I was on gam­ing hia­tus for a few months (my longest yet), but now I’m back into the old swing of things with Soul Calibur 2. I did­n’t play much of it before because I did­n’t know any­one else who played it, but Aaron and Jessie have been addict­ed since the begin­ning of the month. Now I actu­al­ly feel like I can invest some time into train­ing a char­ac­ter and learn­ing their fight­ing dynam­ics. The game is so deep and involved that I can prac­tice for weeks and weeks and still be con­sid­ered a begin­ner. I mean, Virtual Fighter 4 had a pret­ty involved sys­tem, but SC2 extends past the “basic” guard>attack>throw>guard with added sidestep>vertical attack>horizontal attack>sidestep, and mid-guard>high/mid attack and low-guard>low/high attack, not to men­tion the options that open up with soul charg­ing and unblock­ables.

The prob­lem is that SC2 has so many cool char­ac­ters that I want to use. There’s some­thing about using a char­ac­ter that match­es the per­son­al­i­ty. It’s like a pro­jec­tion of the self in a fan­ta­sy world. Whenever I do RPGs, I usu­al­ly cre­ate a char­ac­ter that’s like me (although with height mod­i­fi­er +6 when the option is there). That’s why I nev­er use the “evil” char­ac­ters in fight­ing games.

I start­ed SC2 with Kilik since he had the most rec­og­niz­able tra­di­tion­al Shaolin fight­ing style (my favourite), although Xianghua’s and Yunsung’s moves have fair­ly obvi­ous Chinese roots as well. Kilik end­ed up being too bor­ing for me (no per­son­al­i­ty, pre­dictable moves), so I switched to Yoshimitsu, cause he’s real­ly cool and sneaky, but his moves end­ed up being too awk­ward. I real­ize that this is how Yoshimitsu is sup­posed to be played (with off-tim­ing bal­ance), but the char­ac­ter did­n’t click for me.

Right now I’m using Raphael, who hap­pens to be the most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter move-wise, but also the biggest pan­sy out of all of them. He can go in and out of stances eas­i­ly, with sev­er­al attack­ing options in each stance, mak­ing him an offen­sive, but dif­fi­cult-to-mas­ter, char­ac­ter. He has amaz­ing­ly vari­able com­bos, and in between hits, his foil guard-impacts, just like a fencer. He’s unlike any oth­er char­ac­ter in the game, and I have to applaud Namco for com­ing up with the idea and mak­ing him so real­is­tic.

My ner­dy­ness is com­ing back. The same ner­dy­ness that used to say, “Why make out with you when I could be play­ing a game?”.

On a side note, I’m also back into big break­fasts with bacon, sausages, and milk tea on the week­ends. My arter­ies hate them, but I for­give them and love them all the same.