Retro Gamer meets producer Hiroaki Yotoriyama to journey through the evolution of Soul Calibur

Until the Dreamcast was released in Japan at the end of 1998, only SNK’s eccentric and much-loved Neo-Geo AES console had achieved perfect parity with arcade technology, and that was limited to crossovers between the AES and its dressed-up-as-a-coin-op MVS sibling. Dreamcast, however, was something else.

Sega’s final home console didn’t merely bring console games to the level of contemporary arcade experiences: in many cases its technology enabled developers to surpass the quality of late-Nineties coin-ops. The most obvious example of this phenomenon was Namco’s Soul Calibur, which went from being an excellent arcade fighter to an even greater, more technologically advanced experience when pressed to GD-ROM.

But to get to the start of the Soul Calibur story, we first need to journey back to the series’ origin: Soul Edge. It was Soul Edge (known in the UK as Soul Blade), which ran on the System 11 arcade board, that marked Namco’s sidestep into the relatively unexplored territory of 3D weapons-based beat-’em-ups, a sub-genre that the Soul Calibur games would later claim as their own. The team behind Soul Edge, led by ever-present producer Hiroaki Yotoriyama, used the project as a means of taking baby steps into an area in which they were not fully confident of success and where the potential for a special gameplay experience had not yet become apparent. “We announced that we were working on the Soul Edge coin-op in 1995 and then we followed that up with a PlayStation conversion in 1996,” Yotoriyama recalls. “[During 1995 and 1996], with Soul Edge we were just able to basically explore the possibilities for a fighting game that used weapons.” The result of the team’s experimentation was a partial success.

Fighters were limited to performing sidesteps so as to evade attacks, rather than using the truer eight-way movement that would be pioneered in Soul Calibur. Soul Edge did, however, establish the core group of characters that would reappear in Soul Calibur and its sequels, giving debuts to fighters such as Siegfried and Voldo. Above all, with its utilisation of weapons in a 3D environment, the team’s initial effort presented an alternative to the then-dominant schools of Tekken and Virtua Fighter. The successful PlayStation port of Soul Edge also gave an early indication of Yotoriyama and team’s willingness to augment its arcade-to-console conversions with additional, console-exclusive content.

Instead of opting to quickly develop a Soul Edge 2 with better graphics and more combatants, Namco subsequently took a step back to evaluate how best to capitalise on the game’s successes. Yotoriyama realised there was the possibility of taking Namco’s Soul on a more interesting journey, and a name change was in order to reflect the game’s rebirth. “After our work on Soul Edge,” Yotoriyama explains, “we turned our attention towards developing a fighting game that featured normal weapons known the world over, which we moved into quite naturally. From that time on, Namco’s beat-’em-ups were running along two lines of production – the Tekken line and the Soul Edge line – but we were combining our powers: we had mutual technology and we shared our development know-how.”

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