Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul

Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul isn't a huge improvement over the somewhat standard Saint Seiya: Brave Soldiers, but it remains a solid and accessible fighter that's fun in short bursts. While the simplistic combat won't hold everyone's interest, a lengthy story mode and countless unlockables ensure that there's plenty to see and do before your cosmo burns out.

With dozens upon dozens of playable characters, arenas, music, and art pieces to unlock using currency earned in game, Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul, the series' faithful will have plenty see and do before they are done with this title. Other players will find themselves wanting something with a bit more teeth.

Saint Seiya Soldier's Soul is a quaint fighting game that has its small playability value robbed by a unique fatal flaw in the restart option that drags the action and frustrates the player. While the game has some interesting features, it mostly just drags through monotonous gameplay and a confusing story. Too many features are hard to understand, and while unlocking features, items, and stages reminds me of old school fighting games, the problems of Saint Seiya Soldier's Soul makes the work to unlock them simply not worth the time and effort.

Fans of the series will probably get a kick out of the use of the source material but it's hard to recommend this game to anyone but said fans of the source material. For everyone else, it's repetitive and probably isn't at the level of depth that most fighting games offer these days.

Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul is a title that fans of the franchise will enjoy a lot, but unless this is a series you know, or one that you have have been thinking of checking out, you may just be better reading the serializations instead.

In the end, Saint Seiya: Soldier's Soul is really for the fans of the series. Fighting game players may get some out of it, but only if these arena-based games are your forte. I know a lot of people love them, and I have seen many great fights that take a lot of skill to pull off. There is some strategy involved. There are tons to unlock and a decent amount of story to go through, but really this caters more to the hardcore fan base and even then, while it is enjoyable in some aspects, there are some rough things in it. The AI is bad at times, and the online can be laggy.

That is probably the biggest rub, however. I really would have enjoyed combat with more depth to it than this. Saint Seiya: Soldiers' Soul is a great way to learn about or remember the anime, and a variety of modes and collectibles add mileage to the game. At the end of the day however, it is also meant to be a fighting game, and the combat is simply too bland to really get the most out of the experience.

Saint Seiya: Soldier's Soul would perhaps call out more to existing fans of the Seiya anime, but as a newcomer, I was less than impressed.

Saint Seiya is also an extremely fun fighter that mixes up the standard formula of the arcade fighter.

To the uninitiated, Soldiers' Soul is a bewildering amalgamation of expected clichés and probably not a fun thing to play. To Saint Seiya's audience, however, Soldiers' Soul is an impressive rendition of a respected series augmented with a glut meaningful (albeit mostly salvaged) content. For better or worse, the latter group is all Soldiers' Soul has in mind.