Soulcalibur V

Soulcalibur V is a fighting game developed by Project Soul and published by Bandai Namco in 2012. It is the sixth entry in the long running series.

Plot
Taking place 17 years later after Soulcalibur IV, the game centers around the new main protagonists, Patroklos and Pyrrha, children of Soul series veteran Sophitia, as they take on a long journey throughout Europe to get rid of the latter' "malfestation", a curse bestow a person who gets into contact with the evil Soul Edge.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Removal of many iconic characters, with most of them replaced by unlikable "successors" of them that have next to nothing going for them.
 * 2) * The excuse of the absence of veteran characters being too old is stupid as proved by Maxi, who is 56 years old in this game, yet he still looks identical to all the previous games. The same can be applied to Ivy.
 * 3) * Sophitia being dead is not an excuse since Cervantes was also dead, yet he was able to come back in a new body, so why can't Sophitia do the same?
 * 4) ** Regarding to the prior point, an artwork revealed that Raphael is also dead, and was revived as Graf Dumas, the host of Nightmare yet Raphael is fully playable in his regular form
 * 5) * Worst yet, pretty beloved characters like Zasalamel, Talim, Amy, Yun-Seong, Seong-Mina, and Rock didn't have any replacements, plus it makes no sense that they were gone since Zasalamel always reincarnates, Rock and Seong-Mina aren't even that old after 42 and 23 years respectively (especially the latter), and Talim, Amy and Yun-Seong are pretty young, even after between 15 (Talim) through 18 (Yun-Seong) years. Taki was replaced by her student, Natsu, who sealed the demon that Taki failed to kill by herself. Yoshimitsu was killed by his successor, Yoshimitsu the Second, who acts and fights just like him, and Astaroth's corpse was used to create clones of himself, which also acts and fights like him.
 * 6) They have alternate versions of Alpha Patroklos and Pyrrha Omega. The latter is too similar to the original Pyrrha, while the former has the exact same moveset of Setsuka from the previous game to the point his Critical Edge is the same as her Critical Finish in Soulcalibur IV. The only difference is that his range is shorter than Setsuka's, which also makes Patroklos Alpha an even crappier character.
 * 7) The Story Mode was nothing more than a incest-riddled fanfiction that ruins the series' lore, not to mention lazy and rushed-as-heck (it's only 20 matches in total). As if that wasn't enough, most characters barely had any screentime (Ivy, Maxi, Xiba, Lexia, Natsu, Voldo, Viola, Edge Master and Astaroth), and others (Cervantes, Yoshimitsu, Mitsurugi, Raphael, Killik, Algol, Hilde and Aeon) don't appear or even get mentioned in the story mode at all. It's said that the reason that this happened is because the game was rushed and originally the Story Mode was going to be four times longer.
 * 8) * During the Story Mode, you can only play as Pyrrha, Z.W.E.I., Patroklos and Alpha Patroklos.
 * 9) * The appearance of Edge Master in the Story mode is beyond stupid, and is just a Deus ex Machina to prevent Patroklos from dying and killing Pyrrha.
 * 10) * We didn't get to know anything about the new characters.
 * 11) * The last fight with Nightmare vs. Z.W.E.I. in the Story Mode is stupidly cheap.
 * 12) * The only likable character, Z.W.E.I., gets killed near the end.
 * 13) * The cutscenes in the story mode are awful. Most of them are only still images, and while the intention was to replicate the look of an old story book, the results are terrible.
 * 14) * The time skip was completely unnecessary, as its only purpose was to cut out beloved characters.
 * 15) * Patroklos and Pyrrha are the worst main characters in the series and are nothing more than puppets to the game's antagonists (Patroklos to Nightmare and Elysium, and Pyrrha to Tira), and while Pyrrha is somewhat tolerable, Patroklos on the other hand is extremely unlikable almost to the point of being insufferable, thanks to him being an arrogant brat, and an all-around scumbag in general. In fact, in his first appearance, he killed an innocent man just because he believed him to be a Malfested (just because he was pale and dirty), and when the man denied it, Patroklos's reply was "How unfortunate there is no way to prove it!" and murdered him in front of a crowd. His behavior during the rest of the story doesn't change that much, which led to him becoming one of the most hated characters in the entire Soulcalibur franchise. Sure he'd redeem himself later on in the plot, but that didn't help much. He is so hated that he is basically implied to be retconed in Soulcalibur VI when Cassandra succeeded in changing the timeline.
