Your battle grounds range from a pirate ship, arctic tundra, or the deck of the death star. The arenas you fight in have had the same attention the fighters had. The fluidity of the fighting is plain stunning. All of your characters are extremely detailed and animate extremely well. Graphically Soulcalibur IV is a feast for your eyes. As it is now, you either have to go for a cosmetically pleasing fighter or an idiotic character with the best stats. The game could have done a better job of making different items mesh together. All of the equipment you put on have different stats associated with them which would encourage you to pick the best armor but when you do that you end up looking like a complete fool. The sheer amount of items made my head spin when I first looked. The amount of customizable aspects for your fighters appearance is mind boggling.
If you are not satisfied by the present rooster you can create your own from scratch or you can tweak an existing character. There is nothing with putting a sexy lady in your game but Soulcalibur takes the line of decency clubs it over the head and then snaps it in half. While the new comers are a questionable addition, the most perplexing thing about the rooster is what was done to all of the female characters. This makes him extremely annoying to face and makes you almost invincible when you play as him. Especially Yoda, due to his obvious height issue you can’t hit him with high strikes or throw him. As was the case in Soulcalibur II these guest characters don’t fit very well into the overall continuity of the rooster. While all of the old favorites, like Mitsurugi and Nightmare, are back and ready to go Soulcalibur IV features Yoda and The Apprentice into the mix. With the large amount of fighters, the fighting styles vary enough that anyone can find a style can suit them. In terms of the rooster, Soulcalibur IV is really strong the character list is large and diverse. Overall the single player is exactly what you would expect and does nothing new or exciting. Alright maybe that’s the same idea as the other two modes. In this mode, you ascend said evil tower in an attempt to get to the top, fighting random enemies to get there. The only interesting mode to be found is Tower of Lost Souls. The arcade mode is exactly what you would expect as well, eight fights strung together with no real purpose other than testing your skills. You can easily beat this in 15 minutes which makes playing it almost completely pointless.
The story is a series of five disjointed fights with an underwhelming pre rendered cinematic to cap it all off. The single player portion of Soulcalibur IV is rather lack luster. With so many different types of weapons and fighting styles it remains unique from other fighters. The wide variety of weapons covers anything from razor sharp katana to obnoxiously large diamond swords. It mainly focuses around blocking and parrying different weapons then exploiting your foe in their time of weakness.
The fighting is exactly what you would expect if you have played any other game in the series. Soulcalibur IV is the newest game of the perpetually misspelled, weapon based fighting series.