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Mediocrity at its Best

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 19
Date: September 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is basically a nicer-looking but watered-down version of SC1, and it's ultimately not something that's worth $$.

For one thing, many characters are locked, and in order to get all the characters, Namco forces us to humor their poor imaginations by sending us into "weapon master mode", where mission after boring mission must be completed in order to unlock new features, including the characters. There's no other way to do it. It gets worse.

Namco must have realized that their AI was lacking, so in order to make the story mode of the game more "challenging", they loaded the levels with ridiculous conditions. For example:

Sometimes there will be "earthquakes" or "booby-traps" that harm you, but not your enemy.

Sometimes, your enemy will randomly become invincible, such that even unblockable power-up attacks do no damage.

This is the sort of "fun" stuff Namco has in mind for us. I don't know. I paid for the game, I want all the characters, is that unrealistic? Why should anyone have to waste their time with these boring pointless missions in order to get what they already paid for? This is all just a stunt by Namco because they realized that the game, as it stood, was too mediocre. Their solution for this was to lock certain features and then make up "challenges" in order to get them. These aren't real challenges, though, they're just scenarios where Namco stacks the odds against you and hopes you get lucky. There's no skill involved. There's also no fun.

Basically, this game is a lame imitation of the first.

Graphics: 8/10
Game play: 5/10
Replayability: 1/10
Sound & Music: 1/10

That's right. The sound and music for this game sucks. People have made a big deal about its stereo features, but what's the point of having surround sound in a game when the sound it gives you is garbage? Be prepared for cheezy musical scores and even cheezier English voices for your characters (the one's you're allowed to have, anyway).

Soul Calibur 2 inferior to the first one

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: September 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I agree that controlling this game is great, but I also put a lot of weight to how the characters look like. Imagine playing Dead or Alive with Kasumi with a pair of baggy pants, flat boobs and short hair. Yucky right? Well, the women and men in Soul Calibur 2 look friggin ugly. Spawn and Necrid look awesome, even when they look ugly. I don't know how to explain it. The characters look like they came from a 90s video game. Even the old characters like Mitsurugi and Xiang Hua lost their polished look. I dare you to compare how the characters looked from the first one to this new one. The difference is astonishing. I think I'll trade mine at Ebay or something.

Good Game, But not So good on a Bad Platform

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 14
Date: November 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Soul Calibur II is an excellent game, but the Xbox Version, I daresay, is terrible. The special guest, Spawn, is a horrible fighter. Namco could have done better to pick a better guest star for the Xbox.
The graphics is way better then that off the Virtua Fighters, the Tekkens, and the Bloody Roar Series, but that is the only good part, and thats why it is worth one star.

Same game as Soul calibur 1

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: September 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

As first I thought this game was alrigtht, then i realized its almost exactly the same damn game as SC1. How can Namco fail to make real improvements on this game when the first SC was for dreamcast, which is a pethetically weak system, compared to Xbox. This just illustrates the fact that all xbox games, save for 1 or 2, fail to utilize the potential that the system hardware provides. Its really sad that i have a game system with a CPU that is powerful enought to support the most sophisticated programs in the world, and no games that are worthy of it.

Great game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 13
Date: August 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

...this game been in the arcade for month, that version is incredible i can only imagine what the home system version is like, if they made it better than the arcade machine as they did for sega dreamcast soul calibur, wich is by far the best game other than halo. 5 stars greatest game of all time up there with chess and foosball.

good yet bad

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: September 24, 2004
Author: Amazon User

sc2 is a really good game but after you beat most of the game it isnt much fun anymore.yet there are some flaws like that nightmare needs more cool moves or ivy with that stupid chain sword can basically defeat anyone because if you try to get close to her she just hits you with that sword and knocks you back.if the game is set on hard its impossible to beat her because if you cant get close enough to hit her and keep the offense she will whip the sword at you the entire match.also i think 2 player stinks because i like fighting stratigically like doing lots of combos or something but usually people just hit you wit the weapon over and over, and you cant do anything but hit and block and when there are a billion moves you can do on that game it gets old.story mode is ok but after you beat inferno the second time its all downhill because basically you just buy stuff and get character profiles by beating arcade mode and after that theres not much to do thats fun unless you delete the game data and restart which isnt much fun.the other thing is that when you get the unlocked characters you cant see the move list.but it is one of the best sword fighting kind of games there is so if your one of the sword-fighting type then you should get it.

