The story goes something like this. During the events in Soul Edge, Siegfreid defeated the pirate Cervantes, and took his sword, the Soul Edge, from him. The cursed sword took control of Siegfreid and transformed him into a monster called Nightmare. Now, warriors from all over have come to claim the sword for themselves, or destroy it in the name of good. The story isn't bad, and the characters even have in-depth bios, which you can read up on in on of the unlockable modes. The fighting takes place in one of many arenas. which range from a platform in front of a flooded Japanese castle that's being attacked by boats and flaming arrows, or an underground shrine, with a huge serpent statue sticking out of a lake of lava and dozens of little caverns in the background.

The characters are nicely done, and move fluidly, with each swing of their weapons leaving a trail of light in the air. Each character has their own fighting style (though a few are just variations), ranging from Xianghua's graceful, and quick Krita-Yuga style, which has sort of a resemblance to 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon's styles, to Mitsurugi's hard hitting samurai style, Tenpu Ryu-Kosai-Ryu Kai. One of the more unique, characters is Voldo. Using two katars strapped to his wrists, he crawls, flips and twists around, making himself unpredictable. His outfit is a little disturbing though. Yoshimitsu, from Tekken also makes an appearance as an unlockable character. You'll most certainly find a character that's right for you, whether you like slow, heavy hitting characters, or quick, in your face types.

As with any other fighting game, your goal is to defeat your opponent. This is done by either incapacitating or knocking your opponent out of the ring. The game feels slightly similar to Tekken. There are three attacks, horizontal slash, vertical slash, and kick. The fourth button is for blocking, and parrying attacks. Tapping up or down twice allows you to move into the foreground or backround, useful for dodging verticle attacks. Each character also has a wide variety of moves, and combos. Health usually goes fast, and ring outs are pretty common, so more even more experienced players need to keep their guard up. The counter/parry system is somewhat similar to DoA2's counter system, where you guess where your opponent will strike next, and input the command to counter or parry his attack. Unlike DoA2 however, you don't cause damage by actually countering, but you leave your opponent open for an attack. There are also hundreds of moves. It took me awhile to realize, but Soul Calibur can be a very deep, and strategic game.

The sound could use a bit more polish, as the announcer's voice sounds a little grainy. Not only that, but every single time you win, he'll say "This victory stringthen's the soul of yadda yadda". It sounds a bit corny, and it gets annoying, yet there's no option to disable it. Other than that, the other sounds are good. Swords and axes cutting through the air, and clanging against each other, as well as the "HIYA!"s and "AHH!!"s you can expect from a fighting game are all there and done well. The music is sort of medieval times-ish done by an orchestra. Some of which is really nice. All in all, the music fits the game very well. I especially liked the music in Nightmare and Seung Mina's levels...Very Inspiring.

My absolute favorite part of Soul Calibur is that in addition to an already excellent fighting game, you get a huge amount of extras. Finishing Arcade mode with a character you haven't done so with before gives you either a new character, or a new level. You start with ten characters, and can unlock up to nine more. As for game modes, there's also your usual Versus, Team Battle, Time Attack, Survival, and Practice modes...but they also give you a mission battle mode. You take a character, and choose a mission on a 3-section map of Europe to Asia. You can read out a few paragraphs of a story, as well as the objectives for the mission. You then can accept it or choose another. Missions are essentially battles, where you usually have to defeat more than one opponents in a row, under certain conditions. In one, you'll have to fight as you struggle not to let strong winds blow you off the level, and in another you speed up and slow down randomly as you fight. As the missions get harder and harder, you earn more points. You then use these to buy one of the 300+ high quality pictures. That's not all though. Oh no...when you 'buy' certain pictures, you're not only given the ability to look at them under the Museum option in fullscreen glory, but certain pictures unlock other things like new outfits, levels, modes, features, and even more missions in battle mode.

One new mode you can get is the Exhibition theatre, this allows you to watch characters practicing their moves. If you remember the scene in 'Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon' (doh, mentioned it again) where Li Mu Bai is practicing with his sword at night...It's something like that. Another mode is the Character biographies, where you can look up detailed information about each character, their weapon, their stage, and listen to their voice samples. Something I never would have thought of is a mode that lets you mess around with the opening movie. Want one of the hidden characters in there instead of Ivy? You can change who it shows, when it shows them, and have that play when you start up the game instead, sometimes, with hilarious results.