Alright, let me start this review off by saying that Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny is a great game … a great game. I need to make this perfectly clear, because there are a lot of things that I find, shall we say, annoying, about it that don’t actually affect the quality all that much, or have anything to do with gameplay, graphics, story or anything else that factors into making a good video game. I could have easily said “Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny is a portable version of Soul Calibur IV” and stopped my review there, because that’s basically what it is, and Soul Calibur IV was awesome, and when all is said and done there is nothing more you really need to know other than that. If you are a die-hard or even casual fan of the Soul Calibur series you can stop reading my review right now, go out, buy the game and you will have a lot of fun with it. However, if you are intrigued by what could have possibly annoyed me so much in a game that I have already admitted is both good to play and worth the money read on.

Still with me? Good. Like I said before, Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny is a portable version of Soul Calibur for the PSP. This is your first problem. Soul Calibur is a fighting game franchise which means that its success and popularity are totally dependent on how successful you are at finding other true to life human players to square off against. With Soul Calibur IV for the Xbox and PS3 this was easy because all you had to do was invite your friends over, give them a controller, and keep the booze flowing, and they could spend the whole night having an awesome time with this tale of souls and swords eternally retold … and beer. However, to play a portable game in versus mode, you have to find someone else with the game and a PSP who is willing to sit across the room from you while staring at a tiny screen in front of them instead of say making eye contact and having a mature conversation. This is a much rarer occurrence and even when you do luck out and find a PSP gaming buddy it feels damn socially awkward, way too socially awkward to allow for long strings of back and forth versus matches. Normally this would be made up for by the inclusion of online multiplayer, but Namco for some reason decided that this incredibly popular feature that fans everywhere desired would be a bad idea, so only ad-hoc wireless battle are available.

Now the story is basically absent this time around, but if you have read any of my other reviews you know that I don’t give two shits about stories in fighting games, so that didn’t actually decrease my enjoyment of the game much. There is no real single player arcade mode, most likely due to the lack of story now that I think about it, but that didn’t affect me all that much either because there were plenty of other modes to choose from. The four single player modes that help you kill time when you inevitably don’t have an opponent to play against are Quick Match, Gauntlet, Trial, and Training. Quick match mode puts you up against virtual opponents with virtual win loss records. You climb a virtual leader board, and all in all it’s a solid attempt to replicated a true versus experience … except virtual. Trial mode allows you to fight a steady stream of opponents while gaining points which are essentially based on how much you kick ass. It’s the closest thing the game has to an arcade mode, which is useful when you need to kill time, but it’s hard to get excited about the points because they don’t do anything. You can always hand off your PSP to a friend and ask him to try and beat your high score, but at that point you are better off pressuring your friend into buying a PSP so you can play versus. The Gauntlet takes you through what is essentially a tutorial disguised as a silly story. It is no replacement for an arcade mode, but it does teach you how to play the game and with every character no less. Training mode is your basic “beat up an invincible computer opponent who is doing nothing until you are happy” mode where you can practice your combos and moves on a training dummy to build your confidence. This is great, but The Gauntlet is actually much better at teaching you the game so the whole mode is a little pointless for anyone but the mega-pros who want to get exact frame timing down.

Once you move beyond these two gripes, everything else about the game is actually spot on. The graphics are obviously of a lower resolution than the Xbox or PS3, but they are still very high quality, especially for a portable game. In fact, when you watch gameplay videos of Broken Destiny, it is easy to compare its graphics to Soul Calibur III, the previous installment for the Playstation 2, because the look and feel of the game is just that smooth and refined. The sound is wrapped up in a nice traditional Soul Calibur package, complete with the epic orchestral sound track, the horrible American voice actors, and the deep voiced narrator jabbering off about souls and swords and victory and whatnot. The game has achievements that you can strive for which unlock pieces of clothing you can futz around with in the game’s create a character mode, but these don’t alter your stats or anything so it’s actually little more than creating a custom skin for an already existing character. The innovations of Soul Calibur IV are still intact including breakable armor and critical finishers, and although we don’t get to play with Yoda and Darth Vader this time around, we do get to play with Kratos from God of War, which is awesome. OK, we also get this foppish dude called Dampierre but who cares, we can play as Kratos!

Now, I haven’t described the basic mechanics of the game, because Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny is really designed for people who have played Soul Calibur before. As such, I’ve been writing this review almost specifically for players who are familiar with the Soul Calibur franchise, because truth be told this is not a good place for newcomers to the series. If you really want to start learning Soul Calibur, pick up a used copy of Soul Calibur IV (or if you don’t have a current gen console Soul Calibur III) at your local video game store and start squaring off against some friends. Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny is essentially the same game, just in smaller portable form. This is great if you and a fellow friend with a PSP are committed to making versus mode work, especially if you want to use Kratos, but otherwise it is little more than a training tool for console based Soul Calibur IV matches. Once again there is nothing wrong with the game itself. In fact if I were rating the game as a game alone I would say that, other than the lack of Arcade mode, it was almost perfectly executed and is totally worth the buy. I merely find issue with the degree of difficulty I, and most gamers, tend to have in finding other gamers with other portable systems who are willing to play a portable game in Versus mode. If you can overcome this social handicap, then Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny is definitely the portable fighting game for you.

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