SoulCalibur V - What Happened?

[Music] welcome back to another episode of the stage of history the show about troubled game developments internally retold bando namkai is one of those publishers that we don't discuss as much as your eas your bethesda's or your capcom's is but that's not because they don't have their own fair share of mistakes it's just that they developed 2004's breakdown for which i will always give them tons of slack what is this what is breakdown what i can't give them a lot of slack over is 2012 soul calibur 5 one of if not the most divisive entry in the weapon based fighting franchise it has the dubious distinction of causing the longest gap in between sequels which were coming out at a steady clip all throughout the mid 90s and early 2000s apparently namco needed a lot of convincing to revive the series after five's tepid critical and even tepider commercial response now there's a variety of reasons for this least of all the cursed video game year that was 2012 which will have and has had a disproportionate amount of representation on this very show however the game itself is not blameless it suffered from a number of setbacks and unfortunate decisions that caused it to appear on our stage today so grab your katana axe or pulsating eyeball sword because it's time to find out what happened to soul calibur 5. namco's documentary style historically accurate fighting game series soul calibur is an ashen game which is based on japanese history the stages of the game will also be based on famous battles which took actually took place in ancient japan always played second fiddle to the mighty tekken but that didn't mean it wasn't just as good or didn't have some blockbusting important releases while soulblade and or edge was solid it wasn't until soul calibur its sequel where the franchise hit it big especially on the dreamcast with a version that improved upon the arcade original in just about every way this trend continued with soul calibur 2 adding link heihachi and well-known xbox spokesperson spawn to the lineup oh and um necroid 2 i guess the series then hobbled around on wobbly legs for some time culminating in the memorable but often forgotten soul calibur cross star wars saga that i sometimes think was a fever dream following that and the psp exclusive broken destiny oh my god i forgot that kratos was in that namco's soul calibur team which will henceforth be known as project soul were eventually tasked with making a new major entry but after a variety of very similar releases there was a desire to do something different and to push the series forward now when you're talking about fighting games and pushing forward well that could mean a lot of things layering in new mechanics adding different modes and obviously designing new characters but one of the riskiest things you can do is the dreaded time jump when you decide to pull a shapuden you're gonna have one of two outcomes tekken 3 or street fighter 3 new generation now to clarify slash remind you new generation was a disaster for capcom i'll get to it one day whereas tekken 3 remains the most successful iron fist tournament of all time what do these two three queens have in common that's right time jumps soul calibur 5 did much the same jumping the narrative forward 17 years and getting rid of fan favorite characters for no particular reason other than to shake things up i guess as for which side of the coin this time jump landed on success or failure well it's on this show so take a guess [Music] now most developers know that if you're going to take out beloved characters in this case seong mina taki talum sophia kilik and moveset form and even zasalamel which made no sense cause he's literally immortal you have to make up for those absences in some other way therefore i present to you some other way younger nasalier uncooler characters then popped up to fill those holes in the roster complete with many of the same moves and to [ __ ] line functions the problem was that petrolicus fira zeba and natsu weren't exactly warmly received by veteran fans it's a little weird to want to do something different but then just kind of do the same thing anyway like why not just make 100 brand new characters well they did all two of them zwei and viola both featuring new movesets and weapons for great additions however it's these two that were positioned as the new main characters with all events centering around them why was that a problem you ask well he's are malfested they're not even human they're demons that have sold their souls to the devil don't worry i'll go with you so you just follow me and no arguing okay just do what i tell you to do yes i thank you what's worse is that these two newcomers still manage to gobble up four slots on the character select screen let me introduce you to the omega and alpha variants that nobody asked for while soul calibur does have a habit of featuring clones and recycled movesets as new characters this was particularly egregious as for the rest of the roster well despite the game taking place 17 years in the future it didn't seem to actually affect the returning cast in any interesting way with characters like ivy mitsurugi and maxie looking almost identical to past entries even though they should all be scraping their 50s by this time no big changes to their move sets or weapons no grizzle new designs just the same characters really makes you wonder why they even bothered with the time jump at all because the entire idea of centering everything around these new waffles and cutting out other characters at random with no justification were decisions that project soul made on their own sc5's two directors daishi odashima and haruki sazaki were probably put in an unenviable position here because no matter what you do a percentage of fans will always be pissed with your roster choices but out of all the fighting games i've covered on this show and there have been a lot soul calibur 5 handled this the worst unfortunately this was the least of the game's problems though see navco's teams were very busy around this time not only with games in general but fighting games specifically putting the bulk of their effort into tekken tag tournament 2 which unfortunately had its own set of issues but also took a lot of manpower away from project soul perennial sun glassed badass katsukira harada shut up sappa the [ __ ] down who had co-directed soul calibur 4 wasn't on hand to help obviously as tekken was his priority this loved soul calibur in a bad way right from the start with many of the game's loftier ambitions especially story content having to be cut and scaled back to make the game's early 2012 release date for those that don't remember sc5 story mode was criminally short underbaked and was pretty damn rough in terms of production value and even with that said they barely had any time to work on it themselves cutscene production was therefore farmed out to cyber connect to get it all done and considering how brief it all was that's messed up this is the mode that revolves around the