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#935

A playthrough of the bonus character Li Long in Namco’s SoulCalibur III/Soul Calibur 3. Li Long! A character so ungraciously dropped after Soul Blade that to this day I’m still a bit sore about it. Indeed, Li Long was the original victim of Namco’s obsession with needlessly replacing characters, and was replaced by Maxi in SoulCalibur 1. Why? I think it’s because Maxi was “cooler” than Li Long, in the sense that he was younger and more “hip”. Maxi also formed a part of the protagonist trio with Xianghua and Kilik, which was something Namco attempted to push in the SoulCalibur, although to no avail because Project Soul have the story direction of a headless chicken. The thing which was interesting about the original Soul Edge was how morally ambiguous the cast were. Except for Sophitia, she was too pure for this world. The rest of them were mixed though; not always being bad people but usually flawed in some manner. And indeed, it was those flaws which drew them to Soul Edge, believing that a being of pure evil could somehow be bent to their will. It was great then and it’s great now, with that moral ambiguity serving as an example of where it was done right (with BloodStorm being an example of where it was done wrong, for instance). What did SoulCalibur do? It took away any depth the series had by forcing it back into black and white moral absolutism (Soul Edge bad, SoulCalibur good, hurr durr durr) replacing many of the interesting characters with goody-two-shoes run of the mill protagonists which would make even a shounen manga writer scoff at its unoriginality. Sure, many of those better characters never went away, but a lot of the better ones were effectively forced into the background for no particular reason. Most of the characters in Soul Edge had no real connection, instead coming from all walks of life and being affected by Soul Edge in different ways. Indeed, it was a rather mature premise for the time; that people all over the world share the same humanistic qualities and needs, the same struggles and desires. That wasn’t kawaii desu enough for Project Soul though, so they pushed the previous characters into the background, and replaced them over time with a bunch of generic protagonists who were all interconnected and as boring as a Henry Kissinger interview. What did they do with this? Nothing. They completely squandered the ideas they created by only really focussing on Siegfried, and often squandering the potential of new characters they did include, often shoving them into the background in later games too (which we’ll see in SCIV and V, certainly). My point to this ramble is that Li Long, a legitimately interesting character, was unnecessarily replaced by a boring replacement who Namco squandered as well. Here, Li Long’s character model is relatively well created (being based on his appearance in the intro sequence in Soul Blade), and like Hwang he even gets access to his classic weapon. He uses the generic nun chucks moveset of the custom character mode, which is perfectly good on the whole, though not quite as good as Maxi’s moveset. It’s one of the most spammy movesets in the franchise, and like I said before it’s speed that kills in this series. Ultimately therefore, this is a pretty shallow playthrough, but it’s nice to pay tribute to such a forgotten character at the very least. Speaking of forgotten characters…