Talim's club-like weapons are generally thought to be some sort of tonfa. I haven't tried playing as her in SCIV as I don't have the PS3, just my friend, and thus haven't sat down with it for more than an hour or so. However, the royally futzed with her combat style in SCIII to more so make her an ineffective, light-weight, hit-and-run-style light striker with loads of rolls and dodges. However, many commented that her best moves were either buried under even more complex button inputs or replaced with less effective moves. Hopefully the restored her to her former glory.

At least my main character—Kilik—seems to have had some of the moves I enjoyed in SCII unburied as well as recovered. Imagine the look of horror on my face when I first played SCIII and got the no-range "Tip Shock" (44+B) instead of "Stream Thrust"—which they forced you to crouch to perform instead of him being able to go from standing to doing a crouched thrust in one smooth movement.

I take it that you didn't play the 50% faster SCIII. I figured out that it wasn't my timing that was rusty with Kilik and Mitsurugi when I saw the weapon demo movies—which are exactly the same as the SCII's—play out so much faster than before. Excellent proof of this is watching Raphael's "dance" weapon demo in both SCII and SCIII. As far as I can tell SCIV seems closer to SCII in speed.

Also noteworthy is the fact that it would appear that every girl in the game (although seemingly with the exception of Xianghua) gained about 30% more bust volume between SCIII and SCIV—Ivy's proportions are just ridiculous. I think that strained, purple thing that she wears is some variant of her standard SCII outfit. To sum up this odd change on part of the character designers my friend commented that his favorite bonus character from SCIII, Amy, is "...no longer a creepy little girl, but a creepy young woman."

However, one thing about the "Create-A-Character" mode in this game is that gear and clothing does change things. So the downloadable hats might actually have some effect on your custom character's ability to fight. SCIII had the mode, but it was mostly decor as it allowed for the creation of a somewhat limited style of male or female character who had either one of about 5 generic fighting styles or an identical fighting style to an existing canon character. SCIV actually has stats associated with each item you wear and those stats effect which "skills" you can equip your character with as well as how well they use those skills. Right now my friend is actually working on a guy who uses Yoshimitsu's fighting style—which tends to cause self-inflicted damage—with a set of "skills" that essentially create a "limit break" style effect due to the requisite extreme damage/low health. So in short those hats actually might matter.

Also, the mechanical girl—Ashlotte—was created by Ogure Ito (Oh! Great) of Silky Whip, Burn Up W, and Tenjo Tenge fame. Anyway, making any sense of nearly any part of the SCIV storyline—especially the Storymode endings—would appear to be difficult if not impossible.

I never played SCIII, but I recognize most of Talim's animations as being direct from SCII... but I couldn't tell you if they're as effective as before, all I know is they look the same.

I wonder if SCIV has speed controls? Thus far, SCIV strikes me as being rather documentation-free. The "finishing move" stuff seems to never come up, and I still have no idea how to do Vader's Force moves.

So I've tested out Talim and I know that I'm no expert, but she seems to hit harder than in SCIII. I still need to boot up SCII again to play a bit with her for good comparison since she was never on my normal list of characters that I played routinely.

"Story" mode seems a lot easier than SCIII, but my friend stated that it's probably because the AI is somewhat less psychic. Although I'm not sure if that's fully the case since I played against an AI Ivy in that mode and she didn't even unfurl her sword—though I'll have to attempt to play against her in single player versus to see if it's just the AI scaling due to rounds (as Namco tends to do).

I've not yet used the "finishing moves", but I do know that in versus mode you do get more points for "overkill". "Overkill" would be causing more damage to your opponent than it takes to knock them out, but usually ends up being that smacking around of your downed opponent after they spent the entire match being sort of annoying.

As for Vader's Force moves I recall bringing them up by hitting 2 buttons together and either leaving the direction neutral or pressing a direction. I think I used vertical + horizontal or maybe vertical + kick, but I can't be quite sure.