of those fights are absolutely ridiculous. playing hwang's mode and having to win three fights in a row where you can only damage the enemy WHILE THEY'RE IN THE AIR and the second fight has the enemy regaining health passively? or mitsurugi having to beat 5 enemies in a row in the colosseum, or beat voldo with the critical edge move? it's genuinely infuriating! like any fighting game, playing with your friends is infinitely more fun than fighting the arcade mode or edge master mode. the game WILL read your inputs. it'll know that you're hitting high then low and it'll match it and it'll make you feel like shit. despicable. also, the weapon gague system is a good idea but by the time you break your opponent's weapon in a fight, it often makes very little difference to the fight because of how much health is left/time on the clock. i'm kind of glad it was scrapped, although i do think a fist-fighting mode would've been a good laugh. on the topic of weapons, i LOVE that blade has all these fun weapons for you to play with. although it would've been neat to be able to pick one without applying the stats for it so you can pick the one you like and fight your pals like that. isn't it also crazy that each character in this game has three different costumes, two of them having two pallettes, so there are 5 variants for each character? that's more than SC6!
maybe this review doesn't quite explain why this is in my favourite games. after all i didn't even give it 5 or 4.5 stars, it only got 4. i appreciate it has problems! but this game is truly special. it's such a weird little unique thing that not many people know about. because soul calibur changed its format so dramatically blade never got a proper sequel, and it's never been ported to anything, so you either need the PS1 disc or you need to emulate it these days. what i'd do for an updated, patched version with online and bonus features! i love this game so much. it is special and truly delightful, and it is, really, the only fighting game for me.
anyway, now go and listen to The Edge of the Soul, the main theme for this game.
i am not a fighting games guy. i know how to play smash brothers at a decent casual level, and thats assuming you're happy for me to call smash brothers a fighting game, which you're probably not happy about! soul blade is the one for me though. and to be explicitally clear, soul blade is the one i love. i LIKE soul calibur, i think it can be quite fun, but you have to understand that there is a world of difference between blade and calibur. the three main differences in combat are the reasons i prefer blade to calibur too. to start with, jumping. this is the smallest one, but in blade you have bouncy shoes which means you can jump about 10 feet high with quite a lot of horizontal direction. that means you can easily jump over your opponent. in calibur, your jumps are short hops, meant only for jumping over low attacks. second difference is the ease of movement on the axis. in blade to go down on the axis you double tap down, and to go up you tap down then up quickly (or you can buttonmap L2 to go up which is what a smart person would do). moving axis is not smooth and it doesn't feel like taking a step; rather it feels like shifting onto a different angle to face your opponent. it's a much more considered decision than in calibur. because jumping is more important in blade, you have to be able to jump easily, so up is jump. in calibur this is less true, so up moves you up the axis. moving axis is therefore easier, and in fact smoother. it's less considered and has less of an impact on gameplay. this makes a huge difference in whether you go for a horizontal attack or a vertical one because the axis is more committed and jumps are higher! the difference between attacks ends up mattering a whole bunch. to be clear about calibur, this shit matters too in calibur, just i feel the movement in blade compliments the horizontal/vertical question far better than calibur does. the last difference between blade and calibur's combat is more of a personal thing, and i respect that i probably only prefer it because i'm 1) not that good at fighting games and 2) blinded by nostalgia. basically soul blade's combos have a hard ending to them that essentially resets the combatants positions to neutrals. you can combo someone onto the ground, punish them once, maybe twice if you predict their roll, but you can't really juggle. there's no rush down in soul blade the same way there is in calibur, or any fighting game really. for me that makes it far more inviting because it's SO much slower. not that it is slow necessarily, but actions are more deliberate nad it's easier to see exactly what each character can do, what they will or might do, and how they respond. despite blade and calibur's combat maybe looking really similar on the surface, they are completely different games.
