Originally released in arcades on July 30, 1998, it ran on the Namco System 12 hardware, and was ported to the Dreamcast console in 1999 with new features and improved graphics.

The game centers on the pursuit of the legendary weapon known as Soul Edge, now in the possession of a warrior known as Nightmare, who slaughters countless people to satisfy the blade's bloodlust.

The title brought many innovations to the fighting game genre that include a heavy emphasis on weapons and a unique eight-way movement system.

Finally, the Guard Impact offensive blocking maneuver shown in Soul Edge has been given a deeper range of techniques, allowing players to push back or redirect attacks past themselves as well as swatting away an opponent's weapon to stun them.

[1] However, nine of the 11 characters from Soul Edge ended up carrying over to Soulcalibur by the time the roster was finalized in the Dreamcast version (Cervantes, Hwang, Seong Mi-na, Mitsurugi, Rock, Siegfried, Sophitia, Taki, Voldo), with an additional ten new characters joining the ranks (in the South Korean version of the game, Mitsurugi was replaced by an English-Japanese swordsman named Arthur[2]).

The arcade version featured a staggered Time Release system for hidden characters[3] akin to the Tekken series as well as codes that could be entered on the Namco website.

The mystical sword of the legends, the "Soul Edge", ended up in the hands of the dreaded pirate Cervantes de Leon of Spain.

The reign of terror of Cervantes was soon to start but through the joined efforts of Greek divine warrior Sophitia Alexandra and Japanese ninja Taki he was stopped and killed with one of the twin Soul Edge blades shattered in the process.

As it was about to tear itself apart a young German knight Siegfried Schtauffen approached the port town and battled Cervantes whose corpse had been momentarily reanimated through the will of the Soul Edge.

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.

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.

[6] Each character in Soulcalibur was designed around the idea that they could be viewed as a real person could,[7] 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"[8] It had been announced in January as "New Weapon Fighting Game"[9] and a test version was shown at E3 in May.

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 giving 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.

[13] The Dreamcast port of Soulcalibur was released in Japan on August 5, 1999; and in North America and Europe as launch titles, on September 9, 1999,[14] and November 26, 1999, respectively.

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 app makes use of Google Play Games for synchronization between devices and runs at native resolution and screen aspect ratio.

[21] The Dreamcast version of Soulcalibur also holds a score of 98, making it one of the highest-rated video games of all time across all consoles and platforms, on Metacritic.