Overall (5.75/10) : The pros of her fighting style cannot unfortunately, outweigh her rather horrible look. Perhaps Namco were trying to even out the fact that most of the other Soul Calibur girls gained more clothes this time around (Xianghua and Cassandra for example are both fully covered while even Ivy has more garments than her SC 1 and 2 counterparts)
The Look (4/10): As mentioned her look is probably one of Tira’s worst aspects. Her bright green outfit covers her entire body, which, would be quite practical for a fighter were it not for the giant slash under her breasts. Her breasts are supported only by a very flimsy strip of green material, which as mentioned makes them jiggle. This can be exploited to the maximum in the profile mode where you can make her jump around in circles.Many people have previously pointed out that any woman with large breasts is going to have a bit of bounce, this I accept but Tira’s costume simply capitalizes on this! Even Ivy has some support for her breasts where as Tira’s simply don’t. It’s not exactly practical for fighting and it wouldn’t surprise me if her boobs slipped out from time to time ;). In the FMV sequence at the beginning of the game, she does look rather cute, (which may not be entirely right for the evil girl she is supposed to be), the green seems toned down and the camera never particularly focuses on her breasts either. Tira’s second outfit in contrast to the first is much better at covering her up. She wears a mini dress, with a jacket over the top, which has little skull heads attached to it and thigh high boots but once again the designers choose another hideous colour for Tira, mustard yellow. Tira definitely gets the short end of the stick in the colour department unfortunately; perhaps this was an effort to make the player explore the new Standard Character Colour Edit mode.
Attitude (8/10): Tira is a manic depressive and as such her attitude varies depending on the situation. It’s portrayed pretty well in the game. Sometimes she’s all cutesy with lines such as, ‘Awww, you’re broke already?’ and other times she’ll be so frustrated that she’ll darkly whisper, ‘Let’s find out…just how dark your blood is’. She loves to play around with her enemies sadistically, especially her main enemy of the game, Sophita, whom she teases constantly, calling her a bad mother for abandoning her children, just to come after her. You get the feeling that this whole adventure is something of a game to her.
Intelligence (6/10: It’s hard to judge Tira’s intelligence as the player gets to make certain choices in the game for her (a new feature to the Soul Calibur world). Her intelligence therefore relies heavily on the player. If the player makes the right choices, she fulfills her mission. However, she is a trained assassin and manages to set a trap up for all of the characters at Ostrheinsburg Castle. Even when she is defeated there and forced to retreat, if the player decides to pursue her, she manages to evade them by calling on her flock of watcher birds that protect her.
Stance (3/10): Another area of complaint is her stance. Although in a regular battle, Tira stands in a regular battle stance, in the pre battle screen, she arches her back and pins her arms behind her, which inevitably pushes her breasts forward, making them, appear even larger. She also uses this stance in her profile and in the art gallery it’s repeated in a lot of the drawings of her. It doesn’t look like a particular comfortable position to be honest. The other stance that is commonly seen in the drawings and the advertising campaign is where she holds her ring blade above her head, again exposing the underside of breasts and showing how truly gravity defying they are.
Voice (5/10 [English Voice] 7/10 [Japanese Voice]): Both in English and Japanese, Tira’s voice reflects her extreme mood swings. When she is happy her voice is very playful and cheery though in English it is a bit squeaky and rather grating on the nerves when she shouts ‘Let’s play!’, while in her more serious moods it’s rather gruff and low such when she vows ‘I’ll cut your heart out!’. I do prefer her Japanese voice actress, even though this game has seen an improvement in quality of the English voiceovers such as Setsuka and Sophita who are particularly good in English, Tira’s voice is simply too annoying for me to listen to for long periods of time.
Scripts: (8/10): Her storyline is fairly well scripted, and Tira doesn’t suffer from poor translation any worse than any other Soul Calibur character though there is one grievance I have. Why would Tira simply wait in Ostrheinsburg Castle for every single character to come along and then ambush them rather than hunting them down? This is something that Zasalamel also suffers from. ‘The Cog Man’ has become something of an in game joke as he waits in the Clock Tower just to throw cogs at every single character, other than that though Tira’s story makes sense. In addition becoming an evil assassin who relishes in killing and joins up with one of the greatest killing machines the world has ever known, Nightmare is enjoyable to play through. I especially like her confrontations with Sophitia, whose children, Tira decides will be ideal hosts for Soul Edge. It would have been nice perhaps to see more elaborate dialogue between the two, rather than the mere two or three lines that they speak before fighting one another.
Marketing Efforts Towards Women (5/10): For the PAL version of the game, only Tira’s face is featured in the background so you’re not assaulted by the green monstrosity that is her outfit. However, as she is one of the three new characters to the game, she is featured predominantly in the advertising website and the commercials. The E3 commercial, featured on the official Soul Calibur 3 website under ‘Game Trailer’, has the camera slowly moving upwards over Tira’s body resulting in a close up shot of her breasts. However, I did notice that on the official wallpaper from the same website, they’ve blurred out her chest with a white line. Perhaps this is to avoid complaints from both parents, (although the game is rated 16+ here in the UK) and women alike.Articles on WomenGamers.Com solely reflect the experiences and perspectives of the author(s). Feel free to agree or disagree in the accompanying forum thread.
