| SoulCalibur | |
|---|---|
North American Dreamcast boxart |
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| Developer(s) | Namco |
| Publisher(s) | Namco Namco Bandai (XBLA) |
| Designer(s) | Hiroaki Yotoriyama |
| Composer(s) | Junichi Nakatsuru Akitaka Toyama Yoshihito Yano Takanori Otsuka |
| Platform(s) | Dreamcast, Namco System 12, iOS, Xbox Live Arcade[1] |
| Release date(s) | Arcade July 30, 1998 DC
July 2, 2008 iOS: TBA |
| Genre(s) | Versus fighting |
| Mode(s) | Up to 2 players simultaneously |
| Rating(s) | CERO: B (XBLA version) ESRB: T |
| Cabinet | Upright |
| Arcade system | System 12 |
| Display | Raster, 640 × 480 pixels (Horizontal), 65536 colors |
SoulCalibur (ソウルキャリバー SōruKyaribā) is a 3D, weapons-based fighting game developed by Project Soul and produced by Namco. It is the second game in the Soul series, preceeded by Soul Edge. It was released in arcades in 1998, and it ran on the Namco System 12 hardware. In 1999 it was ported to the Dreamcast with improved graphics and new features. The game was later made available on Xbox 360's Xbox Live Marketplace in 2008.
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The mystical sword of the legends, the "Soul Edge", ended up in the hands of the dread pirate Cervantes 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. His reign of terror was soon to start, but through the joined efforts of a divine warrior (Sophitia) and an underground ninja (Taki) stopped him, breaking one of the twin Soul Edge blades in the process. As it was about to tear itself apart, a young knight (Siegfried) approached the port town. 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 across its path.
Three years after those events, Soul Edge uses Siegfried as its host, and now Siegfried is Nightmare, a knight wearing azure armor. 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 young warriors met on their journey to stop Soul Edge, and with them three sacred weapons join once again.
One of the biggest innovations introduced by Soulcalibur 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 run in that direction. This gives the player a sense of freedom and deepens the strategy of the game. Soul calibur also improved gameplay with "forgiving buffering." Buffering is executing the input for one move before the player's character has finished recovering from their previous move, and leads to executing a quick succession of moves. Other fighting games such as Tekken and Virtua Fighter have relatively strict buffering requirements, meaning expert timing is required to pull off many combinations, while 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, featuring only a few select characters to be carried over from its predecessor, Soul Edge. However, nine of the eleven characters from Soul Edge ended up carrying over to Soulcalibur by the time the roster was finalized in the Dreamcast version, with an additional ten new characters joining the ranks.
As with many fighting games, however, many of the new characters were heavily styled after already existing characters from the franchise. For example, new character Maxi has a fighting style and moveset influenced by Soul Edge's Li Long. In fact, Soulcalibur only added three truly original playing styles, shown in Ivy, Xianghua, and Yoshimitsu. Consequently, Namco has been working hard since Soulcalibur to gradually separate the individual styles of the characters in order to make each one as unique as possible.
In the South Korean version of the game, Mitsurugi was replaced by an English-Japanese swordsman named Arthur.
After releasing Soul Edge, Namco took some time to evaluate what had made the game successful before jumping into development of its follow-up. 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. 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".[2]
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 revolved 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.[3] Each character in Soulcalibur was designed around the idea that they could be viewed as a real person could,[4] 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"[5]
The team for the arcade version of Soulcalibur consisted of roughly sixty 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 give 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.[2]
Soulcalibur was released in Japan for the Dreamcast on August 5, 1999; and in North America as a launch title, on September 9, 1999.
The Dreamcast version of Soulcalibur is one of the first examples of a home conversion of a game being graphically superior to its original arcade counterpart. Among the differences were the improved graphics (including the addition of 3D backgrounds), tweaked gameplay, new game modes, new costumes, and the inclusion of an extra character, Cervantes de Leon.
The Dreamcast version features new modes such as the Team Battle, Survival and the Training Mode. In Missions Mode the player completes various missions to attain points, which can be used to buy various art and costumes. Another feature added is the artwork section, containing both official artwork, fanart and High-res pictures. Also unlockable are a "liquid metal" version of the characters' costume and a "Battle Theater" mode, plus a way to modify the opening introduction theme by changing the characters appearing in it, and an "Exhibition Mode" in where you can see the characters performing their 'moves' alone. In Mission Mode you can also add characters to the "Exhibition Mode", such as Taki and Seung Mina.
The North American Dreamcast version of the game removes one of Voldo's suggestive codpieces featuring a bull. However, the codpiece is present in the European and Japanese versions, as well as the North American Xbox 360 version. The European Dreamcast version was distributed and advertised by Sega Europe.[6]
On April 16, 2008, Namco Bandai announced a port of Soulcalibur would be released for the Xbox 360. The port was based on the European Dreamcast version[7] and was made available for download on Xbox Live Arcade on July 2, 2008.[1] While the game included HD updated graphics and various Live leaderboards, online play was absent which makes it an exception amongst most games ported to Xbox Live Arcade. Other features from the Dreamcast version (Museum, etc., with the exception of Mission Battle) are also in the game. While The Intro is Removed from this port, the intro music is still in this port. All content is unlocked by the start of the game.
| Reception | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Aggregator | Score |
| GameRankings | 96.26% (Dreamcast)[8] 78.91% (XBLA)[9] |
| Metacritic | 98 (Dreamcast)[10] 79 (XBLA)[11] |
| Review scores | |
| Publication | Score |
| 1UP.com | B- (XBLA)[12] |
| Electronic Gaming Monthly | 10/10 (Dreamcast) |
| Eurogamer | 8/10(XBLA)[13] |
| Famitsu | 40/40 (Dreamcast)[14] |
| Game Informer | 9.25/10 (Dreamcast)[15] |
| GamePro | (Dreamcast) [16] |
| GameSpot | 10/10 (Dreamcast)[17] 7.5/10 (XBLA)[18] |
| IGN | 10/10 (Dreamcast)[19] 8.1/10 (XBLA)[20] |
Game review aggregator website Game Rankings has the Dreamcast version ranked as the fifth best-reviewed game of all time, as well as being the highest scoring title in the fighting game genre. That version also sold in excess of one million copies.[21] The game is often considered to be one of the greatest games of all time, receiving perfect 10 scores from GameSpot,[17] a Platinum Award from Electronic Gaming Monthly, a 10.0 from IGN,[19] and being the second game ever to get a perfect 40/40 by Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu (the first being The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time).[14] It is also currently listed as one of the best reviewed games of all time on the video-game-dedicated review aggregating site, GameRankings.[8] Soulcalibur won the 1999 E3 Game Critics Award for Best Fighting Game and the 2000 Interactive Achievement Award for Console Game of the Year.
Soulcalibur was placed as EGM's 22nd best game ever on its "The Greatest 200 Videogames of Their Time" list.[22] IGN listed it as the 38th greatest game of all time on their 2003 top 100 list,[23] the 43rd in 2005,[24] and was voted the sixth greatest game in the 2006 readers' picks version.[25] Later, in their "Top 25 Dreamcast Games", they placed Soulcalibur as the 5th best.[26] It was also placed as the best Dreamcast game by Game Informer[27] and Gamesradar.[28] Soul Calibur placed 74th on Game Informer's "Top 100 Games of All Time" in 2001[29]
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