Soul Calibur IV
Set to finally reveal the origins of this ongoing story, Soul Calibur IV features new and familiar faces from across the galaxy, seeking rival swords for vengeance, honor and salvation. Shown in amazing 720p HD graphics, new and classic characters fight in a revamped battle system to revolutionize the fighting game genre. From character customization to online battles, the features of Soul Calibur IV help propel this venerable franchise into the next generation of gaming. Sith Lord Darth Vader appears exclusively on the Playstation 3 system. Story - Uncover each character's story line as you battle to reveal their motives Arcade - Take on the challenge in battle after battle in this classic arcade mode Tower of Lost Souls - Fight in special battles to challenge your fighting skills and customizing skills in order to reap the rewards Training - Practice your skills to earn your place as the ultimate weapon master Character creation - Create a character unlike any other, with custom looks and items influencing their skills and abilities, which will affect the outcome of your impending battles Museum View - movies, backgrounds and art that you have unlocked Standard VS - Battle one on one in this classic match up for ultimate bragging rights Special VS - Take your customized SC character or newly created character into the world arena and prove if your creation is the best in the world Online Battles - Multiple online versus modes and ranking styles will allow fans to test their fighting and management skills
The Classic Fighter Returns Return to witness the epic struggle between the spirit sword, Soul Calibur, and the cursed sword, Soul Edge, in Soul Calibur IV. Warriors from far reaches of the galaxy battle to control the powerful swords and use them for their own goals. Should these fighters succeed, they will face the ultimate judgment. The ongoing story continues with new revelations, exciting new gameplay features and stunning visuals. And perhaps most exciting of all, a character from the Star Wars universe will also make an appearance. | Key Features
- Newest addition to the Soul Calibur series features thrilling next-gen graphics brimming with intensity
- Continues the struggle between the spirit sword, Soul Calibur, and the cursed sword, Soul Edge
- Features the infamous Darth Vader as a guest character
- Expanded customization options let you give your character a personalized look and specific abilities
- Take both customized characters and original favorites online for the first time
Exclusive Special Characters
Revered and feared Star Wars Sith Lord Darth Vader appears as a guest character in the PlayStation 3 version of Soul Calibur IV. In addition to that thrilling fact, you'll also discover expanded customization options that let you bestow your character with a personalized look and specific abilities. And, for the first time, you'll be able to take both customized characters and original favorites online to challenge an entire world of fans. Completely reinvented but with the same intensity you've come to know, Soul Calibur IV provides an adventure that never disappoints. | 
Thrilling Next-Gen Graphics
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Online Challenges!
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Soul Calibur IV Accessories
 PlayStation 3 Dualshock 3 Wireless Controller
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Iron Man (Single-Disc Edition)
Grand Theft Auto IV
Sony PlayStation 3 Blu-ray Disc Remote
PlayStation 3 80GB
The Dark Knight (+ Digital Copy and BD Live) [Blu-ray]
Gran Turismo 5 Prologue
Resistance 2
Soul Calibur IV Reviews
until tekken 6 this is amazing. But cervantes is still my favorate. Darth vader and yoda are great additions also the apprentace. Visuals are amazing and gameplay is nice. this game is the best out so far. online and against your friends. PSN= Cannibal35
All in all its still fun I would recommend this game. I have all the games from Soul Calibur but the story modes were better in the other games.
It's possible to determine how muscular a character is and how much physique they have. Another addition in creating a character is physique customization. These include a dual-sword Samurai woman, a club-wielding ogre girl, and a bizarre moon person. Hilde is the only real "new" Soul Calibur character; she's a female knight with a neat fighting style that uses both a sword and a spear, and she's fun to play as. For women, a high physique means that they are busty and curvy, and a low physique means that they are thin and flat.
The only nice-looking clothes in the game is the armor, which is all intricately designed and looks really fantastic. When a character's soul gauge decreases enough, they go through a "soul crush", which is a short window for the other player to perform a Critical Finish. As it is, though, Soul Calibur 4 only deserves a 7/10. SC4 took all the complaints about SC3 and made them worse, and lost most of the things that made the series fun in SC1 and SC2. In previous SC games, there were a wide variety of match styles and gameplay styles that could be used for multiplayer. In most cases, it's usually easier to just kill an opponent than to try to hit them while they guard enough times to cause them to lose their soul gauge. The clothes for Create a Character deserve special mention. Furthermore, there are only two ways to unlock new clothes - either by going through the Tower of Souls (and unlocking only a single piece of clothing per floor) or by getting "honors", SCIV's version of achievements, which range from simple tasks like "beat story mode" to more complex ones like "land 10,000 total attacks on an opponent".
