for: Soul (series)

Following the first game Soul Edge (also a game created for the arcade originally, and subsequently the PlayStation) in 1995, the Soul series received a major makeover and was retitled Soulcalibur in 1999. Hence, Soulcalibur can also refer to the series consisting of Soulcalibur and its subsequent sequels (essentially the Soul series minus Soul Edge).

Soul Calibur is the name of the holy sword, created to battle the evil sword Soul Edge, around which the games' storylines revolve. According to a timeline released by Namco on their "Soul Archive" site, Soulcalibur takes place around 1587.

Overview

Soul Edge/Soul Blade had a strong fanbase, but when Soulcalibur was released in the arcades, it was not as popular as Namco would have liked or expected. Luckily for the series, Soulcalibur was picked up for the Sega Dreamcast, and became a smash hit almost overnight. Soulcalibur, the second game in the series, was set 3 years after the original and introduced a revolutionary feature, 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. Soulcalibur also improved game play with "forgiving buffering." Buffering is executing the input for one move before your character has finished recovering from his previous move. It is important for executing quick strings of moves. Tekken and Virtua Fighter have relatively strict buffering requirements, meaning expert timing is required to pull off many combinations, while Soulcalibur's relatively lenient buffering lets players focus more on the game and less on the controls.

Prologue

The mystical sword of the legends, the "Soul Edge", ended 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 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.