January 31st can not come soon enough

[Shard]

Why, you ask?




That's why. Ahhhhhhh yeah, Calibur 5 baby.

Get hype

[Thanatos]

I play ivy.  but I never really played against people.

A black guy came into my dorm room one time and absolutely obliterated me three games in a row as that samurai guy. 

I salute you, black samurai.  You weren't as hot as the girls who liked gta 3, but you were an excellent random video game experience.

[Swash]

I always played as the fencing guy.  Can't remember his name.  Story-wise he was a bit of an ass, though.

[Solwyn]

I always played as the fencing guy.  Can't remember his name.  Story-wise he was a bit of an ass, though.

Raphael? Yeah he was kinda a douche. Kind of like the arthas story. Started out trying to make things better and inevitably ended up trying to destroy everything.

[Shard]

I actually get to compete in a pre-release Soul Calibur 5 tournament on December 4th, so I'm pretty hype about that, especially as an avid tournament player.

There is something deeply satisfying about knowing that you're considered one of the very best (insert your character here) players in the world, and that it's true, haha.

[The Hanged Man]

I remember when enrolling for colleges some guys were playing Soul calibur 4 in their dorms. They all left in disgust after I beat them all 

[Shard]

I hear about stories like that all the time, haha. And the funniest thing is, all of those people (myself included) all think they'll be hot shit when they go to their first offline tournament because they beat everybody online, and they beat all their friends.

And then they get scraped, hard. God, I got beat down so bad at my first tournament. It made me www.frownface.sad . Most leave and don't come back after that. Took me a long time to get to the point where I could compete on the level of tournament players who had been doing it since before SC 4 even came out. Satisfying though


Unless you're Woahhzz....bastard. He's a local philly player who was so good his first time playing that it made a lot of the tournament players sick, haha. It took him maybe 6 months to go from never having played a soul calibur game to being recognized as the best tournament player in the world. Don't get me wrong, it's sort of nice that the best player is a local, but god damn, it gets tiresome having to play/lose to him all the time, haha.

Edit: let it be known I wasn't trying to imply anything about your ability personally, was just relating my own experience

[karategoldfish]

so, raphael was the character who just had that really quick sword jab, right? so i could like. always win by repeatedly pushing A as fast as possible, and then boom im undefeated and all 4 of my videogame-loving brothers are crying a pile of tears and sweat in the corner.

i am awesome etc

[Swash]

Raphael was fun to toy with people too.  All the ripostes and feints.
I've forgotten so much about the game I would probably suck dirt very quickly if I gave it a try now.

[Shard]

KG, you mean mash B over and over.

And your brothers do not adapt very well to spamming 

hehe

[BlueCross]

I'd ask for clarification about the last three posts but I probably wouldn't understand that either.


*moves on to other (but not necessarily better) things...*

[Shard]

Haha, not much to clarify on.

Raphael uses a rapier, he has a series of quick lunging pokes you can use by pressing 6B, 6BB, or 6BBB.

And, being a fencer, he has feints and ripostes that he can do out of stance

Edit: Oh, and KG's brothers suck at Soul Calibur, haha.

[KMD]

I'm not much of a Soulcalibur player, but they honestly all look like pretty much the same game. With all the other big titles coming out this season, I just kind of yawn.

[Shard]

that's what comes from the not much of a fighting game/soul calibur player thing. Sure, the characters all have roughly the same moveset, and the core mechanics rarely change much (though they're changing more in SC V than they ever have in a previous calibur game)

but what sets each game apart are the technical differences. The frame data of each move, their advantage/disadvantage on hit, their advantage/disadvantage on block, what stuns on normal hit, what stuns on counter hit, is it shakeable or is it a crumple stun? Does it tech trap? If so, which direction? Does the hitstun allow you to combo further? etc

You can give two characters the exact same moveset, but if their numbers are tweaked in different ways they can end up playing like two completely different characters

[Shard]

5 in particular, though, is changing the core mechanics more than any prior calibur game.

They added meter, that builds when you attack/take damage (every fighter seems to have meter now). Meter can be used to do EX moves (enhanced versions of regular moves), and it can also be used to do a Critical Edge, which is like a super/ultra from SF4. Each characters has a different purpose, some are more for combos, others for punishes or positional advantage.

Guard impacting will also use meter, but will be more effective than guard impacting in previous games

To replace guard impacting, there's now a mechanic called Just Guard. If you press block at the frame a move would hit you, you automatically perform a justguard which cancels a lot of the frames of block recovery that the move you blocked would normally force on you.

They kept the soul gauge/block gauge from 4, which I'm glad, because I really liked that mechanic, but instead of being able to perform an automatic round ender (Critical Finish) like in 4, it just provides a large hit stun state where you can hit anything you want, including a Critical Edge. (oh, if you aren't familiar, the soul/block gauge is a gauge that is hurt everytime you block, though it refills when yo'ure attacking. It's to prevent the overly turtling defensive style that plagued 2 and 3.

They're also adding a new kind of stepping called quick stepping that you get by double tapping up or down to step.

So there's a lot of core mechanics changes coming in 5.