50 Years of Video Games: Soulcalibur (Dreamcast)

9/9/99 is a day remembered fondly by American Sega fans, as that was the day the ill-fated swan song of the company hit our shores. The Sega Dreamcast wasn’t around long, officially discontinued in early 2001 as the company shifted away from hardware, but it occupies a soft spot in many people’s hearts because of how ahead of the curve the system was and, more importantly, how stacked its gaming library was with incredible games. The fate of the system in general was sealed by other factors, but even right out of the gate the Dreamcast provided an excellent example of the kind of game that would make it such a beloved system. While Soulcalibur released first in arcades in 1998, its Dreamcast debut in 1999 alongside the system wowed people in ways Tekken hadn’t with its home port. While Tekken and Soulcalibur provided extra playable characters over their arcade versions, Soulcalibur also provided plenty of additional play modes and, most notably, was graphically superior to its arcade counterpart, a harbinger of the arcade’s decline as console hardware was now outpacing it. Still, while it was on doomed hardware and was an omen of the decline of the arcade, Soulcalibur’s impressive design helped to popularize a fighting game franchise that would continue to be successful for decades to come.

One of Soulcalibur’s biggest strengths as a fighting game is its intuitive controls. In Soulcalibur all characters fight with a weapon of some sort, and while this can run the gamut from the hulking Astaroth’s body-sized axe to the small kunai of the ninja Taki, you’ll immediately have some understanding of how to use them due to universal control concepts. One attack button will execute horizontal slashes, another is dedicated to vertical swings, and the last major attack button allows your character to kick. While different directional inputs, strings of buttons, or even pressing the buttons at the same time can lead to attacks that provide many more options than swinging your weapon a certain way, this baseline helps inform the attack angle so you can fluidly pick where on your opponent you wish to hit. Soulcalibur is a 3D fighting game with a full range of movement, although moving to the sides does require a bit more force on the control stick to do swiftly than moving forward and back. This plays into the attack system as well, since you can sidestep a vertical strike to gain positional advantage but a horizontal strike covers that option. Vertical strikes are often stronger to compensate and better at getting around guards, the player holding a button to block but needing to duck to guard low. Kicks certainly have more variance across the cast in how they hit the opponent, but usually they are a good way to quickly strike an opponent before they can adjust their guard or hit you with an attack, the round-based battles to empty the opponent’s health bar often going through stages of risk where people start off willing to go for risky vertical strikes but whipping out the cautious kicks if things have gotten down to the wire.

Guarding has a few more aspects to consider in a fight, one being the guard impact parry where, if you can predict an opponent’s attack correctly, you can deflect it and leave them open to a counterattack. Guard impacts are a strong means of countering players who rely on repeating the same attacks or don’t vary up their game plan, and since the window for them isn’t too generous you can’t just throw out guard impacts since you’ll end up leaving yourself open to attacks you could have possibly guarded. A player who hides too much behind their guard can be grabbed and thrown for significant damage, Soulcalibur’s fundamental systems having plenty of baked in counters and options that lead to the flow of the fight shifting based on this clear interplay of systems. Different characters are also given their own advantages within this system to inform who you’ll want to pick for a fight and how you play them. The staff-wielding Kilik and the aristocratic dominatrix Ivy with her sword that shifts into a whip both have a significant range advantage but if you can guard or parry you can slip through and potentially deal a quick string of strikes with a character like the young blade wielder Xianghua or land a heavy blow with someone like the cursed knight Nightmare. If you pick someone like the nunchaku-swinging Maxi or the disturbing Voldo with his claw-like Katars your unusual move set can make you harder to predict, but beyond the unlockable boss character Inferno the fundamental systems at play and lack of options like projectiles makes Soulcalibur a game defined quite a bit by identifying openings, exploiting your knowledge of the opponent’s playstyle, and utilizing the deeper moves in your character’s kit to better take advantage of situations. Admittedly a few characters are built from similar molds, the Grecian warrior of the gods Sophitia and the self-explanatory Lizardman both using the sword and shield, but they are usually given a good amount of extra moves so you can identify clear strengths and weaknesses between them.

