Soul Calibur V was good, but it lacked some of that trademark "oomph" for which the franchise is so well known.
Some were expecting a heftier story, for example. Well, did you know the developer had initially planned to implement a much more robust story mode? According to what game director Daishi Odashima told Train2Game , the story aspect was supposed to be "four times bigger." Unfortunately, "time constraints" meant they couldn't do exactly what they wanted and the story mode had to be scaled back.
Odashima said Namco Bandai "didn't have the staff or the time" required to realize the "full vision" of the intended storyline. Essentially, what we got was a plot that mostly only focused on two characters (Patrokolos and his sister, Pyrrha), and each individual character was supposed to have a story. That's actually pretty standard, but as Odashima said:
"Our first plan on the storyboard was that we had every characters story, and actually we do have it in the studio, but time-wise, man power-wise we weren’t able to do it and only one fourth of what we planned to do is in the game."
He added that many of the stories "got full voice-overs" during the development phase, but they never got used. Hopefully, the team can find a way to use them in the future, but Odashima isn't quite sure how… More downloadable content, anyone? Although fighting games aren't necessarily expected to have great plots and in-depth character development, Soul Calibur had always put a bit more effort into these elements than other fighting franchises. Too bad it didn't all work out in the fifth installment.
Related Game(s): Soul Calibur V