aforementioned new generation with neri a mitsurugi scruff or ivy curve to be seen the original idea that project soul wanted however was for the game to have you cycle through several different playable characters but because of what's known as triple a game development the team were forced to make what they could with what they had otashima even confirmed in interviews there was a ton of planned work that had to be scrapped in the end our first plan in the storyboards was that every character was going to have their own story and we actually have that material in our studio but time wise man power wise we weren't able to do it and only one fourth of what we planned to do is in the game actually some of those voice overs were even recorded but never used and we want to make use of that somehow but right now we're not sure we will now he's just referring to the game's main story mode mind you that has cutscenes and the like and not say the standard arcade mode most fighting games ship with i bring this up because the arcade mode also lacks any sort of ending for any character it just cuts to a result screen that's how bare bones soul calibur 5 was when you don't even have time to make mortal kombat armageddon levels of endings with the ability to become anyone meat lost his sense of identity and disappeared into obscurity what that's when you know your publisher was rushing you with all this de-emphasis on story content namco then decided to pivot slightly and try to position soul calibur 5 as a more esports focused game something the franchise hadn't really embraced before but i guess they needed to aspire to something therefore the game's overall speed was increased comeback mechanics were expanded and bugs and exploits from previous games especially soul calibur 3 were also fixed and refined although some players bemoaned the changes to guard impact and the fact that movement options were now more unsafe overall though these changes were met with positivity especially the increased speed making the game feel much snappier and more aggressive than its predecessor despite all that the game never made much headway in the esports space shocker there [Music] all of these issues the uh understaffed team the cut content and the time constrained work led to a lot of pressure on project soul with some of that pressure being made public when otashima vented on his personal twitter we'd like to take our time to make the game but the company's always on our back i'm nothing more than a salary man frowny face otoshima tweeted this in september of 2011 months before the game was scheduled to release and the internet ran with it pointing to the tweet as an ill omen for the game's chances already a percentage of fans were skeptical of the missing characters and the time jumps so this only intensified their concerns now full disclosure it's hard to find this original tweet as odashima's entire account was nuked sometime after the game's release now the big missing piece of the puzzle here as to why the game was so rushed was that they reportedly had not much more than one year to make it team project soul was broken up after the release of soul calibur 4 most likely to help with other namco projects and were only reformed in late 2010 early 2011 so it's no wonder the game turned out the way it did why did namco just not delay the game further well one reason could be because of tekken tag 2. that game didn't perform well in arcades the previous year so there's a good chance that namco wanted to rush soul calibur out the door before the end of their 2011 fiscal year which ended in march of 2012. when was soul calibur 5 released late january early february depending on the region just enough time for it to hopefully generate some healthy sales numbers which it didn't exactly do while more casual single player loving fans staying away was probably a cause of that competition was also certainly a factor much more hyped fighting games like street fighter cross tekken and persona 4 arena came out just a few weeks after soul calibur 5. now you can say a lot about crosstech and believe me i have but you can't deny it was the most talked about fighting game in the first half of that year for better or worse 5 is then the low point for the franchise in terms of raw sales moving just over 1 million copies across both the ps3 and xbox 360 which was a far cry from the 2.3 million its predecessor had managed back in 2008. even the games dlc was phoned in no it was faxed in because if you were expecting the cuts story content or arcade endings well you better have prepared for your soul to sputter and die rather than burn instead of all that stuff that otishima had said was planned namco felt it better to just fart out more parts for create a soul if fans were anticipating siri's favorites to return like talom or zas they got dom pierre and that's it yeah i didn't even really realize this before making this video but sc5 only ever got one extra character which is just unthinkable nowadays in terms of reviews the game performed admirably there were still lots of grumbles about all the cut story content but since the game played just as well as it ever had it didn't really seem to affect it too much but honestly it was the sales that mattered and that was the end of soul calibur for the next 6 years when a fresh team then approached namco upper management to bring it back they were keen to undo the damage 5 had inflicted therefore the game was more or less a soft reboot going back to the earlier days and splitting off into a slightly different timeline thankfully 6 was much better received even by namco themselves who said as such and went on to sell over 2 million copies worldwide and counting hell just its dlc roster is more exciting than five's entire default lineup and features one of the more wild selection of guest fighters as for otoshima well he moved on to sega shortly after seoul caliber 5's release and directed 2018's soul reverse a japan only wait well what what the hell is this a medieval arcade hack and slasher wait like is this any good someone let me know anyway otoshima's last credited work is being a planner for the excellent virtual fighter 5 ultimate showdown and before you ask me yes here's a video about virtually all of sega's mistakes with their roster of polygonal pugilists even though this entry in namco's legendary series was a bit of a misfire that was clearly mishandled and not prioritized by them it did not result in the series itself being cast to the abandoned ip dungeon while it's unclear soul calibur 6 will continue or a 7th entries in the works it's nice to end this tale of souls and swords on a positive note if you know of any other games fighting or otherwise that have suffered similar fates let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or enter the stage of history that is the flop house vip patreon and become a big boss to nominate what you'd like to see on a future episode see you next time and thanks for watching all right q max's music [Music] to shine [Music] we all need

