Guest characters help bring new players in (like myself back when Link was in II), and those players will find more characters to like in the roster or find new ones in the next game. Nothing about guest characters keeps it from achieving greatness, guests just help bring in new players as the rest of the roster grows. Guest characters have always helped Soul Calibur.
But if we go by your logic I guess Injustice 2 is the most trash fighting game ever made for destroying its integrity and player retention and wasting tons of resources pandering to idiot fanboys
Effort should be put into getting characters with tonal crossover with the home game. Samurai Showdown and Soul Calibur could easily trade characters for guest duties.
Then again, stunts like Star Wars in SC or Negan in Tekken is cool in moderation.
Guests do not ‘take up slots’ of past regulars, that’s not how that works. Guests take up guest slots - it’s been decided already.
Unrelated, comments on Mina/safe moves:
The hunt for the safest moves in a character/game has made upper tier FGC strategically linear and dare I say impotent.
Any move safe on block or hit should have minimal active frames and glacier start-up. Change my mind
Guest characters artificially inflate sales for one entry and are followed by commercial disappointment. How many of the Link players actually bought Soul Calibur III? Probably none as it didn’t have Link, because there is no way somebody would pass up a cheap $100 console to play a giant exclusive library.
Also, you are comparing apples and oranges. Injustice 2 is a game about comic book characters fighting one another. Who in Injustice 2 is featured in a comic book? Everybody. Who in Soul Calibur is not from a fictionalized late 16th century? Every fucking guest character!
Even with that said, do I think that a one off guest character is a good addition to Injustice 2’s roster? No, because it can fuck up the retention of players between titles. Over time it carves out the identity of a series and leaves it hollow inside making every iteration nothing more than another crossover with incoherent continuity.
Also, if you compare the box art, what each game is selling becomes obvious:
Yeah, and then the characters they’ve grown to like will get cut from the next game in favour of the latest popular dudebro and weeabo waifu. A history of souls and disappointments, eternally retold.
I can see the point but IMO it only works when the base roster is already more or less making the fanbase happy. SCVI was almost there, they only lack three or four styles (and Tira shouldn’t have been DLC).
Link players couldn’t buy Soul Calibur III if they wanted to since it was a PS2 exclusive.
Also, you are comparing apples and oranges. Injustice 2 is a game about comic book characters fighting one another. Who in Injustice 2 is featured in a comic book? Everybody. Who in Soul Calibur is not from a fictionalized late 16th century? Every fucking guest character!
The Mortal Kombat characters ain’t comic characters last I checked. They don’t fit the mold of characters that would belong in the DC universe niether.
While it’s certainly true that most people that got SC2 because “omg Link in a fighting game!!!1” didn’t buy SC3, that was less about the game not having Link in it and more with the fact that SC3 was a PS2 exclusive. I remember being pretty pissed about that, as I only had a Gamecube back then and really wanted to play SC3.
I do know for a fact that putting Link in SC2 made SC the fighting game amongst casuals in my country, however. And that most people I know who would later buy SC4, did so because they had previously played SC2.
Guest character is added, more people try it, more people become mainstays to the franchise and the number of hardcore fans increases, with different guest characters bringing in different people over time. People who like the franchise from that point stay, people who aren’t into it don’t.
Simple as that.
I can respect people not liking guest characters, like for the other point brought up about how 2B is being revealed before all of the veterans are back. Your points however are just dumb nonsense, trying to act like a couple guest characters make a shitty game by making up bullshit just because you personally don’t like guests.
That is true. Star Wars definitely didn’t make any sense either, but at least 2B has fan demand backing her appearance.
It is a world of magical dimensions and eyeball swords though so I guess “just magic” could be excuse enough. Like how Link got there in II.
IV’s guests did make me think that a Soul Calibur spin-off with just Star Wars characters would be pretty awesome though. Sadly it’ll probably never happen.
The point of crossovers isn’t to make sense. It’s seeing characters from different series interact and being out of their element. I’m not thinking about how 2B fits into the game. I think it’s cool she’s in a fighting game I like.
If people could not be bothered to pick up the best selling console of all time with hundreds of quality exclusives at the low price of $99 to play it they were not that into Soul Calibur.
If this was in the era of Genesis/SNES it would be a reasonable excuse, but Sony had near total control of the videogame market in that generation with Nintendo and Microsoft gasping for air with only a handful of sparsely released exclusives of their own. If somebody did not buy a PS2 in that generation they were tone deaf or oblivious to the state of the gaming market. So, not getting a game exclusively on the best selling console of all time because it is only on that console is a bullshit excuse.
Call it what you want, but the support of the series for most of the guest train riders was a one off just like the presence of that character in the series. Similarly, the disappointing sales of its direct follow up are a stain on the reputation of the series and a reason for its continually decreasing budget relative to game development costs of the time.
