SoulCalibur 6 May Be the Last of the Series

When you think of iconic fighting game series, the likes of Street Fighter and Tekken are usually on the top of people’s list. But somewhere on that list: be it near the middle or the bottom, you’d probably find SoulCalibur, a series that started in 1995 with Soul Edge about a super evil sword everyone wants and a super good sword most people seem to forget also exists. New games have come out since, obviously, but the gap between the last game – SoulCalibur V – and the upcoming SoulCalibur Vl was a pretty enormous six years.

And as it turns out, there’s some pretty good reasons for that hiatus. Producer Motohiro Okubo, in talking with Dualshockers, admitted that the SoulCalibur IP isn’t in the best of places right now.
 

“The first thing is that the IP itself of the SoulCalibur franchise had low expectations from the company. It was actually facing a crisis of maybe disappearing. It took time for me to convince the company.

We don’t want to blackmail the users by saying that it could be the last one, but as it is, yes.”

That attitude probably explains why SoulCalibur Vl is looking so good right now. Not only are they bringing out all the fan favorites (even if they’re locking some behind DLC, of course) from all through the series history, this time their guest fighter (which had been a stable in the series since SoulCalibur 2) is Geralt from the Witcher series, which seems like it’s designed specifically to draw as many eyes as possible given the current gaming world right now. They needed a superstar on the lineup and they knew where to find it.

In Okubo’s words themselves:
 

“Since the SoulCalibur brand is facing a crisis, we have nothing to lose, so we just decided to do what we want to do.”

Hopefully it pays off.