Soulcalibur III

Chronicles of the Sword is the strangest thing Namco ever bolted onto a weapon fighter. You take a character you built yourself, drop them onto a map of nodes and supply lines, order units around in something close to real time, and when your avatar meets an enemy commander the game stops being a strategy title and becomes a one-on-one duel. It should not work. It half works, and the fact that a fighting game team in 2005 was willing to try it at all says something about how much room the PS2 gave developers to overreach.

That mode exists because this was the first entry in the series built for a console first rather than ported down from an arcade cabinet. Freed from coin-op discipline, the third Soulcalibur turned into a sprawl: a create-a-fighter system with weapon classes that each carried their own movesets, a mission-based Tales of Souls run threaded with branching choices and sudden-death encounters, and a roster that added Tira, Zasalamel and Setsuka to the standing cast. Ivy, Nightmare, Mitsurugi and the rest fight roughly as they always have, with the eight-way run and the ring-out threat that make the series read differently from Tekken or Virtua Fighter.

The combat itself is excellent and slightly unruly. Guard Impact still rewards players who watch rather than mash, the new soul charges and critical finishes add pressure without turning matches into combo recitals, and the sheer weight of the weapons remains the series' best trick. But the balance was never tuned by an arcade audience, and it shows. Certain created-character classes and a couple of roster picks are plainly stronger than anything else on the disc, and competitive play largely moved on when the arcade revision arrived overseas with the numbers reworked.

What holds up is the generosity. There is an absurd amount here for a versus game, most of it single-player, and the creation suite still produces fighters that feel like yours rather than dress-up dolls. Two decades on, the campaign map looks like an experiment nobody repeated, and Soulcalibur III is worth revisiting partly for that: a fighting game confident enough to spend a third of itself on something it had no business attempting.