Soul Calibur 5: Developer Team Explains Skimpy Story Mode
Video games can be compared to restaurants. If you are looking for excellent bulgogi, you should go to a Korean restaurant. If you are looking for fish and chips that hit the spot, you won’t go wrong with authentic Brit establishments that serve this dish. The same applies to games.
If you are looking for multi-layered storylines and fully fleshed out character development, you would do well to try the Assassin’s Creed series or Mass Effect (give or take the third installment’s ending). If you are looking for action games, then you look for titles that pretty much skip the story and get down to action. The truth of the matter is Soul Calibur 5 is a weapon fighting game. No more no less. While it’s nice to have a little bit of a story to glue together the differing action elements of the game, you shouldn’t really expect a fighting game to dig deep into dramatic and soul-wrenching psycho drama and interpersonal intrigues to deliver its entertainment payload. It wasn’t designed for that. Still, Soul Calibur 5 did get a bit of flak from the fact that its storyline was quite, well, thin.
It turns out that the game might not have turned out this way. According to the game’s director, Daishi Odashima, the game was originally planned to have four times more story mode content since the developers originally intended to explore each character’s back story. Unfortunately, due to manpower and time constraints, Odashima had to trim the story elements back a bit and the game launched with a story mode that is a fraction of its original planned size. The good news is that some of the other characters’ voice overs have been completed but not included in the finished version. Publisher Namco Bandai currently doesn’t plan to release these but let’s hope they change their minds in the future. An uncut version would be awesome!
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