Ever since it was announced back in December of 2017, the anticipation for SoulCalibur VI has been very high. Bandai Namco hes been continuously building upon this by adding more characters and fighting modes throughout the year, such as Azwel, which was just announced yesterday by the company. His move set is very unique, as he can attack with his swords that appear out of nowhere and attack from all sides. You can check out the Azwel trailer here:
Despite all of these reveals and announcements, the real question is whether the game will be successful sales-wise. The previous game in the series, Soul Calibur V, wasn’t a terrible game by any means, but it didn’t sell nearly as well as SoulCalibur IV, falling below sales expectations and forcing Bandai Namco to regroup with the franchise. With this in mind, DualShockers.com interviewed the producer of Soul Calibur, Motohiro Okubo, at Gamescom 2018 who explained why it took six years for another Soul’s game to come out. He stated “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.”
Then, Okubo was asked if this would be the last game in the series, and he was quite frank with his response, “Yeah, that’s right. We don’t want to blackmail the users by saying that it could be the last one, but as it is, yes. Since the SoulCalibur brand is facing a crisis, we have nothing to lose, so we just decided to do what we want to do.” You can’t be any more cut and dry with an answer like that. It’s obvious that Okubo and his team are pulling out all of the stops with this title, and now we can see why they have so many things leading up to its release, including guest fighter Geralt of Rivia from The Witcher series. Hopefully the game does well enough to warrant another title for the franchise, otherwise, this could be the last one.
SoulCalibur VI releases on October 19 for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.