Hopefully no guest characters.

Also, next year? This better make it onto Project Cafe.

Where do they say there's a 17 year age gap?

All I know is that all my favorite characters, specifically Sophitia, better be in this. Otherwise, I could give a fuck less about it.

According to Soulpedia, Soul Calibur II was the last game in the continuity where the characters had aged at all. So Sophitia was 25 in SC4. She'd be 42 in SC5. Which is MILF range.

I hope it's not mostly new characters. There's only one cool new character in SF4, Gouken. The rest are crap.

Tekken 6 works because it has all the old guys, plus new ones. SC5 should follow that example.

I wouldn't mind new guys, so long as they keep the old ones.

The last game two games to present such a large age gap were Street Fighter 3 and Tekken 3. Street Fighter 3, with its cast of mostly new characters and new fighting system, was a huge failure, and that's why Street Fighter 4 ended up taking placing as a direct sequel to SSF2 as opposed to SF3.

Tekken 3 introduced an almost entirely new cast of characters, which was somewhat irrelevant as the series wasn't especially popular up until that point. Still, fan backlash against Marshall Law's son Forest resulted in him being left out of all future games (except Tekken Tag 1) in favor of Marshall. Meanwhile, pretty much every former character in the series eventually reappeared in the main series, except Michelle Chang, who retired, and Jun Kazama, who died, and Kunimitsu, who disappeared. The original Kuma, King, and Armor King have all died but been replaced with identically named and similar playing characters, while the Jack line has been upgraded. Devil is still around, in that he is part of Kazuya, but has been replaced in storyline with Devil Jin. Angel was just an alternate skin of Devil and has been more or less forced out of canon.

But since Tekken 3, with the exception of Forest Law, all of the Tekken's playable characters have reappeared in its sequels. Except Mokujin, who was replaced with Combot in Tekken 4 to great backlash, and returned in Tekken 5.

Okay, enough Tekken history. The point is, you don't fuck with a good thing. People don't play the sixth installment of a fighting game because they like the engine or physics, they play it because they like the CHARACTERS. So okay, introduce the younger generation, and make them look young, but don't visibly age the original characters, especially the female characters, by more than 5-10 years.

So I got this for my birthday. I've been playing it a lot lately. Here are the pros and cons:

Pros:
1. It's fun

Cons:
1. There is a short Story Mode that features 20 battles. It centers almost entirely on Patroklos and Pyrrha and they are the two primary playable characters in it. Occasionally you play as ZWEI, too.
2. Story/Arcade/Live battles now are best out of 3 instead of best out of 2. WHEN HAS IT EVER FUCKING BEEN THIS WAY IN ANY FIGHTING GAME EVER? You can change the setting in Live/Offline battles, but good luck finding an opponent if you change it on Live.
3. Arcade Mode doesn't have prologues and epilogues for any of the characters. So all those new characters they introduced? And the ones that returned? If you wanted to know anything about them, too fucking bad. Which brings up another point, why bother with new characters at all outside of Pyrrha and Patroklos when the game has minimal story? Why not just use all old characters? Because hey, you know who they are and apparently you shouldn't cares why they're there?
4. THREE characters on the main roster are mimics. Edge Master, Kilik, and Elysium. Kilik wears a stupid mask in both his costumes. It can be broken in battle, but he doesn't have an alt that doesn't wear. Elysium is the living embodiment of Soul Edge and she looks like Sophitia because that's what Patroklos wanted it to look like. She also wears a dumb face mask.
5. The game is VERY short on modes. It has Arcade Mode, Legendary Souls (a harder version of arcade mode), Versus, Online Versus, and Quick Match.
6. Ezio has projectiles, much like Link did, and continues the fine tradition of unfair guest characters.

Overall, the game feels VERY half-assed and poorly done. A big draw of Soulcalibur and Tekken has always been their continuity, and this fucking cuts most of that out. Guess they're saving that feature for the inevitable enhanced Vita (and possibly Wii U) port.

I like it better than the SC4 fighting system but not as well as the SC2 system. I don't understand why Soul Calibur needed energy bars and super moves, and I wish they wouldn't have brought them back again, but I guess they have to compete with Capcom and Arc. Hell, even Mortal Kombat is in on that trend now.