13. Soul Calibur
Fighting games and movies rarely mix into a good formula... in fact it'd be more accurate to say that in exactly one instance has a fighting game ever been made into a movie that was "kinda good but heavily flawed". Every other fighting game based movie has been generally speaking, worse than the average videogame to screen adaptation. While Soul Calibur is arguably better in it's development of characters than other fighting games, don't let that fool you into thinking that gives it an edge in avoiding the same problems that plagued the rest of it's button mashing kin. First and foremost the reason that most fighting game movies suck is because they have to add a lot of plot to wrap around the fighting scenes. What's that you say imaginary reader objecting to my point so that I can further elaborate on it? Soul Calibur has enough story elements that the writers won't need to make up a bunch of crap? Yeah well guess what skeezix? So did Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat and they turned out "bad in a wacky but fun way" and "kinda good but heavily flawed" respectively. The reason that most of these games fail to turn into movies worth the celluloid they were filmed on, is because the story is always (even in the case of Soul Calibur) shoe horned into the game without really needing to be there. Think about it, how much of any fighting game has
ever had the story elements be playable. They haven't as far as I know. All that great back story stuff in the games is just that
back story. It's in the background. Oh, and before you go mentioning something like "Mortal Kombat: Deception" bare in mind that the story stuff is all a separate side mode to the fighting game. It's a well done side mode, but the creators of the game were wise enough to know that it would be a bad idea to include all that stuff in the mix without having the option to ignore it by switching to a normal fighting mode. The point of that is this, all the plot heavy scenes in a movie based on a game that revolves around beating up somebody and not much else feel out of place because they are. The whole point of a fighting game is to reduce what could otherwise be a longer and more boring game to the nitty gritty essentials. If you look at side scrolling beat em ups like Double Dragon and Final Fight, it's not too hard to think of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat as the same kind of games with everything but the boss fights taken out. All that story stuff is tacked on to give a unique flavor to what would otherwise be a "Brand X" type of game. So when those scenes come onto the screen big or small the don't capture an audience too much because ' they're a distraction to the real reason everyone is sitting in front of the screen whether they have a controller in their hand or not. The one thing I can think of that a Soul Calibur movie might have in it's corner is that there's no tournament for the characters to all meet up at. As I recall, most of the game has isolated characters meeting up in two or threes in different parts of the world. This would give a wider scope and fresher feel to a movie adaptation, but the deck is still stacked in favor of suckage.