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Not to sure about the new character, strange weapon choice. But I'm not complaining the more characters the better!

Marry me, Ivy.

no trailer?...the headline should probably not be "Soul Calibur IV trailer" then....nice screens and gameplay

Not really a fan of any of these anime girls, but as long as they're just bonus characters, and totally optional, I guess it's not hurting anyone.

There's still at least one main character yet to be announced though, whether it's a completely new guy, returning one or another guest character, who knows..

Thank you for being intelligent and not complaining about "extra" characters. I hate when people do that. If you don't like them, don't play as them.

How do you know that there's one more character still to be announced?

There's still one box yet to be identified :)

http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h203/WinterSnowb...

We can assume the one beside Vader is for Starkiller, and all of these anime guys are under the star box, so that leaves quite a possibility for the last guy to be another bonus character, perhaps even another Star Wars character..

Thanks. Guess we'll find out very soon.

I'd rather get this on 360 for Live and achievements, but I'll probably go with the ps3 version for the better controller.

this game doesn't do much for me, the whole series just has not evolved at all since soul calibur on dreamcast. it's kind of like how the newer tekken games do nothing for me and i stopped playing around tekken tag. also the control in SC i'm not big on.

HOWEVER ... if Kratos really is in SC4, i'm going to check it out. his character seems ideal for this game.

Whats the one next to the "?" box? It has 2 people inside!

I was so sure there would be a demo released during E3. I'm sad. :(In SC3's character select screen, next to "random character" there was an option called "random creation" where it would randomly generate a custom character for you. Could be that.

ivy looks soo great

New character looks interesting the she is a Oni is a good thing see how it goes 2 weeks left!

I believe the Kratos rumour was already shot down. There was still some hope for him, but I would imagine they'd have announced something as big as that already, there's less than 2 weeks before the release now. E3 was the last chance, in my opinion for them to announce something like that, and it's pretty much done now. Chances are, someone as big as Kratos would appear on the front of the cover as well.

My money is still on another Star Wars character. Kit Fisto, or Aayla Secura, or someone along those lines. (A characer were they don't have to worry about an actual actors likeness).

Hm. Where is The Apprentice from Force Unleashed on the character select screen? Is he next to Algol on the bottom right? I'm also not seeing Angol, the "pointy" lady.

Also maybe an empty slot is for a created character?

I'm not sure what you're expecting to evolve. Unlike some other genres, fighting games have to stick to a formula or find a formula that's stable. If not, what you're left with is an imbalanced fighting game no one will like. And this is what fighting games are about, balance. You have to ask yourself what kind of moves can fighting games bring to the table that won't break the game in question. We already have parries, blocks, cancels, dodges, supers, and sometimes combos. What else could we possibly add?

Counterattacks like in Dead or Alive would be a nice. But those became frustrating after time. It felt like people memorized every possible combo that each character had to offer and would counter almost every punch or kick you threw. In order to stand a chance online you had to play often; you couldn't casually pick the game up and win.

Now yes, practice makes perfect and everyone knows, or should know, that. Of course practice helps, but if you pick the game up late you won't have to worry about getting destroyed online. You’ll know you stand at least somewhat of a chance.

So if they were to add a counterattack system in a future release to "evolve" it, I wouldn’t want it to be too drastic. Instead of having to press a certain button and direction for each type of kick or punch (high, med, low) like in Dead or Alive, they could group all the punch types into one button+direction combination and all the kick types into another. It would seem more balanced that way. Like Contra was getting at, balance in a fighting game is key.

The empty box is for Jar Jar Binks! :D (Or more likely a downloadable Darth Vader for the Xbox360 version and a downloadable Yoda for the PS3 version.)

I hope it's a can of Pepsi. That would be awesome.Guard Impact.

They're changing some of the details of GI, but they won't ever take an automated damage route like DOA because they don't believe that it should be a strong guaranteed source of damage.

Kratos........Im dreaming, I know.

Well, a few people in the US have the game already, so hopefully that will push Namco to announce this last character, assuming it's anyone special. I guess we'll find out shortly either way.

But again, it's NOT going to be Kratos, he's far too big a name to be kept hidden, they would have announced him ages ago to hype the game more, announcing him a week before release would be a little silly.

Hm... The game looks really nice. Now I want it even more. ^^Either the star slot or the Slot with two characters on it next to the "?"-Slot should be for created characters, the other slot is for minor characters from the story mode.

Btw. why does Maxi loose parts of his clothes during the fight? Can this also happen to female characters? x33"

I'm quite suprised you don't know why already or even noticed the 3 small slots at the side of the health bar! But I'll tell you why anyway because I'm such a nice person. Namco-Bandai wanted to stop the annoyance of playing against someone who is constantly blocking so in order to make the game have a faster pace and to make it more fair they have added in a new feature. When someone is hit whilst blocking the small coloured orb next to the health bar starts to flash quicker and quicker and change colour. If the opposition is hit enough times whilst blocking one of the bars in the 3 green blocks I mentioned earlier will dissapear. When this happens, the charcter will lose an item of clothing. If this is successfully done 3 times the character doing the damage will get a small amount of time to press all four main buttons at the same time (x,y,b,a/x, triangle,square, circle) and will peform a special move to finish off the opposition immediatley. You may have noticed some glimpses of these in some of the previous trailers (i.e when siegfreid smacks the ground and ice comes up etc). Well I hope that helped anyway!

Oh and another thing:I have some good news and some bad news... The good news is that this can happen to female characters. The bad news is...

That you won't be able to see much difference so don't think you'll be seing any bare breasted ivy's waltzing around. Not that I'm that bothered. ("Cough")

Not sure if any of you have already seen this but just thought I'll put it on; gameplay of Talim and The apprentice:

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/739576/soulcalib...