Why Did Each Version of SoulCalibur II Have a Different Guest Character?

Three consoles, three separate deals. No single guest was ever going to cover all of them.

When SoulCalibur II came home in 2003, the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox versions were the same game with one deliberate difference: each carried a guest fighter the others did not have. Link fought on GameCube, Spawn on Xbox, and Heihachi Mishima on PlayStation 2. The split was not a design decision made in a vacuum. Each guest arrived through a different door, and two of the three doors are documented in unusual detail.

THE VERDICT

VERDICT + REASON WHY + WHAT THEY DID GET

Link, GameCube

Nintendo lent the hero of The Legend of Zelda to the version on its own console. Link arrived with the Master Sword, bow, bombs, and boomerang, and his presence is the documented reason the GameCube version outsold expectations, reaching roughly a million copies by 2007.

Spawn, Xbox

Todd McFarlane's comic book antihero came as part of a working relationship: McFarlane's company made the game's action figures, and he designed an original character, Necrid, who appears in every console version.

Heihachi, PlayStation 2

Namco's own Tekken villain needed no license at all. He fights unarmed, fists against swords, with armored gauntlets, and he was not the first choice for the slot, as the section below records.

One game, three boxes

Each version's cover art seated its own guest in the painting. The split was the marketing: whichever console you owned, your version had a character the magazines could headline.

SPAWN, IN MCFARLANE'S OWN WORDS

The on record account

McFarlane explained the deal to Animation Magazine in 2003: "We had just done the deal for the Spawn game and were throwing ideas back and forth about how we can get some momentum going... Then I said, 'I make toys. Why don't I make the SoulCalibur II toys?' Then somebody on their end came back saying, 'we've got these sort of hidden characters. Why don't we make Spawn one of them?' Then they suggested we make him a bigger character in the Xbox version... Then they got me to design a character that was specific to the game, this Necrid character."

That is the whole mechanism in one quote: a toy license and a game deal, traded back and forth until a comic book character held a slot in a weapons fighter and a toy designer had created one of its original fighters.

THE GUEST WHO NEVER ARRIVED

Cloud Strife was the first plan

The PlayStation 2 slot was originally intended for Cloud Strife of Final Fantasy VII. The licensing deal fell through at the last moment, and Namco filled the slot from its own catalogue with Heihachi, who cost nothing to license and whose series shared staff and players with SoulCalibur.

The substitution had one long tail. When SoulCalibur II HD Online arrived in 2013, it could reunite Heihachi and Spawn on both of its platforms, because neither was owned by a console maker. Link, Nintendo's property, has never appeared in the game again.

THE GAME ON THE SHELF

SoulCalibur II

SoulCalibur II · Japan · PlayStation 2

Monochrome faces around the sword on the Japanese box. Each console version of this game carried a different guest, the split this page explains.

The full story: the history of SoulCalibur II →

Why Did Each Version of SoulCalibur II Have a Different Guest Character?

THE VERDICT

SPAWN, IN MCFARLANE'S OWN WORDS

THE GUEST WHO NEVER ARRIVED

THE GAME ON THE SHELF

THE FIRST WORD