The History of Soul Calibur

Read all about the stage of history.

The Soul series has been around for over a decade now, but despite its popularity (over 9 million copies sold so far) there are many folk around who haven’t played any of the games. But with the upcoming Soul Calibur IV featuring the likes of Yoda and Darth Vader, it’s sure to draw in new fans – so if you don’t know your Mitsurugi from your Maxi, this article is for you.

Essentially, the Soul games are based around one-on-one battles, just like any other beat ‘em up – only this time, everyone has a weapon. Instead of beating people up with fists and fireballs, you’ll be attacking with swords, axes, staffs, and more. This makes for some extremely varied combat, and coupled with some excellent graphics and extremely smooth gameplay, it’s no surprise the series has a lot of fans. The games are also easy to pick up but hard to master – a novice can get a lot of fun out of the title without knowing any moves, while an expert will find a lot of depth beneath the surface.

Soul Edge/Soul Blade

The first title in the series was released in the arcades in 1996. It featured roughly ten characters who were all seeking for the legendary sword Soul Edge, which supposedly contained a huge amount of (evil) power.

A few months later, the game hit the original PlayStation as Soul Blade. It added more characters and game modes into the mix, and while it didn’t prove insanely popular, it established a dedicated fan base.

In retrospect, Soul Blade looks like a prototype of all the ideas that would come to fruition in subsequent sequels. The basic gameplay is there, but the engine had yet to acquire the silky smoothness of its descendants. Still, it has a number of features that were missing from the first sequel that were missed by fans, including multiple weapons for each character.

Soul Calibur

The sequel to Soul Edge hit the arcades roughly a year after the original, and brought with it a number of improvements. The most highly touted of these was the so-called ‘eight-way movement’ system that gave players a lot more freedom in sidestepping and running around the opponent. It made the gameplay feel much more open, encouraging attacks from the side or even from behind.

The game also featured a larger roster – although having said that, the majority of the characters were paired up with very similar fighting move sets. So while Kilik and Seong Mina might look different, they played in much the same fashion, with a small number of unique moves differentiating them.

While the arcade version of Soul Calibur was an improvement on its predecessor, the Dreamcast port in 1999 blew everyone away. It was a huge level above the arcade release, featuring much improved graphics, an expanded roster, and a single player ‘mission’ mode that was actually kind of fun – something that’s rare in fighting games. It was released alongside the launch of Sega’s final console, and received extremely glowing reviews. For its time, the graphics and sheer polish were unparalleled, and it now sits around the top ten highest rated games of all time.

The game has now been re-released on the Xbox Live Arcade, so if you’re curious to dabble in the Soul series, this could be a good place to start. We still play Soul Calibur to this day – its gameplay is pretty timeless, and while the sequels would refine the gameplay, this is where it all comes back to.

Soul Calibur II

The third game in the series was released in 2002 in the arcades, followed by a 2003 release on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube. The most obvious feature of Soul Calibur II is that it features an exclusive character for each version. Heihachi from the Tekken series sports a pair of gauntlets on the PS2; comic book character Spawn creates an axe out of his cape on the Xbox; and Link from the Zelda series battles with his sword and shield on the GameCube.

SC II refined rather than revolutionized the gameplay and graphics of its predecessor. Everything was polished up further, and some nifty new features were added, such as more varied stages that included walls. Fans appreciated the tightening up of timing on all the moves, including a much improved guard impact system.

The game also added back in the additional weapons from Soul Edge, allowing players to unlock new items for every character. These weapons would be varied based on power, defence, and special abilities (such as being unblockable).

The game was rated very highly upon release, although not as high as the first Soul Calibur. Over time, gamers also noted a couple of gameplay bugs that gave people an unfair advantage. Overall, however, Soul Calibur II was a welcome evolution of its predecessors.

Soul Calibur III

Released exclusively for the PlayStation 2 in 2005, Soul Calibur III felt like Namco had taken the ‘kitchen sink’ approach to game features. What resulted was a bit of a mess, but still a highly fun mess.

First of all, the roster for SC III was huge – nearly all the characters from previous games (bar a couple of random ones like Edge Master and Necrid) are here. But perhaps more impressively, you can even create your own character from a range of classes, fighting styles, weapons, and clothes. While these characters are obviously more generic than the actual roster, it’s a surprisingly deep system that let people create a wide range of wacky fighters (such as the Pope).

And then there are the modes. In addition to all the usual ones (Arcade etc), you can also take part in the Tales of Souls mode, which takes a chosen character through a series of missions and cut scenes similar to previous iterations. Chronicles of the Sword, on the other hand, lets you take one of your custom characters through a strange, huge, and relatively fun cross between traditional Soul Calibur and a real time strategy game. You’ll even level your character up like in an RPG as you progress through the 20 Chronicles.

So there’s a lot of things to do with SC III – we’ve had friends sink hours upon hours into the various modes, and still have a lot more to do. However, with such an expansive feature set, the gameplay itself wasn’t greatly changed, and in fact contained a couple of bugs that proved quite annoying. Overall, though, this is probably the definitive version of the previous Soul Calibur games – while it doesn’t have the polished simplicity of the original SC, the sheer amount of value in the product makes it the one to get.

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