10 Video Game Characters We Can't Believe Got Cut

10. Cloud Strife - Soul Calibur II

Nowadays, the Soul Calibur series is well-known for its crossovers. Over the years, Namco's venerable weapon-based fighting game has seen its cast cross swords with the like of Geralt of Rivia, Ezio Auditore and - most bizarrely - Darth Vader and Yoda.

Yet this tradition didn't start with the first game. Instead, it was Soul Calibur II that introduced the concept of inviting characters from other series to battle with the game's original cast. Famously, each console received its own exclusive character - GameCube owners got to play as Link, XBox players had to make do with Todd McFarlane's Spawn (still struggling to figure that one out), and the PS2 crowd got Tekken's Heihachi Mishima.

Heihachi was always a weird choice for Soul Calibur, given that he fights completely unarmed. However, when you realize who Namco originally wanted, Heihachi's inclusion makes more sense.

The original plan was to have Final Fantasy 7's Cloud Strife be the PlayStation exclusive character, a move that would have been huge at the time. Cloud was (and still is) one of the most recognizable protagonists in gaming history, and this would have been his first appearance in a video game since Final Fantasy 7 had been released five years prior. Not only that, his iconically/comically large Buster Sword would have been a perfect fit for the weapon-obsessed world of Soul Calibur.

Sadly, Square-Enix would ultimately nix the deal, resulting in Namco having to hastily fill the empty roster spot with a character from another of their IPs.