The evolution of my opinion

Let me just get this out nof the way first:Soul Calibur 3 is the best Soul Calibur game yet.Period.But this was not always my opinion.
I have been playing the Soul Edge/Blade/Calibur series since Soul Edge first arrived at the arcade in my (then) local arcade.I was working in the stock room at Montgomery Ward's and would walk down to the arcade(it was in a mall) and play it on my lunch breaks.When it finally shipped for PS1 as Soul Blade,I was waiting for the delivery guy at the door entrance to the electronics dept. of my place of work.When I got off work I went straight to my cousin's house,who shares my deep love of fighting games,where we played it for an unspeakable amount of hours.The graphics were much better than anything else at the time and the fighting engine was amazing.The inclusion of all the extra modes and weapons(weapon master mode)pushed the game into a whole new category of fighting games.

Now when I found out that Namco was making it for the PS2 only,I was extremely disappointed to say the least.The old console had a hard time poushing Soul Calibur 2 and was plagued with slowdown,so waht made them think that a new and improved sequel would fare any better.As it stands ,I was right about that part.There is ALOT of slowdown,not so bad that it really affects gameplay,but it can be really prominent at times.The "Chronicles of the Sword" is a good example as the framerateseems to drop into the teens when there are alot of units on screen at once.The graphics are pretty weak as well and are not even as good as SC2.The character models seemed to suffer the mostas they are very primiotive looking,I would go as far as saying they are about equel with the Dreamcast version of SC1.I actually intend on booting up my PS2 and Dreamcast later and putting my tv on picture in picture mode with the screen split in half to see how accurate that statement is.The backgrounds look really nice with lots of things going on at once.
my biggest complaint is the unbalanced difficulty.When playing through a mode like "Tales of Souls"(story),the difficulty will start really tame allowing you to pretty much tear through the first 6 or 7 fighters relatively easy.But then,out of nowhere ,the difficulty will skyrocket and you'll suddenly find yourselfstuck on a computer controlled fighter that totally obliterating you with perfect after perfect.I actually broke a game controller for the first time the other night because I got so frustrated that I threw my gamepad at the floor as hard as I could.

The important thing is that the fighting engine is still the best and person to person multiplayer is still unmatched.