Namco Hometek, the American branch of Japanese development and publishing company Namco Ltd, officially announced this morning that the fighting sequel Soulcalibur III would be headed to U.S. shores later this year. Though an exact release date wasn't revealed, the new game is expected to arrive near the end of autumn or beginning of winter 2005. The surprising twist of this announcement is that Soulcalibur III will be system exclusive to the PlayStation 2, and will not appear on Microsoft's Xbox or Nintendo's GameCube at all (and if it eventually will, nobody at Namco is ready to talk about it). This PS2 exclusivity is definitely great news for the almost 700,000 PS2 owners that bought the second game in 2003, but likely disappointing for the more than one million combined users who purchased Soulcalibur II on other systems.
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