Soulcalibur (video game)

Nightmare fighting against Sophitia in the Dreamcast version.

One of the biggest innovations introduced by Soulcalibur to the gameplay system of its predecessor, Soul Edge, is the eight-way run. Previous 3D fighters had only limited movement along the third axis, with sidesteps and rolls providing useful but unsustained lateral movement. In Soulcalibur, simply holding down a joystick direction causes the character to move in that direction, giving the player a sense of freedom and deepening the strategy of the game.

Soulcalibur also improved gameplay with "forgiving buffering", executing the input for one move before the player's character has finished recovering from his or her previous move, and leads to executing a quick succession of moves (other fighting games such as the Tekken and Virtua Fighter series have relatively strict buffering requirements, meaning expert timing is required to pull off many combinations, but Soulcalibur features much more lenient timing to successfully execute a buffer). Finally, the Guard Impact offensive blocking maneuver shown in Soul Edge was given a deeper range of techniques in Soulcalibur, allowing players to push back or redirect attacks past themselves as well as swatting away an opponent's weapon to stun them.

Soulcalibur was originally planned to be a dramatic overhaul, with all new characters apart from Mitsurugi from Soul Edge.[1] However, nine of the 11 characters from Soul Edge ended up carrying over to Soulcalibur by the time the roster was finalized in the Dreamcast version (Cervantes, Hwang, Seong Mi-na, Mitsurugi, Rock, Siegfried, Sophitia, Taki, Voldo), with an additional ten new characters joining the ranks (in the South Korean version of the game, Mitsurugi was replaced by an English-Japanese swordsman named Arthur[2]).

As with many fighting games, many of the new characters were heavily styled after existing characters from the franchise. For example, new character Maxi has a fighting style and move set influenced by Soul Edge's Li Long (the only of the original starting characters not to return). In fact, Soulcalibur only added one original playing style, belonging to Ivy. New characters Xianghua, Maxi, Yoshimitsu, Astaroth, Kilik, Nightmare, and Lizardman were based upon existing characters Hwang, Li Long, Mitsurugi, Rock, Seong Mi-na, Siegfried, and Sophitia, respectively. Consequently, Namco has been working since Soulcalibur to gradually separate the individual styles of the characters in order to make each one unique.

The mystical sword of the legends, the "Soul Edge", ended up in the hands of the dreaded pirate Cervantes de Leon of Spain. For the next 25 years, he stayed dormant on the remnants of a Spanish port town, taking the souls of those who reached him during their search of the sword. Like Soul Edge, starts in the year 1583. The reign of terror of Cervantes was soon to start, but through the joined efforts of Greek divine warrior Sophitia Alexandra and Japanese ninja Taki, he was stopped and killed, with one of the twin Soul Edge blades being shattered in the process. As it was about to tear itself apart, young German knight Siegfried Schtauffen approached the port town and battled Cervantes, whose corpse had been momentarily reanimated through Soul Edge's will. After emerging victorious, Siegfried's attention turned unto the sword. The moment he took the hilt of the cursed blade, Soul Edge released a bright column of light into the sky. This was known as the "Evil Seed", bound to bring calamity and death in its wake.

Three years after those events, in 1586 AD, Soul Edge uses Siegfried as its host, and now Siegfried is Nightmare, a knight wearing azure armor and sporting a hideously deformed right arm. Europe plunges into a vortex of slaughters as he and his followers claim souls to strengthen the blade in its weakened state. Unknown to them, a group of warriors met on their journey to stop Soul Edge, and with them, three sacred weapons join once again.

After releasing Soul Edge, Namco took some time to evaluate what had made the game successful before jumping into the development of its sequel. Producer Hiroaki Yotoriyama decided to give the sequel a new name instead of just calling it Soul Edge 2 in order to have a fresh start and take the series in a new direction. The name Soulcalibur is a portmanteau of the word soul (as in Soul Edge) and King Arthur's sword Excalibur (ultimately, the name would be used within the game's universe for the holy weapon which would counteract Soul Edge's evil). Inspired by an internal Namco prototype featuring a character able to run openly in a field, the eight-way run system was implemented. Upon application, the development team was surprised at how well it meshed with their fighting system and decided to build the rest of the game around it. During development they worked closely with Namco's Tekken development team, sharing ideas and research. Yotoriyama felt that with that cooperation and partnership, they were able to develop "the greatest weapon-based fighting action game in the world".[3]

Yotoriyama has described the game's concept as expressing "fun and diversity in weapon combat", citing the contrast in how one weapon would affect gameplay compared to another and how they would react to each other upon clashing. Each character's fighting style was designed to revolve around their weapon, though he noted that because of the differences they experienced difficulty in balancing the gameplay. He described the availability of movement in comparison to Tekken 3 as a large contrast between the two series and more tactical and emphasized how it interacted with the game's "ring out" feature.[4] Each character in Soulcalibur was designed around the idea that they could be viewed as a real person could,[5] and to this end, motion creator Masataka Ishiguro emphasized the arm and leg movements for each character in relation to their weapon, wanting players to "feel the individual motions and the realism within the game"[6]

The team for the arcade version of Soulcalibur consisted of roughly 60 people working on Namco's System 12 hardware, while the team developing the home port was reduced to about forty. Given a deadline of seven months to coincide with the North American launch of the Dreamcast, the transition was difficult for the team, due to the differences in hardware. However, due to the similar capabilities and limits of each system, content was left intact between the two versions, with Yotoriyama feeling that the team was "obsessed" with giving their best effort for the port. The biggest technological change to the Dreamcast port was to render all of the game's stages in full 3D polygons, whereas the far backgrounds in the arcade original were flat, two-dimensional images. Additional content was also added to the game to ensure replay value, based on researching other fighting games marketed at the time. Many of the team's ideas that they were unable to incorporate into the port were eventually used for later games in the series.[3]

The game was originally released in the Japanese arcades on July 30, 1998. A Gamest Book series guide book Soul Calibur Skill Up Manual (ソウルキャリバー スキルアップマニュアル) was published by Shinseisha on September 27, 1998.[7]

In Japan, Game Machine listed Soulcalibur on their September 1, 1998 issue as being the third most-successful arcade game of the month.[39]

The Dreamcast version of Soulcalibur sold in excess of one million copies by December 1999.[40] It is the second biggest selling game on the system.[41] It won the 1999 E3 Game Critics Award for "Best Fighting Game" and the AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards for 1999's "Console Game of the Year" and "Console Fighting Game of the Year" (along with a nomination for "Game of the Year").[42]

Blake Fischer reviewed the Dreamcast version of the game for Next Generation, rating it five stars out of five, and stated that "Beautiful, deep, and far more compelling than any 3D fighter in recent memory, Soul Calibur is reason enough to own a Dreamcast."[32]

The game received universal critical acclaim, garnering perfect 10/10 scores from GameSpot[27] and IGN,[30] and was for nearly a decade the last game to receive a perfect rating from IGN, until the release of Grand Theft Auto IV in 2008. It is the second game ever to get a perfect 40/40 from Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu (the first being The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time).[23] As of 2017, game review aggregator website GameRankings has the Dreamcast version ranked as the seventh best-reviewed game of all time, as well as being the highest-scoring title in the fighting game genre.[13]

The Dreamcast version of Soulcalibur also holds a score of 98, making it one of the highest-rated video games of all time across all consoles and platforms, on Metacritic.[43][lower-alpha 2]

• Official website
• Soulcalibur at MobyGames
• Soulcalibur can be played for free in the browser at the Internet Archive