Game Play: Soul Caliber IV

I've always been a huge Soul Caliber fan, from playing the game first with Big Brother on the Dreamcast. I'm not a huge fighter buff in general, despite a huge flirtation with Eternal Champions which might point to the opposite, but I like the genre when it's done well.

For the most part I'm willing to say that Soul Caliber IV is the genre done well. Briefly though, I want to talk about one bit which is just truly annoying.

There's been some fuss about the inclusion of Star Wars characters into Soul Caliber. I gotta say that with a so-called plot along the lines of Soul Caliber, they could pretty much have Kris Kringle fighting Kris Kristofferson and I'm not sure I'd notice.

No, the problem is that someone seemed to have let the inclusion of LucasArts essentially break, or at least throw a decent sized monkey wrench into, the arcade mode of the game. While I think including The Apprentice from the upcoming Force Unleashed games is perfectly fine, I don't see why he has to be ten times harder than anyone else in arcade mode.

I mean I played as Darth Vader and took the so-called boss out for pancakes after not so kindly making him my bitch in about ten minutes. The Apprentice, who is not the boss of the mode, took almost an hour of complete swearing and near controller tossing. I don't see how that is anything but bad design and someone's idea of Lucas worship. I don't give a damn who The Apprentice is or how powerful his little mitochondria are supposed to be - he shouldn't stand out as significantly more powerful than everyone else in an entire roster during an entire game mode. It's just stupid.

Otherwise I'm mostly enjoying the game. Even playing as The Apprentice, which is of course not as godlike as playing against, is something worhwhile - but would someone please tune this jackass down a notch?