Not For The Casual Fan

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: September 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Before you judge the criticisms I have of this game, I must make it clear that I am a true veteran of the first "Soul Calibur". I am able to beat the game on ultra hard in under three minutes, I can unlock everything in the game in just a few hours, and I've created lines at arcades of people trying and failing to beat me.

Now that that's out of the way, let me tell you why "Soul Calibur 2" falls short of meeting or raising the bar that the first "Calibur" set.

First of all, I find the difficulty level of this game to be really, truly insane. After finally clearing 'Weapon Master Mode', struggling with annoying mission objectives like 'Defeat the enemy under unknown conditions', and repeatedly having my [butt] kicked by little girls in short-shorts and samurais wearing Hammer pants, I was about ready to destroy my "SC2" disc. You have to be a really hardcore 'soul' in order to stick with this game, and even then, there's no doubt that you'll be shouting expletives at the screen and punching the walls late into the night.

Secondly, the A.I. which was just about right in "Soul Calibur" is now incredibly evil. They'll hit you while you're down and while you're in the air, guard impact constantly, and 8-way run around everything you do... as if the voice overs weren't bad enough already.

Still, "Soul Calibur 2" is able to deliver on many fronts. The controls are responsive, the graphics are gorgeous (on the Xbox version), and Spawn is great as an exclusive character. Unfortunately, the difficulty and the lack of updates will ruin this experience for many people, making "SC2" fall short of 'masterpiece' quality.

How can you say that Chris Schmell!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 26
Date: June 23, 2003
Author: Amazon User

How can you say that the game is awesome when you haven't even seen it yet. Don't you realize that by rating the game so highly before you have actually had a chance to review it, you are in effect, bossting the sales of the game. If the game's sales are boosted inapproporiately, then the manufacturer will think that they created a good game. This means that future games that they create may not be very good because the baseline for criticism was ignorant!! In other words, every review that is unfounded, hurts the quality of the game industry as a whole and keeps better games from coming out! Keep it to yourself if you have no idea!!

what can I say

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: November 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

i bought this game expecting to get a great party game like super smash bros. (N64 version rocks! im UNBEATABLE seriously)But this game is not like super smash bros. or your average casual fighting game. however i like the game and it is deep and fun true to what most people are probably saying. HOwever i have some complaints: #1 your friends will not be able to come over and just play because youll either beat them so bad theyll cry and get discouraged, or theyre too lazy to come over often enough to learn to master the game
#2 i was very surprised and bothered about how effective the button mashing is in this game. i mean if youre talented button mashers are no sweat, but it sucks to get whipped by some guy when youve been practicing for days.
#3 a bit of a catch 22- if youre too good your friends wont bother playing you, if you suck theyll laugh at you

ok on to the characters: i originally got really good with ivy(not professional like some freaks out there) but good enough to whip you. however i found that after playing with one character for a long time, its hard to break away and start from scratch with a new character, really hard. I recommend getting a head start with Ivy. Also, Raphael has the freakin cheapest move sets ever just push in the diraction youre going and tap B its basically guaranteed to get you smacked up for being cheap.

the levels: same things over and over again

do i recommend this game? for fighting game lovers- without a doubt. for more casual gamers- stay away from this one.

Decent, however....

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 5
Date: February 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I disagree with some who have labled this, a mindless button masher, however, my key dissappointment with this game was that there was too much text to read and not enough areas of animated sequence. For myself, [edited] from ps one still rules the roost. I am surprised that no one has mentioned this great title in the reviews. Part of the fun of each character was watching the video clip at the end. What I liked about [edited] was the different fighting styles. It required a lot of strategy, this game lets you get a lot more slack as a button masher.

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