So I bought it yesterday and me and a friend went to town on it. It's great fun. The new critical edge system is definitely a nod to street fighter's super and ultra guages. So far there's no Yun Sung or Zasalamel which bothers me as those were some of my most used characters. The story mode is really deep compared to previous games as it really focuses on Sophitia's children with some cool looking cinematics but it's mainly sketches with sound effects. Character creation is cool although I see no points around here, no abilitites to be gained from equipping items, it all looks purely aesthetic. I did have a go with Ezio and he's pretty cool, he does fit well within the franchise. Strangely I have unlocked the Devil Jin fighting style, yes, from Tekken. As far as I can tell you can't play as Devil Jin himself but you can choose his style for a custom character, it reminds me of Heihachi in SC2. I'm going to crack on with the story mode today and try out some new characters as well as hit the training option hard. I tried to have a couple of online matches last night but it failed to find or create a game, my internet was dodgy last night so hopefully it wasn't the game having broken online functions again.
I made a character on SCIV called The Baron who used Zasalamel's moves, he was awesome, most people couldn't live with him online. I like this game but there's already a whole host of reasons for me to hate it. 1. No Yun Sung. I like using Hwang in the original two Soul games but when they removed him I had to start using Yun Sung, he's one of my favourites and he's simply not in this one, they haven't even replaced him like they did with Taki and Xianghua, he's just gone. 2. No Zasalamel. I loved using him on SCIV, simply gone. But they've left all the shit characters I don't like. WFT? 3. Two of the most rewarding mechanics in the Soul series were blocking and parrying (guard impact). They both required skill and were enjoyable. It was awesome on SCIII when me and my mates would go ages without hitting each other, we were just blocking the attacks. In SCIV they decided it would be a good idea to punish people who were good at blocking by implementing a mechanic where if you successfully blocked enough attcks your guard would be broken allowing the enemy to kill you instantly, this was retarded enough. But now they've decided to punish people who are good at parrying by putting a mechanic in there whereby instead of pressing forward + block, or back + block to parry an attack you now have to press back + R2, this uses a quarter of your soul guage and leaves you massively open to attack when you inevitably miss. So they've rendered to parries obsolete but they've added yet another mechanic called Just Guards where you have to quickly tap block for as few frames as possible in order to block and gain an advantage (I thought blocking was supposed to give you an advantage anyway but hey). This Just Guard technique is stupidly difficult to pull off as just gets you killed because you're trying to press block as little a possible. Project Soul really know how to fuck up a great franchise. Like I said I still like this game and it's early days yet but there's a few really, really bad things that shouldn't be in the game and loads of cool stuff that should be, but isn't. With Tekken now being complete shit and Soul Calibur on it's way there I have no doubt in my mind that Street Fighter is the king of fighting games at the moment.
Who uses block in soul calibur? Pfffff. We banned the use of block since SF2 in my neck of the woods.
I'm playing it now. It is really much worse that I'd hoped because of the stupid ideas they had but I'm having fun, at least it works online unlike sc4. I haven't been this disappointed with a game since ff12.
At first, for some reason, all I'd heard were complaints about 12. And recently I'm hearing about 75% exclaims on FF12!! lol In other words, even if he likes the game now, it might have been a letdown... until he got a logical opinion that is.