However, after Soul Calibur II, the series seems to have lost its way and lost focus. Customizing a character also adds stat bonuses and skills. Really, it feels like SC4 is trying to do too many things at once, and isn't accomplishing any of them. Supposedly, there's an alignment system in SC4 that changes how good/evil your character is (or, at least, there's different endings in story mode where a custom character will either claim Soul Calibur, Soul Edge, or both, depending on his or her alignment), but unlike SC3 it's not visible, and the voices don't change either. The game's backgrounds are pretty good, as well, but nothing particularly noteworthy or epic like some of the stages from SC2 and SC3.
Each character has a different weapon, ranging from axes to swords to staves. If the game consisted wholly of a more fleshed-out character maker and a multiplayer game with some more game types, it might be better. There's also a system of parrying and dodging, as well as traditional guarding. It's also possible to get a "Ring Out" by knocking the enemy out of the arena, but in SC4 this option feels really cheap - what's supposed to be a detailed swordfight quickly becomes "who can throw the opponent out first" due to SC4's poorly handled physics. Each character has different moves that are based on a combination of vertical and horizontal-based attacks. Both fighters in a match have a "soul gauge" that increases when they hit their opponent and decreases when they guard against enemy attacks.
Raphael's adopted daughter Amy returns from SC3, where she was a guest character; she uses a style similar to the Rapier style from SC3. Different clothes in the game provide different bonuses, either to stats (attack, defense, and health) or to skill points. None of them are particularly well-designed, though, and they're not even that fun to play. I have literally been part of a battle online that consisted of my opponent and me (both Mitsurugi) either attacking with that move or guarding against it and hoping for a lucky parry so that it would be our turn to attack with that move. The graphics in this game are really good - as mentioned, the armor in particular looks really nice.
In addition to story mode, there's also a more traditional arcade mode where you fight eight single enemies in a row; this more resembles the single-player mode of previous Soul Calibur games. The major new game mechanic introduced for SC4 is the "Critical Finish" mode. It seems like the costume creators spread themselves too thin; while there's only a few armor sets for female characters, there are at least four uniforms that are just there to be goofy - a maid uniform, a waitress uniform, a stewardess uniform, and a nurse uniform. It's possible to look for a player within your level range, but it doesn't really matter that much, since levels have nothing to do with ability.
The team-based system used for single player does not get used for multiplayer, despite its prominence in the single-player mode. The game plays smoothly if your connection is four or five bars, but starts to lag insufferably at 3 bars and lower. The costumes for the main characters have gotten a bit more ridiculous in most cases, but the new character, Hilde, has a really neat set of armor, and the create-a-character option allow for a lot of good armor choices as well. However, in Soul Calibur IV, while the basic system has been carried over, in a lot of places it feels much less technical and much more like "hit them with the same attacks that you know work". In SC3, it was enough to go through the strategy-like sub-mode to unlock new clothes; in SC4, it feels a lot more limited, and since Create-a-Character is one of the most emphasized modes in the game, it feels really unusual. When encountered in arcade mode, he is far more difficult to defeat than any other character in the game, and it's even worse when someone picks him in online mode.
In previous games, the system was fun and balanced, allowing for fast-paced but highly technical fights. There are a few new characters in the game. In SC4, the two styles are limited to a regular match, with or without bonuses provided by equipping different weapons and items. There is a secret goal on each floor that is hinted at when you start the floor; completing this objective unlocks a new piece of clothing for use in creating characters. In addition to the Critical Finish, the other new game mechanic is breakable armor.
Each character has three "segments" - high, middle, and low. Vader and Yoda are both decent characters, but The Apprentice is ridiculously overpowered, possessing one of the highest speeds in the game as well as high damage and force powers. None of these make sense in the game's context; they're just there so you can play dress-up. The online mechanics are, at least, smooth and relatively problem-free, if a bit simple. Each set of floors has a different "gimmick" and a different boss; for example, one set of floors has a "clown" or "harlequin" gimmick, while another has a "knight" gimmick. There are a couple different modes for single-player. As a whole, Soul Calibur 4 is a disappointment that can be fun, but for the most part isn't.
The new mode used in most of SC4's single player game types is a tag-team mode, where if you have multiple characters on your team, you can swap them out in the middle of a battle and let the swapped-out character regenerate health. Finally, there are five characters guest-designed by prominent Japanese artists. Repeated attacks to an area will break off the upper layer of armor on that area (leaving undergarments intact, of course) and make that area more vulnerable. There are levels in online play, but unlike games like Halo 3 and Metal Gear Online, it's not an average of how good a player you are, but rather a tally of how many times you've won (like an RPG). The basic story mode consists of going through five fights against various opponents. However, a lot of basic clothes that would make sense in the game - for example, a set of tights that covers the whole body, so that the armor isn't just sitting on bare skin - aren't actually in the game. There are also 2 guest characters from Star Wars in each game - both game modes have The Apprentice from the upcoming "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed", the PS3 version has Darth Vader, and the XBOX 360 version has Master Yoda.
