Taki rules!

I'm a big fan of Beat'Em Ups. And In almost every game, I end up playing a female, fast character. Not that I actually want to play a female character (though hot chicks surely are a plus), but I simply love fast fighters. And it usually turns out that the fastest ones are often female.

So when the very first Soul Edge / Soul Blade came out, I quickly focused on Taki, the fastest of all the characters available back then - and also the one with the tightest outfit. And even though I also came to like other fighters when more and more sequels were released, Taki always remained my favorite.

Now that Souldcalibur IV is out, I first feared after playing it a while that in order to get achieve missions and grind money, I might have to rely on other chars that are "cheaper" and more effective to play, like Nightmare or Kilik. Those characters have huge range and many moves to throw opponents out of the ring. That combined with high dmg output makes fighting the CPU and finishing the game quickly rather easy. So I stuck to such characters, always alittle sad since I wanted to do that with my favorite character instead.

But when it came to getting the achievement for 100 critical finishes, I started playing with Taki again... and I realized once more just how amazing she is! Well I always knew that and loved her for certain qualities (pun intented) but I found out a few more things that I never thought I could use her for:

one reason: critical finish galore

Her attacks are fast and - given the right equipment and skills - do huge soul gauge damage! Then all I needed was to find good attacks to actually cause the soul crush in order to finish the opponent. And it turned out that Taki has quite alot of moves like 4+B or 6+B that make soul crushes quite easy to do - especially because those can be chained / spammed, at least with slower opponents.

another reason: cannon-throws

I never used the ground explosion techniques of Taki too much in the past. But when fighting the CPU at high difficulty, it "showed" me an arial throw that started with that explosion. I don't remember the name given for those moves in the game, but I simply call em "cannon-throws" myself. And after practicing those, they now became a fixed addition to my move-arsenal - at least when fighting against the CPU.

With those 2 new discoveries, I ended up finishing the game and story-mode with Taki over and over again, grinding money, critical finishes and guard blocks. And I was surprised how easy the game is with her, even in hard mode. And above all: It's so much fun! There aren't many games where I have a character that fits me so well... I just feel comfortable and home when I can control Taki. Her swift moves, her direct reactions to my button-pressing. And with the new techniques, I don't feel weak or fragile at all, not even when facing the biggest, strongest characters.

Had to take a picture of this. Was such a nice score with Taki on hard mode. Wasn't even aiming for it.

So thank you Namco, for designing such an amazing Fighter. And sorry for ever disbanding your for that long, Taki! I hope the long sessions I had the past few days compensated for that!

Images taken from and probably © IGN and Namco