Multiplayer combat is certainly where all of this will shine the brightest although AI players are worthy opponents as well because they do show some attack favoritism, won’t perfectly read your inputs, and have the same limits you do in terms of certain attacks having clear lead-ins to give you time to potentially react. This will naturally vary based on the difficulty you set, but the important part is they can put up a fight across the various single-player modes and, if they are perhaps a bit too formidable, many of the game’s stages have boundaries you can knock them out of to instantly win a round with a ring out. While the strength of that option varies between stages due to shifting sizes and shapes of the flat arenas, canny players can often avoid this instant win condition but having it adds an extra consideration and win condition that can be exploited even if it might not feel all that fair to lose so suddenly in human vs. human matches. The stages themselves do have some interesting backdrops such as a 16th century Japanese castle that has been flooded as part of a siege, the massive statue of an underground cult’s god that looms over a lava pit, and the underground treasure vault where rats will actually run between the fighters’ feet as they duel.

The cast themselves have quite a lot of attention given to their appearance and wardrobe as well, the earlier mentioned Ivy perhaps sounding like a contradiction but one costume emphasizes her dominatrix edge with a scantily clad look while another dresses her more formally to represent her high-class attitude. The game takes place in 1586 and both uses that aesthetic well and subverts it, Yoshimitsu being a masked ninja with wooden cybernetics on the far end while Mitsurugi’s costumes evoke both traditional and wandering samurai archetypes. The cast itself has a rather global scope, the towering Rock a Native American, Cervantes an undead Spanish pirate, and Seong Mi-na hailing from Korea. While the mix of including recognizable historical settings and concepts from our Earth may clash with anthropomorphic lizards and zombie pirates, this is because there is one major supernatural force in the world of Soulcalibur that the story revolves around: Soul Edge. This cursed blade has unfathomable power but its influence can warp humans into monsters as well, but much of the cast find themselves pursuing it for one reason or another. Some crave its power but don’t know of the darkness it holds, others hope to destroy the blade to rid the world of evil, and some are all too happy to embrace the evil of the blade and desire it for that reason. Playing through the game’s Arcade mode you’ll learn where a character lies on that scale, although the amount of story present is minimal. You’ll fight six battles with random members of the cast before facing a character that is appropriate for your choice and then the final boss Inferno to receive an ending explaining how they handle Soul Edge, although this can lead to some odd situations. You can get a few character profiles from the manual, but the unlockable profiles in-game are earned for beating Arcade and for unlockable characters like Lizardman you would first see his ending without the context the profile provides that he is more than simply a lizard with some weapons and armor.

Arcade is a simple and quick way to get comfortable with characters, although a Training mode exists to better explore their depth. However, the main heart of the solo play experience would have to be the game’s Mission Battle mode. In this mode you are free to pick and swap the character you’re playing as whenever you wish as you select areas on a map to engage with fights under special conditions. These are presented as part of a broader search for Soul Edge, but their main focus is definitely on providing unique battle experiences that test your ability to adjust your fighting style. One mission may have strong winds you have to fight against to avoid being knocked out of the ring, another will feature a poison that drains your health but can be passed between fighters by landing attacks. Some battles will force you to fight a sequence of characters or the enemy might only take damage from certain attack types so you need to find your moment to strike. A battle may start where you have practically no health but regain it slowly so you need to defend well to survive or another might have such a short fight timer you’ll need to consider how to deal damage quickly, these special condition fights not only interesting challenges of your understanding of the game’s mechanics but a good way to teach you to think outside of the box.

Mission Battle also has close ties to many of the game’s unlockables, although it does so in an unusual way. Soulcalibur has concept art and promotional stills you can purchase with points that can only really be earned in great amounts in Mission Battle’s fights, and by buying certain pieces of art you can unlock things like more missions, new levels for all modes, or even martial arts demonstrations starring the cast. If the point to unlock ratio was well tuned this would be nice, but there are definitely periods where you can find yourself replaying missions to build up points to buy the art, and since the game doesn’t tell you if the art is tied to an unlockable, it can take a bit to unlock substantial content. While the well choreographed martial arts demonstrations that involved motion capture are impressive to watch, earning them is made a little less thrilling when you’re trying to find more meaningful content with your purchases.

