I’ve never been that into fighting games. I have a hard time getting past the fact that
1. basically, you’re fighting in a 2D world — forward, back, up, down — which I mean, come on, I have actually played Doom, so it doesn’t exactly feel state of the art
2. real mastery seems to involve memorizing a hell of a lot of special move combos, which I am just too lazy/stupid to actually do
Nevertheless I’ve been playing a lot of Soul Calibur IV for some reason.
I think it’s partly because the environments and the characters just look so unbelievably beautiful. I suppose it’s a trade-off — the more pre-rendered animations and non-destructible, non-accessible areas there are, the prettier and more detailed they can make everything look. And everything does look damn pretty.
And it’s easy! I am the lowest, most bottom-feeding species of fighting-game player, lower even than the lizardmen of floor 6 of the Tower of Lost Souls, so I mostly resort to a lot of random button-mashing, punctuated by occasional blocks and one or two actual power-combos that I’ve bothered to figure out. But even that, which is pathetic, gets me pretty far.
But now I have a dilemma. I have now reached a point in the Tower of Lost Souls (which I am Ascending, not Descending) where there is a dude who is kicking my ass. Up till now I have been playing as various Ladies, mostly Xianghua, because let’s be honest, the stuff they do with breast-physics-modeling in this game is beyond anything anybody has ever done anywhere, in any medium, in the history of entertainment. But unfortunately Xianghua is not exactly overpowering in a fight.
Now take Algol. I don’t really know who Algol is, but dude is about 7 feet tall, and he’s so powerful his feet don’t even touch the ground when he walks half the time. He doesn’t even bother to carry a sword, because different weapons just sprout out of his body at odd moments when he needs them. Algol is trouble in a fight. He’ll ring you out in about 5 seconds if you even look at him. That’s who you want to be.
Unfortunately, he has no breasts. It’s a dilemma.
(p.s. I’m not going to comment on the existence of Star Wars characters in SCIV. Yes, you can play as Yoda and Darth and some random Apprentice. This is so blatantly non-canon that I can’t even talk about it.)
