Review: Soul Calibur III (PS2)

The fighting genre is, to quote David Attenborough on jellyfish, "deceptively simple." Utilising few buttons, they are very easy to pick up and very hard to master. Soul Calibur III, like its forebears, uses a very intuitive control system: anything fancier than kick, guard, horizontal or vertical attacks is enacted by combinations of buttons (which can be assigned to the shoulder buttons for ease of use). And should you not like any part of the control scheme, you can reassign any button - Gamestyle approves.

Set in Renaissance-era Palearctica, SCIII follows an assortment of warriors, some good, some evil, who all wish to either possess or destroy the cursed blade Soul Edge. It's an unintrusive plot, all the better for getting on with the business of hitting everybody else with big pointy sticks. The characters all have different weapons and fighting styles - some better for beginners, others favoured by experts - so there's plenty of room for you to find a favourite no matter what your skill level.

This game treats us to three new characters: Zasalamel, a scythe-wielding man who has been cursed with eternal life and seeks Soul Edge so that he may finally die; Tira, an insane teenage girl who wields a spiked hula hoop (you heard) and has devoted herself to serving evil; and Setsuka (quickly nicknamed Set-Square by the Gamestyle team), a woman who wields a sword hidden inside an umbrella. The series' established characters are an equally charismatic bunch (apart from Yun-Seoung, whose face we want to smash in), and we were pleased to see the return of all our favourites.

Instead of hosting guest characters as per SCII, Soul Calibur III has a very impressive character creation engine. It's one of the selling points of the game, and with it you can go wild making suitably deranged-looking mishmashes, or you can use it to make passable mock-ups of many existing game characters. Gamestyle managed to create pretty good likenesses of Prince of Persia, Dante and Samanosuke, among others. After selecting your character's sex and profession (which will affect the choice of weapons available to him or her), you can then choose from literally hundreds of pieces of clothing, armour and accessories; including monocles, clown shoes, pirate hats and a few articles from Tekken characters. You can change the colour of anything - even their knickers and socks! Disappointingly for such a big company as Namco, the character creator's not very good for making ethnic minority people - few of the faces are non-caucasian. You also can't choose different body types, so dwarf characters or towering Astaroth look-alikes are out of the question. Nor can you create animal characters like Lizardman - a handful of animal masks is as close as you can get.

There are three new modes to play with in SCIII: Tales of Souls, Chronicles of the Sword, and Quick Play Missions. Almost unthinkably, the Team Battle mode from SCII hasn't made a return. Why, Namco, why? If you still fancy playing against real humans, there are tournament and league options with the numbers made up by CPU opponents. As well as the above, there's a museum in which to view battles between CPU-controlled characters; and a very good practice mode in which you can be guided through various tutorials by the owl-headed blademaster Olcadan, or practice your moves on a CPU opponent who can be told to either stand there dumbly or fight back at one of seven difficulty settings.

Tales of Souls consists of around 12 (depending on how many of the hidden ones you find) battles linked by a story influenced by the decisions you make. Choose the right path and don't lose any of your fights, and you can unlock secret characters and different cutscenes. As stories, the Tales are rubbish (they contradict each other and can't all be true). Battle-wise, they're all pretty much the same: almost every character has to battle Zasalamel (including Zas himself - what's up with that?) and Tira. The Tales are a good way to earn gold, though, and the incentive of finding all the hidden stuff will keep you going back to them.

Quick Play boasts several tasks as odd as they are challenging. As well as fighting a giant statue and trying to hit the shopkeeper girls as they run away from you and taunt you, these include Sudden Death Rally (all moves are one-hit KOs, first person to reach yay number of consecutive KOs wins), Blast Chase (hit your opponent to pass the bomb to him or her, don't be holding the bomb when it explodes), and Scorer (do yay points of damage within the time limit). You won't earn much gold from most of these, but they're too much fun for that to be a worry. You can use your custom characters in this mode too, making it one of Gamestyle's most-visited events.

Chronicles of the Sword easily steals the show as the best new mode - so much so that you could make a whole game of it alone. You move your troops around the field map, taking over enemy strongholds and defending your own. If that sounds far too Age of Empires for a game like Soul Calibur, don't be fooled, it's a lot more fun than it sounds, and is a welcome addition to the fast fighting. After creating a new character to lead your troops, you then have to make your way in the world by commanding your squad through enemy lines. Your squad will move where they're told along the preset paths, and will automatically try to hack down any enemy stronghold in their way. As soon as you bring it down, it's yours - if you can defeat the enemies holed up inside. If you meet enemies out in the field, you can battle them in the normal Soul Calibur way, or let your people fend for themselves. As well as levelling up with battle, your fighters' success can depend on their unit type. Cavalry are the fastest, for example, but take ages to bring down strongholds, with knights having the reverse situation. Bandits are good at both but are poor at fighting in the field. What's best depends on the situation and on your own style.

Soul Calibur III is amazing, a brilliant showcase of the genre, and one of the best titles for the PS2. There's so much to do, and the visuals are absolutely gorgeous, it's astounding that the game all fits on one disc without collapsing under its own weight. It's also far more of an advancement over the previous game, which makes it unmissable for any fans of the series. Even if you don't normally consider yourself a fan of this kind of thing, it's well worth a look.

Rating: 8 / 10

Words by Anna Ghislaine