that's not even talking about the tone and story either. the first thing to understand is that soul blade is a mid 90s japanese fighting game whose story was written for the playstation port. it was practically non-existant in the arcade version. soul blade has this thing about "the war age" and the feeling of these fighters travelling the world on their own personal quests, which i find really delightful. despite being set in a historical period in the real world, it feels like this exciting fantasy world. there's a lot of colour to the stages, and a lot of colour to the outfits. the music is similarily epic, something calibur also wants to do. the supernatural hovers on the horizon in blade: it's the thing we have been chasing throughout our journey. we travel the whole world looking for this legendary cursed sword, and when we find it we get the hardest boss of the game, cervantes de leon, as well as souledge (or inferno) itself. the mechanical difficulty of these two bosses compliments the fiction that soul edge is all powerful, and the supernatural has no place in the world. caliburs story is much more anime and explicitally fantasy; not necessarily a bad thing but it is different. the way the world is understood is so different. you have motherfuckers like zasalamel, lizardman, astaroth, and tira, all of whom scream fantasy and the supernatural. it's no longer something on the periphary, it's the here and now. the fantasy of the world is the thing that's important, not the historical context. in SC4 Siegfried is this giant crystalised knight who wields the crystalline version of the sword Soul Calibur. in blade, where the historical fiction matters more, he is not a fantasy character, but a man whose motivations come from ego. the blonde germanic and handsome young knight is actually one of the villains in soul blade, which feels fantastic! his hair is short and trim, denoting his age, and his voicelines are cocky and egotistical. when siegfried embraces the supernatural it only ends badly for him. i love that the canon ending for a character you just beat arcade mode with is that he turns into a fucking monster. it's delightfully tragic. i love the siegfried of blade SO much, because he becomes the biggest wet blanket in the world from SC1 onwards.
blade's storymode has these book like segments that are entirely unique to each character. they're pretty simple, and not always written in the best prose, but i always loved the start of them, which sets the historical setpieces up. it's not just "mitsurugi is the son of a farmer who goes to war", it's "he's the son of a farmer who joins the seto inland pirates" who were real pirates around that period! siegfried's castle stage isn't just some fantasy castle, it's a castle for a feudal lord at war with a nearby marquis. it's populated with terbuchets and we see crumbling towers in the background. this world feels real and lived in despite the small writing.
it's all nostalgia to me i know i know i know, i KNOW that this game probably isn't as good as SC2 or SC6 (better than SC5 though lol) but i do think it's really special. it has two completely unique soundtracks, the default arcade one and a second called the Khan Super Session which is better than literally any of the soul calibur soundtracks. they go insanely hard, 5 minute long tracks for fights that will barely last two minutes at a push. the voiceacting is cheesy and fun, and it's sweet that the european characters speak english but the asian ones speak japanese (although it would have been better if they all genuinely spoke their own languages) but nonetheless, it's neat
i acknowledge that there are some problems! edge master mode, as conceptually fun as it is and as much as i like the story, is bullshit at points. the win conditions for some of those fights are absolutely ridiculous. playing hwang's mode and having to win three fights in a row where you can only damage the enemy WHILE THEY'RE IN THE AIR and the second fight has the enemy regaining health passively? or mitsurugi having to beat 5 enemies in a row in the colosseum, or beat voldo with the critical edge move? it's genuinely infuriating! like any fighting game, playing with your friends is infinitely more fun than fighting the arcade mode or edge master mode. the game WILL read your inputs. it'll know that you're hitting high then low and it'll match it and it'll make you feel like shit. despicable. also, the weapon gague system is a good idea but by the time you break your opponent's weapon in a fight, it often makes very little difference to the fight because of how much health is left/time on the clock. i'm kind of glad it was scrapped, although i do think a fist-fighting mode would've been a good laugh. on the topic of weapons, i LOVE that blade has all these fun weapons for you to play with. although it would've been neat to be able to pick one without applying the stats for it so you can pick the one you like and fight your pals like that. isn't it also crazy that each character in this game has three different costumes, two of them having two pallettes, so there are 5 variants for each character? that's more than SC6!
maybe this review doesn't quite explain why this is in my favourite games. after all i didn't even give it 5 or 4.5 stars, it only got 4. i appreciate it has problems! but this game is truly special. it's such a weird little unique thing that not many people know about. because soul calibur changed its format so dramatically blade never got a proper sequel, and it's never been ported to anything, so you either need the PS1 disc or you need to emulate it these days. what i'd do for an updated, patched version with online and bonus features! i love this game so much. it is special and truly delightful, and it is, really, the only fighting game for me.
anyway, now go and listen to The Edge of the Soul, the main theme for this game.