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 485,919

Keywords: Matt McMuscles, Wha Happun, What Happened?, Soul Calibur V, SoulCalibur V, What Happened Soul Calibur V, Video Game Documentaries

Id: oaed72j1oSo

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MrManicMarty]

What I remember about V (I only rented it I think, so I didn't have it long... Remember Blockbuster guys?) is the story and the main character. OH BOY, Patroclus... God damn.

[u/[deleted]]

I remember just slamming people left and right with Natsu. I’ve always been a Taki main, and Natsu was laughably unbalanced. I’d even come back a year later after putting the game down, and hop onto ranked to just get a ten game win streak and put it back down again. The game had so many balancing issues, but I did enjoy it.

[u/VenomRaven]

I loved SC2 and 3. 5 was horrible. Morphing the roster was just a terrible idea. Glad they went back on it. And the story mode was so bad in terms of plot but also so cheaply made yet also so bloody long.

One thing I didn't like about SC 5 but also 6 is the special moves. I feel like they kill the pacing of the fight completely and that they dont work in a 3D fighting game. They just break the momentum IMO. Dont know how common an opinion this is though

[u/ZersetzungMedia]

While it's not a game I play frequently, Soul Calibur is a game that rests in my heart.

Playing SC2, easy contender for the greatest fighting game, loads when I was young meant that each time a fighting game came out I wasn't deterred by 10 hit combo try hards.

I can't speak for the Fighting Game Community but as the video says it's very much true SC plays second fiddle to Tekken. It's the arcade companion to the competitiveness of Tekken. Fighting games are already niche so being the less popular fighting game of an already small community puts it at a disadvantage. Being the more casual of the two you'd think it'd help it reach a wider audience.

SC IV was well recieved but it doesn't seem to have resolved the waiting issue. Three years since it came out and nothing about a sequel. I wonder if they will until Tekken 8 releases. Last DLC was December 2020 and nothing new about any more.

[u/CrimsonFoxyboy]

Soul Calibur has always been one of my favourite series. Loved the Edge master mode for example in the first Soul Edge.

Loved all entires up until 4. Just wasnt a fan of the path character design took. Seemed like they wanted heavily to compete with Dead or Alive on that department. Also hated the mission mode there.

5 i was suprised that i enjoyed more than 4, even if the roster was bad. Supers was a bit boring to introduce, but at the same time i kinda liked ex moves, guard impact taking meter though was a really strange move.

I was hoping to get into 6 as they returned to a the classic roster, but i just got annoyed with the blurry backgrounds, and god i hated the Reversal Edge mechanic, just slowed down things a bit too much.

[u/nectarousness]

I don't think its a coincidence that they did a time skip and ditched almost the entire classic cast of female characters who would've been visibly older except for Tira and Ivy... and they don't age. Hmm.

(Okay, they brought back Hilde, but she barely looked different and was pretty young in SC4.)

Meanwhile, almost all (exceptions being Maxi or Cervantes due to no aging) of the returning cast were men who were allowed to look older and more seasoned. :P

[u/[deleted]]

I've never played any of these games other than the first one on the Dreamcast, which was a lot of fun. Which ones are considered the best in the series?

[u/Renvar7]

I really enjoyed soul calibur 4 and 5.

4 had really expansive movesets and no super meter. Characters were generally mix up heavy and not safe.

5 had a dumbed down move list but had a super meter. Metered attacks and super attacks were more about extending a juggle than just press 1 button bye bye half your health.

As a long time veteran 0f these two I greatly dislike 6. Character strings are too safe, there's not much room for landing counter hit launchers. And the supers break the game. They changed the core fighting balance to be centered around parries and the auto parry mechanic which is just a coinflip.

[u/J-dub-suede]

Video is too harsh. I like the characters and protroculus was awesome(gameplay not sure about story). Was one of my favorite soul caliburs. I don’t know why more people don’t play it. It has cool characters and more engaging full movement instead of side scrolling. But I guess cut work time does suck