This is a comparison page for Last Bronx and Soul Blade for the Saturn and Playstation 1. All written comparisons, movies, and JPGs were made while playing the games on the actual console and taken from the actual console through an S-Video connection.

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Comparison Comments

Graphics

Soul Blade runs at 640x240 at 30 frames per second, and Last Bronx runs at 704x480 at 60 frames per second. Soul Blade uses gouraud shaded light sourcing effects on the characters and the floors, as well as translucent effects for weapon movement effects and sparks from impact. Last Bronx does not have lighting effects of any kind, and motion blur is achieved through fast animation techniques rather than translucent effects.

Backgrounds in Soul Blade are polygonal objects attached to simple 2D color gradient or flat color floors and far backdrops. These 3D objects are adequately texture mapped to appear detailed from the distance they are displayed at, and relatively low polygon count. Last Bronx uses multiple independant 2D backgrounds, floors and ceilings that are capable of scaling and rotating in sync with the camera movement in order to create a solid 3D "ring" environment. Polygons are used for the characters, weapons and ring fences.

The advantage of Soul Blade's approach is that the gouraud shading blends texture maps and ultimately creates a 3D effect on the characters and rings through color fading and shading. This takes the eye away from the relatively low detail texture maps on the floors and characters. Last Bronx's approach is optimized for maximum character animation and overall framerate, which allows for its custom hit detection and fluid motion capture animations. Overall both games look great for their respective systems, and their genre, and the approaches are actually too different to claim one is superior to the other.

3ivx Compression was used on all video files with the exact same settings. The movie files for each game float around the .80 MB per second range, indicating similar amounts of colors being used in each. All of the movie files are taken using the same hardware and software, and all of the audio is captured at 1411 kbps. This indicates that the texture maps and backgrounds in Last Bronx are higher color than Soul Blade's, because the gouraud shading, lighting effect and transparency are known to boost color counts on screen significantly. Therefore a game with equal color counts in texture maps and the addition of these effects should rate in much higher, while Soul Blade only does in certain levels with fully transparent floors. This, when combined with fact that Last Bronx is running at twice the framerate and higher animation leads to yet another inconclusive conclusion as to which game is doing more technically in graphics.

Sound

Both games use digital voice samples and effects and stream music from the CD-ROM.

Gameplay

Basic moves, combos and movements are very similar in both Last Bronx and in Soul Blade with one notable exception. Soul Blade allows the player to side step opponents by double tapping down in the D-Button. 3D movement occurs in Last Bronx only when a move knocks a character in or out of the screen, or when rolling to get up after being knocked down. Other than that, both games employ fighting styles which would seriously cause personal injury to the fighter using them, meaning that they wouldn't work in real life no matter how fast and strong you are. Combos and moves are relatively simple and work in the same way they do in countless other fighting games, though neither game is considered an especially technical fighting game. For this comparison, it is only worthy to note that nothing is happening behind the scenes that would technically outweigh the other game.

Conclusion

Last Bronx and Soul Blade are very comparable in gameplay, being that both are weapons based 3D fighting games. Both employ unique approaches to their graphics design, and neither demonstrate any sort of absolute advantage technically. This is true because Last Bronx is running at higher resolution and twice the framerate while Soul Edge employs gouraud shading and transparent effects. Fans would have to look elsewhere than these two games in order to support a system exclusive bias.