 * 16) Lackluster single-player content with too much emphasis on online play. It's an enormous downgrade from Soulcalibur IV which already cut out a lot of single-player content.
 * 17) No Museum Mode unlike in other installments.
 * 18) Legendary Souls has one of the worst AIs in a fighting game to date, as the characters are beyond cheap.
 * 19) Overall, the roster sucks. Only half of the cast return for the game while the other half is filled with garbage replacements, two versions of the same two main characters, and three mimicry characters, with Kilik being one of them (the other two are Elysium and Edge Master), leading to the roster having a lot of wasted character slots.
 * 20) A big chunk of the pieces to custom characters are DLC.
 * 21) The Arcade Mode is only six matches long and doesn't have endings or even a final boss unlike previous games. A sign that this game was rushed!
 * 22) The only DLC Character, Dampierre (from Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny), despite his comedic value, is awful to play as.
 * 23) Due to the removal of many characters, this game also has less styles to custom characters, and overall removed more styles than the ones they added, and used mimicry and clone characters as filler, a total of 7 styles were removed and only 3 new were added
 * 24) The styles of Algol and Ezio cannot be used to create a character.
 * 25) Weapons are now only cosmetics, unlike the previous game where they had different stats and abilities
 * 26) Many characters suffered a huge reduction in their moveset.
 * 27) The DLC support only lasted three months
 * 28) Many of the assets of this game were used for the awful free-to-play game Soulcalibur: Lost Swords, instead of fixing the shortcomings of Soulcalibur V
 * 29) There are special costumes and weapons in legendary souls mode (the SC4 versions of Nightmare and Siegfried and Inferno Cevantes alongside the SC4 versions of the Soul Calibur and Soul Edge) that cannot be accessed by the players in anyway unless they hack the game, this cheesed off a lot of people that a small community of hex editors was formed to make this playable.
 * 30) It almost killed the Soulcalibur franshise, and stayed dormant until the release of Soulcalibur 6.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The gameplay in this installment is the best in the series up to that point.
 * 2) The newcomers who aren't replacements are actually decent (Viola and Zwei).
 * 3) The character editor is actually good, and unfortunately better than 6's due to having more clothing options
 * 4) Unlike the Star Wars characters in Soulcalibur IV, Ezio from Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood and Revelations really fits the setting and is a great guest character.
 * 5) The graphics look good.
 * 6) The voice acting is great.
 * 7) There is DLC that allows you to use music from all the previous titles (including Soul Blade on the PS1)
 * 8) It lets you use Devil Jin from Tekken as a style for your custom character.
 * 9) Thankfully, Project Soul learned from their mistakes by rebooting the franchise with mh:awesomegames:Soulcalibur VI (in the same style as MK9, also being a sequel), which brought back iconic characters and fixed many of the problems this game has.
 * 10) The mode for creating characters is very cool, since you can create any character from another game, anime, book, TV series, movies or even characters from previous SC games that didn't make it into VI. (proof of this are the YouTube videos where several users created some characters and they were great).

Reception
While it generally received positive reviews from critics, Soulcalibur V became divisive among fans of the series, due to a number of changes Project Soul made, such as the removal of fan favorites in place of their inferior versions, the rushed story mode, as well as Patroklos, whom they agreed he's the worst newcomer in the game due to his repulsive actions and arrogance. The game would wind up selling 1.38 million units, which is less than its predecessor. Thanks for its underperformance, the franchise went dormant for 6 years until it was revived with Soulcalibur VI.

Videos
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