Update 2 – Time played: 21 hours, 10 minutes
It’s time to step back into the tale of souls and swords. I’m back with another Progressive Looks entry for Soulcalibur VI! Since last time I’ve played a lot more of the Libra of Souls single-player mode, a fair amount of online, and I’ve messed around with the character creation and have attempted a few renditions of some of my favourites. This is my last entry into this series before I write the review, so let’s get started!
Since the online is the biggest thing I haven’t talked about yet, I figure I’ll start there. Soulcalibur VI’s up-front offering of online features isn’t great. It just has ranked matchmaking and “casual” player lobbies. I’m a pretty competitive person and I love to see myself improve at something over time, so I’m okay with the ranked matchmaking mode. However, the issue is that ranked is the only way of getting a quick match in SCVI. The casual lobbies take time to find and don’t put you into a match right away. So if you’re the type of person who doesn’t want to deal with the stress of thinking about your ranked stats (which is 100% valid), you’re either going to have to be very patient or just bite the bullet and play ranked. Honestly, the only reason I used the player lobbies was to play with friends, otherwise I just played ranked. Thankfully, the ranked matchmaking is pretty solid. I always found matches quickly and had relatively little downtime between games, and I could find games with quite a wide variety of different players. Online connections were stable for the most part, but I did run into a few matchups that were unplayable due to a bad connection. The worst offence SCVI commits online is the fact that player created characters are playable in ranked. That sounds pretty neat right? Well, with the way that the character creator works in this game you can resize certain accessories an shapes attached to your character. This has created some real monstrosities such as phalluses, people with large phallic objects attached to them, and a character with a cube sized so large that it covers their entire body and hides every single one of their animations making it impossible to reacted to any move. It’s kind of stupid out there.
The character creation tool itself is pretty cool, with all sorts of races to choose from and a wide variety of different outfits, shapes, accessories, etc. to choose from. That’s also not to mention all of the option sliders for colours and body shape. You can even have some degree of control over what they sound like with voice options. Unfortunately you don’t have every single piece of equipment unlocked for character creation right away. You have to unlock them with in-game currency, and there’s even some pieces locked behind DLC. With the basic options available I was able to make somewhat satisfactory characters based on the Tales series, and that alone was good enough for me! I also love how you’re able to look up other characters that people have made and uploaded and download them to use yourself. Overall the character creation mode is really nice and well done. Too bad you’re allowed to take them into ranked play though, just casual matches would have been fine.
It’s been an interesting time doing this Progressive Looks series. It was one of the very first things I started on Al Unlocked, but it’s taken me nearly a year to come up on the finish line. Lots of things happened and a lot of other projects pushed this one to the side, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t care about this one. Thanks so much for reading this Progressive Looks series on Soulcalibur VI and look out for the review. Stay tuned!
Soulcalibur VI
AL UNLOCKED 