Mission Battle has a lot to do in it even before you have to replay it a bit to earn that art and that does help with varying up the required replays, but there are still a few other modes to engage with mostly for the sake of enjoyment. Team Battle lets you link together a series of characters into a team where losing with one character just means the next one comes in to continue the fight, the battle ending once one side is completely exhausted. Survival has it where you instead only have the one character and can’t afford to lose, needing to make it through as many opponents as you can without losing a single round to try and eventually earn a high score. In a weird touch you can unlock the ability to swap characters around in the opening cutscene, but the game seems to be giddy to throw in extras and unexpected features, there even being fan art you don’t need to buy in the art gallery as a fun show of love to talented fan artists. While a deeper story mode would be nice so you can properly understand a character instead of piecing it together from profiles and Arcade endings, Soulcalibur provides plenty to do as well as a fighting system that achieves greater longevity thanks to its basis on the relationship between the two players rather than pure mastery of specific attack inputs.

THE VERDICT: Soulcalibur constructs a clear-cut set of interconnected fighting options, the direction of your swing and options for getting past an opponent’s guard all universal on some level but granted greater strategic depth based on the diverse cast’s specific forms of the fundamentals. Different attacking styles can exploit it in different ways without circumventing its core rules making it easy to understand why you took a hit and consider counters to it the next time it crops up. This weapon-based fighter set in the Middle Ages isn’t just sound when it comes to its fighting system and embrace of a heightened version of its period style but also provides a good amount of single player content to work through, Mission Battle shining with its subversion of the usual battle format while options like Arcade and Survival give you quicker clear-cut ways of testing your skills with a character.

And so, I give Soulcalibur for the Sega Dreamcast…

A FANTASTIC rating. Returning to Soulcalibur 1 after playing some of its sequels might make you realize a few of the the improvements made on it over time, but the series hasn’t really focused on fixing anything wrong with the original so much as further refining an already incredibly well designed fighting game system. Tellingly, even up to Soulcalibur VI you still see many characters with move sets that contain much of what was established here, and while moving around has definitely been improved with no more sidestepping slowness and guard impacts have had a rise and fall over the years in how effective they can be, this game achieves a strong balance that doesn’t upset the vital interplay of its attack and defense options. The playable characters all definitely have different strengths and weaknesses and ways to better make use of different attack angles or movement options, but having them all rooted in the horizontal-vertical-kick triangle in some way with a defense system built around it makes a universal set of skills easy to cultivate before you begin to consider deeper aspects like learning to understand your opponent’s approaches or finding out which fighting style gels with you. Fights are very much about learning how the other player will respond or attempt to break through your own guard and adjusting your fighting style accordingly, and with less focus on combos and more on meaningful strikes you do have moments to recover from bad guesses. Sprinkle atop this harmonious fighting system a variety of ways to play it or challenges that briefly tweak the rules for an interesting challenge and you get a game that can match its multiplayer potential with a fair bit of content to explore between competitive skirmishes, Soulcalibur certainly understanding the idea that a fighting game on a home console needs to not only entertain when the friends come over but should also provide something to do to entertain yourself or even better your abilities so you can put up a better fight next time you face a human player.

Soulcalibur doesn’t feel antiquated in the way some early fighting games do compared to their descendants and that’s definitely because it has few holes in its design to identify. A few things could be a touch smoother and you can always keep adding new characters and new modes to up the amount of content offered, but the gameplay’s edge has not dulled with age. Balancing the points system for unlocking art is probably the easiest area to identify as needing improvement even though the small bit of repetition that it currently requires isn’t too hard to stomach if you want to unlock the last little bits of the game’s minor content. In fact, the idea of having the art gallery tied to more substantial unlocks is a nifty way of making those hold more weight than they otherwise would, although the unnecessary mystery around if some artwork also comes with a brand new stage undermines that joy somewhat. Soulcalibur isn’t really held back by that choice though. While its sequels are sometimes more upgrades of it than iterations and thus Soulcalibur might not get picked over them often, its an easy game to get into both as a novice and long-time player thanks to a fighting system with easily understood ground rules that inform battle strategy even if you don’t know all the attacks. The Dreamcast was definitely welcomed in with a superb fighter, one that was not only superior to its arcade version but even to later rereleases like the Xbox 360 port that stripped out the missions that gave it greater longevity. It is certainly a shame when the best version of a game is locked to an old console, but this feather in the Dreamcast’s cap just adds to its legacy as a quality console whose life came to a far too early end, but this also spring-boarded a phenomenal series of weapon fighters to prominence, Soulcalibur not the start of its series but definitely where it started down its path to popularity and acclaim.