Revelade said:
Nice definitions. Here's mine.
Action: the player faces hordes of stupid enemies, yet his stats are usually higher than the others. Execution is fairly simple, whether it's choosing attack in turn based games or mashing the attack button in real time games. If you have better stats, you win. Games in this area would be: Gauntlet Legends, Dynasty Warriors, Final Fantasy X or Lunar.
Puzzle: the player is not in conflict, but rather has to solve a riddle through logic. Games in this area are: Zelda, Myst, Indigo Prophecy.
Reflex: the player is rewarded on how fast he executes a certain ability. If you do this ability better than the other player, you win. Games in this area are Counter Strike, F-Zero, DDR.
Strategy: the player is rewarded on what he decides to do, rather than how he does it. The opponents and him are equal in terms of stats and the game is decided through choice. The chances of winning should be close to equal for ALL players in the game. Games in this area are: Starcraft, Warcraft III, chess and SOUL CALIBUR 2.
RPG: Nope, not those games like FF7 or such. Role playing is what it is, playing a role. Common misconception is it has to be a combat game. Well GUESS WHAT. Not every person that exists fights. Role playing is LIVING the life of a person, not fighting enemies which has confused the average gamer. Games in this category are The Sims, Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing.
The bottom line: Soul Calibur II is a strategy game because it counters beat skill, both players are equal in terms of chances of winning and it's not dictated by luck.
Do you
really want to provide valuable evidence to those actually
arguing in this thread evidence that you
don't read or play games? Those categories
I presented are the
official categories that
gaming companies use to
specifically catagorize all games released to the market. Let me make this a whee bit easier for you to understand.
Action
Namco, the freaking company who
made, published, whatever the game of Soul Calibur II, taking into account all facets of the game, label said game as a 3D Fighter under the Action category. Pan's right about one thing. A random button-masher can beat one who's memorized every move in the game. Why? Unpredictability. Yep. It's not
luck, it's the raw inability to guess what move is coming next.
I'll elaborate on why Soul Calibut is an Action game. You take on the role of a fighter and control their actions. This is a stable of every-single Action title on the market. This includes first-person shooters (Halo, Counterstrike, Metroid Prime, etc.), platformers (Mario, Jax, etc.), and fighting games (Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, etc.). You hit the button associated with 'weak punch' and your character throws exactly that. You hit the button associated with 'strong kick' and your character does exactly that. That's Soul Calibur II.
Is there some aspect of strategy involved? Duh. There is a thought process involved in every single game out there. There is
more strategy involved in Soul Calibur II when two hardcore Soul Calibur fans are involved. When a hardcore fan meets a new player, strategy goes out the window because the new player will randomly push forward, backward, right, left, A, B, X, Y, L, R, and the C-stick (NGC version). You don't know what's coming at you, and you have to either hope you can sit back and try to take advantage of their lack of knowledge of join in the button-mashing.
Every freakin' game has strategy! On that same note, most games have action elements in the fact that 'action a' causes 'action b'.
Adventure
This is a shrinking genre, primarily because most games can also be fit under another genre or better fitted there. Legend of Zelda is an excellent example here. Adventure games usually have a central hero and an expansive story. However, Legend of Zelda is also an Action, Puzzle, and Role-Playing game. It is labeled as an Adventure because of this mixture of genre in nearly equal proportions.
There is something interesting about Soul Calibur II that has it fitting in here where the original Soul Calibur would not. It's the adventure mode where you can earn gold to buy new weapons, characters, etc. There is not enough of a strong mixture here to warrant either a combination of genre or calling of anything else.
Story is a staple of the Adventure genre.
Driving
Cars. Lots and Lots of Cars. There are games, like Sonic Battle Adventure 2, that do have cars but belong to a different genre.
Puzzle
Games of this genre have situations or environments to solve in order to get through.
Role-Playing
You said the
same freakin' thing I said! You either can't read or didn't feel like reading. SquareSoft catagorized Final Fantasy VII, a severly over-rated game, as an RPG because you take on the role of Cloud and Company. RPG is more a marketing tool based on the sucess of table-top RPGs and the fact that this type of game tends to be Action, Adventure, Simulation, and whatever else might be added into random titles.
Simulation
The Sims is the most popular example in this area. Really, every game simulates something. It's when a game dedicates itself, in majority, to simulation does it become a Simulation game.
Sports
There are violent sports out there, and street fighting is considered one...even if illegal. There are semi-legal forms of street fighting, such as kick boxing of the (questionably real) Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Strategy
Soul Calibur, in the hands of truely hardcore fans of the series, likely is the ultimate Strategy game. However, there is far more to this genre than simply that. Why? There are dedicated Strategy games, there are games that simply emply a large amount of Strategy but rely more heavily on other genre, and there are games where Strategy is simply unavoidable.
StarCraft falls into the first category because you can beat ability with strategy. A single Zergling stands absolutely no chance against a single Dark Templar or Marine. A swarm of Zerglings, however, can over take either. Soul Calibur falls into the secont category because a block can stun and lead to a string of attacks, a specific move can counter and beat another, and jumping or distance can give a poweful advantage. However, desperation can win. Doing something incorrectly in mass quanties cannot, in most cases, deliver a win (as the example presented with the Zerglings). The Sims fall into the third, and final, category because you simply cannot avoid determing that a certain recourse is better than another in a certain situation.
The Bottom Line
No two ways about it, Soul Calibur is more an Action title than a Strategy title. It
does emply elements of Strategy, but those are only blatantly obvious in a hardcore v. hardcore setting, and, even then, a desperate and frustrated player can pull out a win over a concentrated and calm player. It's already been stated that those who've never even played Soul Calibur can beat an expert. I've done it. I did it three times in a row before I learned what buttons did what and tried to do exactly what you said Soul Calibur was and strategize. Then I love five times in a row because ability and knowledge beat lack there of. I got desperate, and I won again. I find I played the game better being a frustrated button-masher rather than a perfectionist planner.