New Soul Calibur Footage: Now Including Gameplay

I'm sure a lot of you could have figured out what today's blog post would be about. Today, we got both good and bad news. Well the good news of course is that we were able to finally see some actual gameplay from the Soul Calibur title but the bad news came at aboooout.. 1:25 into the video. Wait for it..


Yeah, that's right. We're definitely waiting until 2012 to get our hands on this. I definitely wanted to play it before then but I think just about anyone could have predicted this, right? This short video also pointed out a couple of other nice goodies. For one, we seem to have an upgrade to the guard crush system.

The guard impact system might have been altered or we have an entirely new mechanic put into the game. Patroklos blocks a move at the 0:41 second mark. He glows blue and there's a unique sound. Instead of being put into heavy blockstun by this move, he is able to retaliate almost instantly. A similar scenario happens at the 0:52 second mark. This time, it's red. The reason I think this could be the new guard impact is because in Soul Calibur 4, we had guard impacts and just impacts (a guard impact with very precise timing). The guard impact was blue/green if I remember correctly and the more precise version was red. This could be a way of speeding up the game. I wonder what the whiff animation for it will be if it is different from guard impacting. We see a guard impact whiff at the 0:56 mark by Patroklos. For now, I'm just throwing ideas out there. I'm going to do some research on 8wayrun.com, the competitive forum I used to go to back when I played Amy and Algol (before he was banned) in SC4. That reminds me, I would not hate to see the hero king make a return.

And lastly, speaking of returns: The other big thing we got from this video was that MITSURUGI IS RETURNING! Looks like he's not too old to hang up his sword just yet.  I have high hopes for this game!