You can either add items and change weapons for their default costumes (to give them stat increases) or you can give them their own costume made up from Create-a-Character parts, though for whatever reason you can't use their "normal" hairstyle and have to use their 2P hairstyle (or any of the other create-a-character hairstyles) if you want to customize them. The audio is decent, but there's nothing really worth pointing out in terms of music or voicing. The difference between the extremes is clear and easy to see (something that's fairly rare for this type of "sliding bar adjustment"), and it's neat that they let you change it. In story mode, you're usually fighting teams of 3 enemies, and depending on the character you play as, you may get allies of your own. The new addition for multiplayer is online mode, which functions the same as regular versus mode in that it only has two modes. They don't even have the unique styles of the Star Wars characters to make up for it. The story mode is much shorter due to the fact that there are multiple enemies in each fight.
It doesn't really add much to the game, and as a game mechanic feels kind of useless. The core mechanics remain roughly the same. Soul Calibur IV is in many ways a victim of that lost focus. The same goes for voices, as well, except that the personalities of each voice are also very different. All in all, the new characters for this game, other than Hilde, feel like wastes of time and space. Creating a character has been simplified and improved in many ways. One specific example of this is Mitsurugi's standard one-two vertical combo, which hits fast enough that if you catch someone in it, they won't be able to counter with any move because it hits so fast that it interrupts any move they try. For men, a high physique means that they are bulky and wide-chested, while a low physique means they are thin and scrawny.
There's 8 faces for males and 8 for females, but two of each are really young and two of each are really old, which really means there's 4 average faces for males and 4 average faces for females. The Critical Finish is an instant-kill attack; however, the shortness of the life bars and the rarity of finding someone who guards enough to actually lose their soul gauge means that it's not an over-spammed attack that gets used all the time, but rather a way to finish off a long and difficult battle with a tide-turning attack. Create-a-Character is in many ways the heart of this game's unlockable content. The unique Create-a-Character styles from SC3 have been removed, so every CaC now uses a regular fighter's style (however, you don't have to go unlocking styles like you did in SC3, either). A lot of the systems and gameplay modes are really poorly handled. Skill points are used to assign skills of various categories, ranging from things like "automatic guard impact" or "automatic unblockable attack" that will randomly aid you in battle, to "health drain" that sucks health out of enemies and gives it to you, to skills that increase your stats when fighting enemies of a certain gender or alignment. Thankfully, in versus mode (regular and online) there is an option to play the game without any stat modifiers or skills, which means that you can just have fights between characters without worrying about that stuff.
In one team match, I won consecutive battles by simply standing near the edge and using the same throw any time a new challenger appeared on screen. The only really fun thing in the game is messing with create-a-character, but despite the physique customization options, the incredibly limited number of faces, voices, and clothing sets kind of puts a damper on the whole experience. The hairstyles, at least, are relatively diverse and cover a wide range of styles, short and long. For this reason, you can customize regular characters with Create-a-Character, too. I had a character who had a kindly voice and only said kind things, but who still claimed Soul Edge (the evil sword) in the end. This is a mode where you go through floors of a tower, two or three at a time.
There's a variety of faces and voices, but it seems like there's too many "extremes" (really young faces and voices, really old faces and voices) and not enough average stuff. The skills and stats are kind of neat, but they also affect the character-creation process, when you feel like you have to buy stuff that gives good stats, instead of just getting stuff that looks neat. None of these have a unique style; each simply takes the style of an established character and uses their own unique weapons. While the other clothes look okay, only the armor and the weapons really show off the game's graphics, with their reflective properties and intricate detailing. The multiplayer modes in this game took the largest hit.
Soul Calibur, in its heyday, was one of the most respected fighting series. The other new single-player mode is the Tower of Lost Souls.
I would have given it two stars the day I bought it, but now I shooting for five. Anyhow, I highly recommend this game if you like fighting games with precise movements and quick combos. (I hate getting stuck in COD4 if you have something that you need to get done all of the sudden). Matches rarely go past ten minutes making this a perfect online multiplayer game if you don't have a long time to devote to it. I must say that my first impression after purchasing this game was "Am I missing something here." I chose Darth Vader in arcade mode and the credits were rolling within ten minutes of fighting a few different characters. A few days later I practiced using many of the different characters and the hundreds of moves that come with them and I realized that this isn't just a regular button mashing fighting game. The controls are VERY precise and pressure sensitive.
In my opinion this game really shines when you go online. There's a lot to learn here. Needless to say, I was disappointed. You might be pleasantly surprised. I tried fighting online, but couldn't ever get into a match due to heavy usage. After a week or so of buying this game it got a whole lot easier to find available matches. If you have this game, but don't like it, give it another try. I love the fact that you can fight opponents online with the same precise controls as in the single player game.
This is a must have two player versus game. Not a lot of differences from SC3 but i loved 3 so that's fine. Great Game. mainly got it to be Darth Vader. He is the man and the apprentice is also very good.
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