I meant the game itself, not the moveset.
The biggest issues people have with Soulcalibur V is the Street Fighter 3 attempt at a new cast and the lack of content. The directors wanted to call it Soul Edge 2 as kinda a new beginning similar to how the original Soul Edge was the beginning for Soul Calibur, but Soulcalibur was chosen for the marque value. The lack of content was because they were not given enough staff from Namco and they were not given any extra time to get in some extra things they wanted.
- The directors wanted to give every character their story, but lack of staff helping and time ultimately lead them to doing only Patroklos and Pyrrha.
- The directors wanted to delay the game to at least March/April, 2 months from the January release, in the hopes they could get in 2 more characters for Soulcalibur 5, being Bangoo and Cassandra, and potentially some extra content. Namco did not give them any extra time and kept it to the January release.
- They were hoping to do DLC characters besides Dampierre, but once again, Namco said no and restricted them to content like Created Character content and extra Songs to choose from when battling.
Namco was doing so little to help with Soulcalibur V that it's actually amazing that the SCV team, being competitive players themselves, were actually able to make probably the most fun and most balanced Soulcalibur game since Soulcalibur II. Soulcalibur III had a glitch called Variable Cancelling that gave most of the characters a 100 to death combo making the game a total competitive nightmare and....oooo boy, Soulcalibur IV. Not only the slowest game to appeal to the casuals, but imagine if Super Smash Bros Brawl had an extra mechanic to the tripping system where if you tripped, the opponent could press the B button from anywhere on the map to get an instant unskippable kill on you.
That's what the armor breaking and critical finish system was in Soulcalibur IV. While the armor system was designed to punish players from guarding too much, armor pieces could literally break randomly even if the armor was at green health which meant if your opponent ended up getting a lucky break and quickly pressed the Critical Finish button, it was a free Round Win. That's not even counting the muddied Created Character system that had STATS attached to the pieces that originally couldn't be turned off Online, meaning when you were playing Online, you were playing against people who stacked up on Creator parts and had a ton of HP and whatnot.
I will defend Soulcalibur V for having genuinely good gameplay, because it felt so much more satisfying to play compared to Soulcalibur IV. Soulcalibur 3 was fun, but the gameplay certainly had it's issues and felt really cheap at times, but the many modes it had were good fun, as well as the multi-branch Story mode that if you followed successfully could lead you to a hidden boss.
But I can say with absolute confidence that if a game got me to play through all of the content twice(Once on my own and the 2nd time to help my Dad's account clear the trophies for it as it was accidentally played on his account and he was clearing out trophies on his PS3 list), that it did something right with it's main gameplay. It was the game that made me return back to Nightmare after originally having him as my main in Soulcalibur II before switching to Raphael in SC3 and 4. Nightmare was so much fun to play in Soulcalibur V.
Had Namco actually gave the directors effort in helping them, I'd argue that Soulcalibur V could've had the potential to be the next Street Fighter 3, a game that was panned at first, but eventually became praised for what it did do right. Soulcalibur V's gameplay was legitimately fun to play, but the biggest issue it had was the lack of modes to do things and relying too much on an online battling system that still had issues' like Soulcalibur IV's online. Soulcalibur V had so much against it that it's amazing we even got a Soulcalibur VI, let alone a director who managed to convince Namco to actually put effort in it, after how much Namco sabotaged SCV.