Every Soulcalibur Guest Character Ranked!

8. Heihachi - Soulcalibur II (PS2/Xbox 360/PS3)

The head honcho of the Mishima Zaibatsu was the PS2’s exclusive character to Soulcalibur II. His fighting style from the Tekken games was transferred directly from the Tekken series.

This puts him somewhat at a disadvantage, since everyone else is packing weapons. His fighting style is one that people were familiar with though, and Heihachi was regarded as a top tier character competitively. Obviously he wasn’t disadvantaged for coming unarmed. He wasn’t a bad character at all - in fact he’s quite a good one to play as.

No, the reason Heihachi places so low on the list is because of how unoriginal his inclusion was. He’s a character made by Namco for Tekken, included in another game series. Yoshimitsu fulfilled the same purpose.

There are rumours that he was a last-minute replacement for another character (multiple sources are convinced this is Cloud from Final Fantasy VII), but Heihachi was not a decent replacement. He just didn’t have the drawing power to sell more copies of the PS2 version. Spawn, despite being a huge disappointment, was a more exciting inclusion on paper. We’re now left pondering what could have been and that’s pretty damning.