#874 Soul Edge ver. 1 (ARC) Bosses (1/2): Soul Edge playthrough.

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AdmiralMcFish - Bosses and Hidden Characters

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Published on April 18, 2018 5:57:36 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQipXIErwRU

Game:

Soul Edge (1995)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 6:23

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A playthrough of the final boss Soul Edge in version 1 of the arcade version of Namco’s Soul Edge/Soul Blade.

Get ready for the next 90 videos, as I hope to cover the entire of Namco’s other major fighting game series, the Souls series, in one fell swoop. We’ll see many of the same bizarre choices which typified the Tekken series, some positive, some negative, as we look at one of the most unique fighting game series in existence.

The Soul series is called so for a specific reason. The first game…is sort of a prequel to the latter games. That’s right, Namco, the king of soft reboots, decided to reboot their other series after only one game. Why? I honestly don’t know. It’s a question which may be answered somewhat as we go through the series, although I hope to answer it to an extent in the next game.

Soul Edge was released in the arcades in 1995. It saw the player take control of eight individual fighters, all seeking to obtain the legendary cursed sword, Soul Edge, in order to benefit themselves in some way. There were two things which stuck out to most players. One, while it wasn’t the first 3D weapons-based fighting game (that was the Battle Arena Toshinden series which I’ve already covered), it was the first good one. It definitely feels a bit derivative of style of gameplay the Samurai Shodown series set in place, with matches coming down more to powerful single attacks than special moves and combos. Despite that, it still stands apart from Samurai Shodown given its (relatively) grounded gameplay and universe. Something which wouldn’t last forever, but the way that the Souls series initially downplayed its supernatural elements is quite fascinating, as it was in the Tekken series. Graphically-speaking it looks pretty good for the era, and then there’s that amazing soundtrack, one of the best of any game in existence, which I’ll gush over more when I get to the PS1 port of the game. Instead of endless stages like the Tekken series, here instead you have ring-arenas with 3D backgrounds, which were really quite impressive for the era. Or would be if Virtua Fighter 2 (VF2) hadn’t been released the previous year.

The second thing which people noticed was that it was hard. I mean, mid-90s level difficulty. We’re talking about VF2 (arcade) and Kaiser Knuckle levels of difficulty, with some people even supposedly stating that the eponymous boss of the game was outright impossible to defeat. Now, of course, such statements are usually hyperbolic. Even the worst of the worst like The General and Parace L’Sia can be defeated, given enough patience, and Soul Edge here is no exception. To this day he definitely stands as one of the most obnoxious bosses in existence though, being the bane of many childhoods including my own.

So, this is yet another game (after G. Axe in Golden Axe the Duel) where the boss is named after the name of the game. It’s a little on the weird side certainly, and explains why they changed it in future titles. The game sees you fight against all other playable characters, before taking on the sub-boss and wielder of Soul Edge, the demonic pirate Cervantes, who I’ll speak about next time. After defeating him, the player sees a nightmarish cutscene in which Soul Edge takes control of Cervantes’ corpse and rises from the dead, seeing the world into disarray and chaos as a result. It’s both terrifying and incredibly awesome, a weird sentiment which will come to typify the series in future titles.

Soul Edge acts as the final boss of the game, and he’s the last instance we’ll see of Namco’s classic two-form boss formula. For those who didn’t want the Tekken videos I did, Namco created a number of two-formed bosses (Kazuya and Devil, Ogre and True Ogre, Jun and Unknown and Kazumi and Devil Kazumi) where the boss was fought across two stages, with the second form of the boss being based on the moveset of the first one, but with addition moves and powers. Soul Edge is actually underwhelming example of this we’ve seen as, at most he has a few relatively unimportant moves over Cervantes, such as a running kick and a few additional combos.

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