Fighting game internet culture has moved so far beyond the way we used to share information, that some of the most interesting aspects of old fighting games are lost to the sands of time. I think this is really unfortunate — some of my favorite things in fighting games are weird glitches or interesting design choices in games both popular and obscure. In the interest of preserving some of this trivia, I’ve decided to start a little show called “Crow Bites” — short videos designed to capture some the stranger bugs I’ve run into over the years in the FGC. (If I’m a responsible_spaceboy, everything in this series should be under 5 minutes. That’s the challenge I’m giving myself, at least.)
With SoulCalibur VI on the way, I thought SoulCalibur II — the game so frequently referenced by Okubo as a design reference — was a good place to start.
“Soul Charge” is fundamentally a different beast in SCVI — what was once a re-imagined version of Tekken‘s “Ki Charge” mechanic is now a panic-button meter-consuming state closer in design to Pokkén Tournament‘s “Burst Mode”. A “feature” of SCII’s Soul Charge mode that almost certainly won’t return is its graphics-breaking buffer glitch, an odd side effect from playing around in SCII’s large buffer window. Rest assured, if I stick with this series, the sentence “SCII’s buffer window caused this glitch” is a sentence you’ll read a lot.
SRK’s youtube channel features guides, reviews, odd trivia, and more, all circling the world of the FGC. If that sounds like your bag, be sure to check out our back catalog here!