As someone with over 100 hours on this game, and had made countless custom characters, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. There is a bug that can happen to you seemingly out of nowhere where your save data will be corrupted, causing you to lose all your game progress, stats, and custom characters. I have lost all of those hours of my life. Hopefully this will keep you from losing hours of your life as well.

I am total noob in this game. But the reason I downvoted this is a different one.
When the loading screen appeared, I was somehow surprised how "lame" it looks like.
I played Soulcalibur IV on XBox and I remember this game to be way more intuitive and good looking.

I also was disappointed by the story telling. It is just a bad drawn comic with some text.
No cutscenes or something. It really looked old. I though I would play a game from 1984 or something.

But all this was not even that bad. It just gave me a first negative expression.
So I tried strory mode and versus mode. The character selection disappointed me.
You select the character from this "matrix" with 2D images on it. But then it takes like ages to load the actual 3D model for the selected character. And somehow ... the faces of the 3D models looked cringe.
In comparison: Dead or Alive feels way more natural (but there I also hated the latest one with these annoying conversions).

So after some disappointment I tried to use "Training". This also was kind of a bad experience for me (as a noob/newcomer to this genre). I expected the combos to be shown at the bottom of the screen to practice them. Like in Dead or Alive or in other games. But this was not the case. I had to look up the combos in a list with small text which was really hard to read on the TV. The controls were all described for usage on a PC with keyboard. But I used a controller on SteamDeck so I never really figured out which button it was. Example: I pressed A on the XBox One controller ... but on screen it showed me "K" or some of the keyboard keys. Why? Wasn't that game originally made for consoles?
And there was also a section describing how to use the characters ... oh boy ... it is a huge text without any linebreaks. White font on brown background with lime green icons inbetween. This really gave me eye cancer. So I just uninstalled the game. I maybe will watch some videos on YT on how to play/use it. But I remember Soulcalibur V way better on console. The fights started fast and you could replay fast. The loading screens were barely there. But in the new one ... you are always disrupted with lagging moments. 3... 2... 1... ... ... fight ... sometimes it felt like the counting was longer than the fight.

To be fair, I think some issues might come from SteamDeck (like the keyboard keys showing instead controller buttons). But the usability is just not good. I guess I will wait for some other fighting game.

That character creator alone is worth hours of fun.