I've played enough of this now to form some basic first impressions.
First thing to get out of the way is that this is definitely better than SC4 was. The visuals are better, backgrounds are prettier and the character models are higher poly. Seems to be a pretty solid 60fps on the 360 to my eyes, but I might be wrong.
The English voice acting is pretty terrible, with only Ezio being pretty decently voiced (they've used his normal Assassin's Creed VA, and it shows). Playing as Pyrra is painful because of the constant 'Oh, I'm sorry' and 'did that hurt?' whining. There's an option to switch the voices to Japanese though.
Modewise, there's a pretty bare bones arcade option which has four 'courses' of 6 battles to fight through. Story mode is interesting, but has you playing as Pyrra or Patroklos in pretty much every battle. You'll need to play through both these modes to unlock everyone. There's a 'quick battle' mode where you battle against character creator characters built by the dev team. Somewhere in here you can unlock a 'Devil Jin' style for the character creator.
The character creator is now seriously impressive. It builds on SC4's by also allowing you to change the pattern on the clothing, and 'stickers' and clip various props onto your character like gun holsters etc... You can also *finally* recolour the character weapons, so you don't have to worry anymore about building your character to match the weapon colours.
Online is pretty impressive too. Your player card can have a custom shot made by taking a picture of a character in character creator and adding various frame elements. Ranked is as you'd expect. Player matches use a lobby that really should be the gold standard for how fighting game lobbies should be. You have the match in progress occupying most of the screen, but there's a chat window so you can text chat along with everyone else.
There's some mode called 'global colleseo', which is some giant lobby that can hold 50 people at once. There seems to be one of these big lobbies for each major world city. I think they're going to be doing some tournament stuff with this further down the line.
Character wise I've not tried everyone yet. Pyrra and Patroklos play like hybrids of Sophitia and Cassandra from earlier games. Patroklos is more aggressive. Ezio is really easy to use and pretty fun, lots of interesting projectile options. Viola looks like being worth learning, she has a glowing energy ball she can send out and then call back, which lets you set up unblockables by hitting the opponent from two directions at once.
Quite a few characters don't return in this one, but those that have seem pretty much the same as before.
In terms of unlockables...
Fight system is mostly as you'd remember. They've ditched those weird 'fatality' moves from the previous one and have gone with a super meter instead. Some of your moves can be 'EX'ed' with meter by pressing all the attacks at the right time. And there's a super move available with a double fireball then all three attacks. Meter is also needed to guard impact now, although there's a SF3 style parry that requires you to tap block at the right times. I can't even get close to the right timing for that yet, but I expect it'll get more important down the line.
Summary? It's better than SC4, the single player is still a little lightweight compared to earlier Calibur's (especially SC3, I doubt they'll ever top that for single player), and the multi player has had a lot of really impressive work done on it.
First thing to get out of the way is that this is definitely better than SC4 was. The visuals are better, backgrounds are prettier and the character models are higher poly. Seems to be a pretty solid 60fps on the 360 to my eyes, but I might be wrong.
The English voice acting is pretty terrible, with only Ezio being pretty decently voiced (they've used his normal Assassin's Creed VA, and it shows). Playing as Pyrra is painful because of the constant 'Oh, I'm sorry' and 'did that hurt?' whining. There's an option to switch the voices to Japanese though.
Modewise, there's a pretty bare bones arcade option which has four 'courses' of 6 battles to fight through. Story mode is interesting, but has you playing as Pyrra or Patroklos in pretty much every battle. You'll need to play through both these modes to unlock everyone. There's a 'quick battle' mode where you battle against character creator characters built by the dev team. Somewhere in here you can unlock a 'Devil Jin' style for the character creator.
The character creator is now seriously impressive. It builds on SC4's by also allowing you to change the pattern on the clothing, and 'stickers' and clip various props onto your character like gun holsters etc... You can also *finally* recolour the character weapons, so you don't have to worry anymore about building your character to match the weapon colours.
Online is pretty impressive too. Your player card can have a custom shot made by taking a picture of a character in character creator and adding various frame elements. Ranked is as you'd expect. Player matches use a lobby that really should be the gold standard for how fighting game lobbies should be. You have the match in progress occupying most of the screen, but there's a chat window so you can text chat along with everyone else.
There's some mode called 'global colleseo', which is some giant lobby that can hold 50 people at once. There seems to be one of these big lobbies for each major world city. I think they're going to be doing some tournament stuff with this further down the line.
Character wise I've not tried everyone yet. Pyrra and Patroklos play like hybrids of Sophitia and Cassandra from earlier games. Patroklos is more aggressive. Ezio is really easy to use and pretty fun, lots of interesting projectile options. Viola looks like being worth learning, she has a glowing energy ball she can send out and then call back, which lets you set up unblockables by hitting the opponent from two directions at once.
Quite a few characters don't return in this one, but those that have seem pretty much the same as before.
In terms of unlockables...
Fight system is mostly as you'd remember. They've ditched those weird 'fatality' moves from the previous one and have gone with a super meter instead. Some of your moves can be 'EX'ed' with meter by pressing all the attacks at the right time. And there's a super move available with a double fireball then all three attacks. Meter is also needed to guard impact now, although there's a SF3 style parry that requires you to tap block at the right times. I can't even get close to the right timing for that yet, but I expect it'll get more important down the line.
Summary? It's better than SC4, the single player is still a little lightweight compared to earlier Calibur's (especially SC3, I doubt they'll ever top that for single player), and the multi player has had a lot of really impressive work done on it.
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