A game so good I wanna be buried with it.
There's plenty to the game that even years later I'm still going back to it just for the fun of it. To put it simply, every Soul Calibur game after this one feels really mediocre because of their story mode. The combat may have been perfect and the characters solid but their dismal story modes essentially ruined them.
The combat itself remains unchanged though certain attacks have been edited slightly most likely to balance some characters the horizontal, vertical and kick attacks all work in conjunction and building combos is easy enough. That being said the AI is atrocious in this regard because they can clearly read your moves and counter in the best way possible, Setsuka in later levels of the Tales of Souls Mode being the worst offender.
New to the series at the time was the Character Creation system. To make things interesting they actually included the fighting styles under different classes and jobs so its more akin to an RPG than a fighting game. The mode is entertaining enough but it's not the main reason I personally bought the game.
There is also a series of missions that you can play such as Dancing Statue a battle against that giant statue of Hephaestus which is the second worst fight in the entire game because of its sheer size. There's a lot of variety here some involve using the Soul Charge feature to inflict damage on otherwise invisible enemies, chasing after the shopkeepers or fighting the True Final Boss Night Terror without having to go through the insanely difficult challenge to face him in story mode.
Then there's the Chronicles of Sword Mode which depicts a massive war between three kingdoms. I never bothered with it, especially after it became known that playing it at all could cause data corruption, plus all the unlockables from that mode can be acquired just through randomly battling till the game tells you you've unlocked it.
Up next is the graphics and they look amazing. Every stage in this game is incredible to observe (it's a given with this series) but the Chaos stage really stands out. The epic music, the terrifying madness going on in the background this couldn't be anymore perfect it's a final battle that really feels like a final battle. It's a shame we never got anything near as epic in 4 or 5.
And another thing I really like is the different character select screens specifically the backgrounds be it the stormy weather in Quick Play or the really strange design for the Colour Edit mode. It's not worth much but I do like them.
One last returning feature is the multiple endings. Last seen in Soul Blade/Soul Edge during endings a prompt will appear and pressing it effects the ending normally giving you a good or bad ending. I like to refer to them as either Night Terror endings or Abyss endings depending on which final boss you battled.
In short, Soul Calibur 3 is probably where the Soul Series peaked. I don't know why it started going downhill after this but I can blame Namco Bandai same as I did for another fighting game series they ruined for no adequately explained reason. Also if you play this on a PS3 60HZ is the best way to play it otherwise the game slows down to an unplayable pace.