#882 Soul Blade (PS1) Unplayable Characters (1/8): Diver playthrough.

Channel:

AdmiralMcFish - Bosses and Hidden Characters

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9,630

Published on April 27, 2018 6:00:16 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK_u4lllaHg

Game:

Soul Edge (1995)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 4:45

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A playthrough of the unplayable character Diver in the PS1 port of Namco’s Soul Blade/Edge.

Here’s where the fun begins. Soul Blade has a ton of unplayable characters hidden beneath the surface of the game, and goddamn are they interesting.

In earlier fighting game titles (most notably in the mid-90s), characters included in in-game cutscenes were typically stored with the same data as legitimately playable characters. Another good example of this is Sonic The Fighters, where all of its cutscene and prototype characters are playable by hacking and messing around with the character address of the game. Soul Blade is the more or less the same, with you basically entering into a whole other world by accessing these unplayable characters. Finding a “world beneath the surface”, as it were, is easily one of the crown jewels of fighting game hacking, and it makes Soul Blade all the more fun and fascinating to cover as a result.

What’s also really interesting about this is that most of the unplayable characters are perfectly playable in human hands. Indeed, what’s even more interesting is that the values for the exclusive hidden characters are all over the place in the games coding! This implies to me that, as a bonus, Namco simply decided to take a few of the cutscene characters and make them into legitimately playable characters as a bonus. It’s extremely appreciated on the whole, but kind of funny that they just decided to pick a handful of them and leave the rest unutilised. Considering how good this game already is, eh, it would have been cool.

Here’s another interesting thing though. If you’ve seen my Fighting Layer videos, you may recall that all the unplayable characters were actually selectable in the off-screen section of the character selection screen. With the right gameshark code, you can actually do the exact same for Soul Blade, forcing the game to load all the unplayable characters in the off-screen character selection section. I didn’t do that though, because I’m a strong independent hacker who don’t need no gameshark. Anymore, at least.

Like most of these characters, Diver is mostly an anomaly. That said, she’s a damn interesting anomaly all the same. She uses Sophitia’s moveset from what I can tell and I still enjoy the extremely ominous ending she’s a part of. It’s also just nice to play as a deep-sea diver, of all things, in a game set in the 16th century. A nice surreal thing in a series which becomes all the more surreal as it goes on.

Next up, Hwang, but not.

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