Soul Saber 2

This thing has been eating my life for the past two days. Despite my stupid ISP messing up the multiplayer mode brilliantly, it’s still one hell of a fun game.

Reusing this image as I don’t have another at hand. Maybe later…

Like I once mentioned, the freeware trial (this) was released sometime during the latter half of the last September (getit here! Click on ダウンロード, I’ll add a tutorial about how to setup the thing later if I feel like it) and I’ve forgotten about it until two days ago and the rest was history.

Soul Saber 2, unlike Soul Saber, aren’t a fighting game. By spirit, Soul Saber 2 feels like Kinryu VS Xentex with zero character customizability but with a lot more players per battle (KvX was 2 vs 2, SS2 could go up to 6 vs 6 and it is hinted that the full version might even be able to go up to 8 vs 8). Here’s a crude way of explaining it, Soul Saber 2 is a 3D brawler; you enter battles as one of the two factions as a ‘robot’ (well, ‘characters’, but canonically they really are actually androids and gynoids or whatever anyway therefore ‘robots’, lol). Each faction has a meter that represents their available credits and each ‘robot’ costs money so each time one dies, money will be spent for each respawn and the bar indicates how much of it is remaining. The first faction to run out of cash loses. Simple as that :D (also, each character costs differently, stronger ones costs more of course so if you use one that’s super strong but your skills suck ass you’d still lose in no time, maybe even faster compared to if you would have used a weaker character lol). However unlike Kinryu VS Xentex, Soul Saber 2 also works with a keyboard instead of being gamepad only as how KvX was..

In place of character customizability, Yamadaya has introduced a new concept into the original Kinryu VS Xentex gameplay. Here, there a lot of characters and they are separated into four classes: Melee, Close-range, Defence and Bomber (these categories does not mean the characters of a certain category can only do a certain action in the game, a character of the Melee type has range attacks too, only that their ranged attacks are weaker compared to the other classes, things like that). I’ll explain each of them later on. There’s a rock-paper-scissors thing going on between the four in which the Melee and Close-range class are strong against the Defence class, the Defence class is strong against the Bombers, and the Bomber class is strong against the Melee and Close-range class. This also effects the cost inflicted on the opponent’s credit bar; a Melee class dispatching a Defence class will result in a greater reduction to the opponent’s bar compared to a Defence class killing a Defence class or a Bomber class killing a Defence class, or at least that’s what the tutorial says, I have never really noticed the bar, was always too busy chasing and killing~ There are 3 to 4 characters in each type to choose from and each of them has their own specialities and weaknesses. Ok, now I’ll explain the individual classes lol: Close-range class are the interceptors, they have an exceptionally high agility and they can zip through the whole place in seconds, mainly because they are equipped with jetpacks. They have average defence and are also generally weaker in strength compared to the other classes but both their melee and range attacks are balanced. Defence class on the other hand are the slowest group of sloths in the whole game rivalling dead snails with their speed but in-trade of that they are very strong in both attack and defence where they can jump in the middle of a pack of enemies and practically massacre all of them, also, two of the characters in the Defence class also have a force field perk that can  make them invulnerable to range attacks. It’s not to the point of being pervertedly imbalanced though, since Bombers can still easily kill a Defence because they are too slow to move away from their bombardment. As for the Bomber class, well, they are bombers. They play the support fire role where all of their strength go to their range attacks, and they are usually super long ranged with a minimum effective range and they explode on impact dealing splash damage to a small area. They are the contributors to the beautiful overhead flying lasers/missiles throughout the battle lol, better when there are lots of bombers shooting all over the place together. They have the weakest armour in the entire game and their close quarter attacks are mostly limited. They are also the safest to play, one can stay at the backline and still get to kill things~ haha. Lastly, the Melee class, I placed it last because it’s the last class to be unlocked (in a new game there are only three characters available, one of each classes except for Melee, I’ll get to that later) and it is also the strongest class in the game imo. They have the highest attack and defence value in the entire game but they also have the shortest sight, radar range and lock-on range in the game. It’s so short that it’s almost pitiful, seriously. But once they lock-on on something, it won’t survive for long… unless they run of range lol.

There are only 3 characters available on a fresh install: one from Close-range, one of Defence and one from Bomber. The others are unlocked as you gain points from playing on multiplayer mode against the host server and/or used certain characters in multiplayer mode some certain amount of time (I think). Aside from points there is also a ‘military ranking title’ thingy and level value thing next to it. It’ll rank up according to the points earned from play against the host server in multiplayer mode. It unlocked the Melee class once it reaches Lieutenant Commander for me but I’m not too sure about the rest. The level value next to it was never explained in the manual but I think it’s a gauge kind of thing for the current ranking. It goes up mostly when playing online but down while playing offline and once it drops under lvl1 your ranking title will drop by one. I’m not sure how that part works, maybe there are more factors involved into the calculation for that than just wins and loses, whatever they are.

Then there’s the multiplayer mode. Yamadaya has setup a beta testing server for online play so that’s where I have been playing but being with a stupid ISP and all, the experience is quite frustrating at times, ok, most of the time actually; I can die for no reason and my kills would sometime not register and the one I killed suddenly gets back to life and shoots me from behind, sometimes something goes wrong and the controls go crazy like I was overlapped with a computer player or something, I could leave my controller and it’d play itself. Another annoying thing is while its smooth when I’m far from the other players, it’d get jerky once I get into the middle of the action and the consequence is obvious. Not only that, sometimes when I ‘die’, I can get into this ‘half-dead’ state where I really did die but my weapons ammunition are various other stuff was not reset. Seeing all these problems, I still can’t confidently say they are the glitches of the game itself, being a trial and all since all of them seem very likely to be caused by my ISP alone, I dunno. Meanwhile, I’d play in freeplay mode but my ranking would go down…

Oh, also, since the trial has no BGMs yet so I just use my foobar and play my own stuff while I play. I think you can make your own BGM with the game too since there is an MP3 folder in the game folder but I’m not sure how that works.

P.S. damn it! I just wrote a 1435 word long blog post instead of doing my 1000 word essay assignment >____>

24 March 2014 update: Wow, still getting so much traffic to this post after so many years. I notice that many of the links above are already dead by now. Here is the new webpage for Yamada-ya though. Soul Saber 2 should be quite obvious in there.