[Click here to start from the first progress log]

Soul Calibur has one of those titles that’s trickier than it looks; it’s officially written as “Soulcalibur,” but that’s not natural at all and I refuse to refer to the series as such. Not that I have a problem with mashing words together, mind you—Spider-Man will always be Spiderman to me (after all, no one would be able to look Batman in the eyes if he insisted on spelling it Bat-Man), and Mega Man will forever be Megaman no matter how many mental gymnastics are ultimately required in order to justify it. The sword is also referred to as “Soul Calibur” in this game, and I strongly suspect that the combination into a single word has a lot to do with the lawsuit threat Soul Edge faced that was the impetus for switching to “Calibur” in the first place.

This is like Full House if the cast was armed

Pat and Pyrrha make it to the town that the latter burned earlier when we first met her, and Pat suspects that it’s the work of malfested. She disagrees, but he’s technically not wrong. Before long, Graf Dumas shows up and reveals that he’s actually Nightmare, that his goal is to destroy Soul Calibur, and that the “malfested” he had sent Pat to kill were actually normal humans. All of these things were pretty much obvious at the end of the very first episode, but it shakes Pat’s confidence. He’s also slightly wounded and doesn’t stand a chance against Nightmare anyway, so Pyrrha steps up and goes into her full malfested form to fend off Nightmare.

This changes her moves slightly, but it’s not like I was hugely familiar with them before. Nightmare isn’t too hard of a fight despite his reach, thankfully. Anyway, Nightmare doesn’t seem all that impressed with her skills, but abandons his goal of destroying Soul Calibur after being fended off, disappearing in a wisp of fire. That leaves me incredibly confused about his goals, alternate identity, and continued existence. Meanwhile, Pat goes full emo at Pyrrha’s crazy eyes and kind of sort of threatens her, eventually panicking and running away like a true hero. Tira shows up afterwards to comfort her, solidifying her role as Pyrrha’s trusted “friend.” This story would be two episodes long if Pat wasn’t so completely and utterly useless.

With nowhere left to go, Pat returns to Z.W.E.I. and tells him that Dumas is actually Nightmare, which piques his interest. Left alone while Siegfried is fetched, Pat has a vision of his mother Sophitia promising him that Pyrrha can be cured of her malfestation if Soul Calibur is revived. Siegfried shows up as the vision ends and demands that Pat vows to fight Nightmare, even if doing so ends up requiring killing Pyrrha. He refuses, so Siegfried decides that he’s not worthy of wielding Soul Calibur anymore and tasks Z.W.E.I. with taking it back when Pat refuses to hand it over. That means we get to fight as the werewolf for this one for a change.

Once Pat’s sufficiently beat up, Z.W.E.I. starts to remind him that he promised to protect Pyrrha and all that, forcing him to acknowledge that Sophitia would have accepted her for what she is. Soul Calibur responds by glowing, and none of this makes any sense. He refused to kill Pyrrha in the first place, so this entire exercise was a roundabout, borderline incoherent way of making a simple point. Anyway, Pat is now a slightly less pathetic character because of these magical plot happenings.

Now that Pat’s magically less awful, Z.W.E.I. wants to fight again. This time we control Pat, and his moves have changed similar to how Pyrrha’s moves change in her malfested form. He never had much reach, but I could swear that his moves in this form have even less reach. That might just be an illusion brought on by the computer finally putting up a bit of fight, though. After beating up werewolf guy, Siegfried is suddenly cool with letting Pyrrha live, and he gives Pat time to go find Ivy since she knows about Soul Calibur and likely knows how to revive it.

Pat finds Ivy and she explains that it’d be bad if Soul Calibur was revived and the wielder sucked. Basically, she needs to duel first to be sure that this is a good idea. I managed to land his new Critical Edge attack (basically, a super attack each character can use when the bar next to their name is full) for the first time here, but it’s not that great. It looks nice, but seemingly does less damage than his previous one. Still, Ivy went down fairly easily thanks to a bunch of grabs. After being beaten, she reveals that Soul Calibur is one of three treasures that need to be reunited for it to be revived. The other two weapons belonged to Xianghua and Kilik, but Xianghua is sadly not in this game outside of her appearance in the flashback at 3:40.

After a little searching, Pat comes across Xianghua’s daughter Leixia and her traveling companions Xiba (successor of Kilik), Natsu (disciple of Taki), and Maxi. What follows is a fairly creepy sequence where everyone—including Maxi—starts pointing out that Pat is apparently attractive. They also want to fight as payment for their help, which means it’s time to beat the crap out of some replacement characters. First up is Leixia, whose moves are strongly reminiscent of Xianghua. The next fight is against Natsu, who has some really fun moves (I’ve used her in arcade mode) that she didn’t get to use. Third up is Maxi, who didn’t land a single blow. That just leaves Xiba, who’s annoying beyond reason or description, but has some surprisingly powerful moves. I might make a custom character based on him to have access to his moves without needing to put up with the grating personality.

And now, a little arcade mode

Arcade mode in this game consists of 6 fights, 3 rounds each, which is a departure from how previous games typically handled it. Still, I’m enjoying using it to learn the ins and outs of different characters, even if it didn’t work out so great with Leixia. I scraped by as her for awhile, but the final fight is always against Nightmare, and he appears to have been sped up somehow. That’s the only way I can explain him managing to consistently hit and interrupt a fast character like her. Seriously—after winning two straight matches against him, he managed to combo her over and over again and keep her on the ground to win three straight with barely any damage. I only barely beat him in the rematch. Either he’s been sped up, or there are some seriously insane combo possibilities here that can make it look like that’s the case.

[Click here to go to Soul Calibur V log #2]

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