Saint Seiya: Soldiers’ Soul, as I have been quick to learn, spawns from a late 80’s manga series by Masmai Kurumada. Around the same time, it took off as an adapted anime series at intermittent points over the last thirty years. Exposure in North America has been limited to some of the weirder parts of Cartoon Network, but Saint Seiya is extremely popular in Latin America. How I felt about M.A.S.K. or Transformers is how kids in Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City probably felt about Saint Seiya.
To the untrained eye (ahem), Soldiers’ Soul isn’t the easiest universe to absorb. Legend of the Cosmo, Soldiers’ Soul de facto campaign, splits into four completely separate arcs meant to recreate beloved storylines from the base material. Other than some localized text dumps and stilted cut-scenes, it’s nearly free of the sort of context that would differentiate it from someone unfamiliar with anime. A bunch of bronze saints challenge the superiority of the gold saints, and the Athena’s life is always on the line. People get angry and they fight. This happens frequently.
Conflict is usually the through-line of any piece of drama, and Soldiers’ Soul obliges this concept by declaring itself a fighting game. As the four arcs of Legend of the Cosmo go, multiple characters will endure dialogue heavy cut-scenes in which you may or may not understand what’s happening before eventually leading to an inevitable fight with whomever you happen to be talking to. Sometimes, even when you win, you have to fight again because your enemy will have employed a deus ex machina to power-up. Illogical as it may seem, this is a fighting game about an anime about characters fighting. They have to fight. They need to fight. This is all that they do, and that sort of makes it OK.
There’s only one part of Legend of the Cosmo that’s technically unsettling; a gross appropriation of existing content. Brave Soldiers (the previous Saint Seiya game that Steven McGehee reviewed for us in 2013), as I discovered while going over some YouTube Let’s Plays of a game I never played, featured three of the same Legend of Cosmo arcs! And most the same fights! All that appears to have changed was a slightly more concerted effort toward rendering the cut-scenes in 3D space, as opposed to Brave Soldiers’ 2D talking heads.
Should this be disappointing? When a new game incorporates an older games’ content, is itself plagiarism or an active bonus? Granted, one of the Legend of the Cosmo arcs, Hades, is entirely new – but that’s still a good 75% of the (surprisingly) lengthy campaign pieces that’s made up of exiting content. Is this like Madden using some of the same playbook, or Call of Duty bringing back favorite maps? Are these arcs so intrinsic to Soldiers’ Soul and Saint Seiya that skipping over them would lead to some sort of justified fan rebellion? I have no idea because all I can see are elaborately outfitted gentlemen obliterating each other, but this may be a cause for concern if you’ve previously absorbed all that Brave Soldiers had to offer.
Soldiers’ Soul adheres to the principles of a one-on-one fighting game, but only marginally so. Caught somewhere between a brawler and 3D arena fighter like Ehrgeiz or Destrega, Soldiers’ Soul opts for spectacle and simplicity over technical prowess or ability. This is not Tekken and this is not Street Fighter (the latter of which is ironic considering Dimps has a hand in both), but rather something closer to any number of Naruto games that have made it over to the west.
There isn’t a whole lot of mechanical variance to take in, as Soldiers’ Soul 70+(!) characters share a similar setup. Light and heavy attacks chain into combos and a guard button helps stop said combos. Guards can be broken, but more effective is well-timed dodge, which can instantly put you at an opponent’s back for a righteous opportunity. A tech roll, two different throws, and burst attacks (special moves that consume your Cosmo meter) are all part of every fighter’s arsenal
The aforementioned Cosmo meter is Soldiers’ Soul attempt at flourishing its own style. Either filled naturally or powered up in rare moments of tranquility, the Cosmo meter can be used to dash and close the gap between you and an opponent, fire off a projectile, or employed a fuel for any number of special moves. Big Bang attacks, available during Seven Sense Awakenings (read: tapping into an ultra-powered mode from a separate meter) function well in means of desperation or directed punishment, and supply an expected visual punch. A general rule is that it’s always cool when your opponent is getting destroyed in impossible and often spectacular ways.
An impressive roster is not a solution for depth. Even by customizing your characters—points earned can buy some pretty nifty assist phrases—there’s a startling lack of balance. This doesn’t really matter so much when smacking the AI around, thought it does lead the game becoming more of a chore than an entertaining experience. As a fan I may be into the characters or a part of their increasingly dire circumstances, but as some guy experiencing Saint Seiya for the first time, I found that the dodge/parry move worked wonderfully and spamming the same attack over and over was remarkably effective at winning the game.
The four arcs and countless side-objective powering Legend of Cosmo are impressive in their breadth, but there’s plenty more to do inside Soldiers’ Soul. Online battles (which were kind of a ghost town at the time of review!) and local versus modes are expected and accounted for. Battle of Gold is a separate, almost survivor-like mode that pits different saints in tiered battles against contextually appropriate rivals. Divorced of their narratives backgrounds, Battle of Gold fights were just another avenue to beat the snot out of different guys. As is the running theme with Soldiers’ Soul, I don’t get it, but I’m sure fans of the series will.
What I think is important, or, at the very least, important for Soldiers’ Soul prospective audience is how closely it mimics its namesake. On a technical level the visuals aren’t very good, or at least not what you’d expect from a $60 PlayStation 4 release in the year 2015. The cel-shading is nice and the nifty-sixty frame-rate is appreciated, but everything’s a little too simplistic to run with its other full-priced heavy hitters on the same platform. If you were to tell me this was a PlayStation 3 game ( and technically this is also a PlayStation 3 game) I would believe you.
While this seems important, it actually doesn’t matter. All Soldiers’ Soul needs to do is create a convincing rendition of Saint Seiya. Along similar lines, Platinum Games’ Transformers: Devastation isn’t the most visually accomplished game around, but it looks exactly like the thirty-year-old cartoon. This is extremely important! It’s like a secret handshake that communicates an idea based purely on visual recognition. In that regard, Soldiers’ Soul probably hits all of its bases. After watching Saint Seiya clips for an afternoon and playing this game over the course of several days, there’s a pretty clear similarity at play. Soldiers’ Soul may not have had the same tools or budget as some of its peers, but passion clearly went into making it look like fans would expect.
Why do I have to mash X when I die in Legend of Cosmo, and should I be concerned that doing this produces the same effect as not doing it? All of these characters seem extremely earnest in their hyperbolic intentions; should this affect how I see the game? Saint Seiya’s audience, a legion of fans with thirty years of history and fandom behind them, may recognize these signature checks and balances and embrace Soldiers’ Soul as the latest iteration of their beloved art. Things like recycled content, shallow fighting mechanics, and unbalanced characters (probably) mean absolutely nothing against a gigantic roster and a good-enough style that, for all intents and purposes, looks like Saint Seiya should look.
I don’t know if Soldiers’ Soul is good and this is a troubling thing to admit at the end of a review where I’m supposed to tell you whether or not it’s good. If you’re into Saint Seiya it’s probably perfect. If you’re not and want a bit of insight into a playable version of a respected anime and manga series, it’s probably OK. If you have no interest in either perspective, Soldiers’ Soul is a bewildering amalgamation of expected clichés and probably not a fun thing to play. But you already know this because you’re not on the internet reading Saint Seiya game reviews. You’re a fan, and you’re wondering if it’s worth $60. This concession yields a simple answer; yeah.
