Guess I'm gonna keep this double dipping trend goin', huh?
A few years ago I was a current-gen hating kinda guy, so I got
Saint Seiya - Soldiers' Soul for the PS3. It was
fine, lest for a few performance hiccups, but since I'm the kind of guy that
hates to let a good deal pass him by I somehow found myself with a copy of the game for PS4, and here we are.
While my original write up is all kinds of bad, I really don't feel like treading over old ground, so I won't go into much detail. As a whole, this is an arena-based 1 on 1 fighting game. It has a
decent amount of modes and a large cast of characters, even if it has a
ton of clones. Characters like Saga and Kanon or Bud and Syd share a few moves as well as their appearance. There's no reason as to why SeaDragon Kanon and Gemini Kanon shouldn't share a slot, the God Cloths are basically moveset clones of their basic counterparts.... so it is a decent roster,
but there's a lot of
fluff on the character select screen. Character models are very simple, but they are also very colorful and
crisp, while the armors every character sports are very
shiny, all in all it's a
beautiful game. On the other hand, unlocking everything takes a long time. A
looooooooooooooooong time. One way or another you'll be grinding for money. Spamming Shion's R2+Square on VS CPU battles in "First Strike" mode is the easiest way, or you could attempt Survival Mode endless times or try your hand at the second Soul of Gold board. Whichever
poison you pick it's gonna be a bit of a drag.
One of the game's biggest selling points is how its story mode covers the
entire anime, all four arcs including the filler(Which in a
surprising turn of events wound up being the only saga in the series I could consider
passable) Asgard Saga. The cutscenes are very low budget, being made up mostly of characters standing around while
flapping their lips, but thanks to dynamic camera angles and top-notch voice acting it's far more lively than
boring anime cut-outs. Since Saint Seiya was kind of a big deal in Latin America,
this version of the game gets both Portuguese and Latin American dubs. At least the LAS version managed to get most of the original cast back, so kudos for that, I
replayed the entire thing with Latin American voices and sans for some iffy Japanese-to-English-to-Spanish translations it was pretty
dope. The Sanctuary, Asgard and Poseidon arcs are well told,
however, the final arc, Hades, doesn't fare as well. The early parts of the saga are missing a ton of characters, so it makes for a very
haphazard retelling, events like being told that Seiya got sent to Cocytus and moments later that he got back, ignoring his fight against Valentine, or Eurydice not getting a character model, so Orphee's story is glossed over in a very unfulfilling manner. The later part of the saga is just as bad,
even though they finally have all the characters needed. For instance, Seiya is the one that defeats Hypnos instead of the other Bronze Saints, and the other four don't even get to awaken their God Cloths in a cutscene, they just show up wearing them in time to watch Athena fight Hades,
instead of helping in the fight as it happened in the manga. Saint Seiya's story is pretty bland, full of plot holes and poorly explained shenanigans, but the Hades' arc gets the short end of the stick.
Thankfully, what really matters, the combat system, is more than adequate for an anime fighting game like this. Extending combos is built around dash-cancelling(L2+X), and while it doesn't really
fit the series, taking fights into the air is quite
fun. It's not quite as exciting as, say, My Hero One's Justice, but it gets the work done. That said, Special and Super moves are kinda
iffy because not all of them can be
comboed into, it feels like the only way to use some attacks is to get the enemy to whiff their basic attacks and try to hit them then. Heck, it seems that only the overpowered God Gold Cloth-wearing Saints are able to combo into their Super Moves, something that makes them
undeniably better than
any other character in the game. So... it's a decent combat system, but it's not perfect.
Well, I'll say that I agree with my
initial assessment of the game. It's decent, it's fun, but it
could use a lot more polishing. The PS4 version has faster loading times, and the 60 fps framerate is quite a boon, but otherwise it looks and plays the same.
6.0 out of 10
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