![]() ![]() ![]() I love this game, I said, to a group of new faces who didn’t believe me. Years later, at a liberal college, I remember following friends into a room where SoulCalibur 4 was being played on a television. In the tyranny of kids, who uncritically absorb and perpetuate whatever rules or structures they see, I wasn’t a part of SoulCalibur‘s target audience. Talking about SoulCalibur at school, these players would smirk at me when I’d weigh match-ups. Boys I played with were significantly less likely to hand me a controller after a loss. Unlike group-hangs when friends and I played Mario Party, Super Smash Bros., and even Burnout, SoulCalibur was a struggle to get in on. SoulCalibur‘s pitch was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, I didn’t have to participate in everything.īut just from seeing the opening scene of this blockbuster fighting game - the moment when a game states its goals, makes its pitch, and reels in its audience - I knew that worming my way into the game’s culture, battling other players and getting competitive would be harder for me, even though I loved the gameplay, the stages, the single-player mode. As the camera angles changed, breasts were the first feature to appear. It was a sort of girl-on-girl action that, to me, felt explicitly designed for straight boys my age. A moment later, the camera cut to Ivy, who dramatically shimmied her torso before extending her whip. The fighter Taki, in a skin-tight red suit and no bra, would land on the ground, breasts jiggling everywhere. ![]() SoulCalibur 2‘s intro has stuck with me, a little bitterly, since I was an overcompetitive 12-year-old craving another game to dominate at. Last week, I met with Okubo to ask him a burning question I’ve had since I first laid hands on SoulCalibur 2 in 2003: Why do the series’ women still look like sex dolls? In 2018, when so many mainstream games are casting a wide net across a redefined notion of what it means to be a “gamer,” Ivy feels like a bit of a relic of a past’s mainstream, like lead paint or cocaine for toothaches. This version, Okubo said, maxed out the volume on what makes SoulCalibur feel like SoulCalibur, which seems in part to be a doubling down on its playable seductresses. The series may have been seriously wounded, but the soul still burns, for now, as SoulCalibur 6 will be released for PC, Xbox One and PS4 on October 19. The company climate wasn’t really encouraging another instalment for the franchise,” said Okubo. “ SoulCalibur actually was in a little bit of a crisis as a brand. As a series, SoulCalibur almost didn’t live to see a seventh iteration, said SoulCalibur producer Motohiro Okubo, speaking with Kotaku in a small interview room behind that booth. It’s not just her bandaid attire it’s that, by sticking to their guns (or, here, sword-whip), Bandai Namco has pigeonholed what could be a stellar fighting game for everyone. 20 years later, at an E3 with down-to-earth playable female protagonists in Assassin’s Creed, Tomb Raider, The Division 2, The Last of Us Part 2, Battlefield 5, and other headlining games, Ivy in SoulCalibur 6 seemed a little out of place, buried deep within publisher Bandai Namco’s booth at the back of the show floor. Ivy’s over-the-top appearance may have fit in quite well with the boys’ club mentality of the late 1990s when she was introduced in the first SoulCalibur. ![]()
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