Necrid was one of the original characters introduced in the console release of Soul Calibur II, as he did not appear in the original arcade version. He was partly created by Todd McFarlane, the mind behind Spawn and other comic books, and this one is definitely among his more absurdly designed creations.

Technically, his canonical form is green, but my son Alexander actually prefers his orange version for some reason. I always thought he looked kind of like the Hulk. If the Hulk had been designed during some kind of strange fever dream.

You would think he’d be a hulking juggernaut-type character, much like the Hulk in Marvel Comics, but regardless of his size or weapon, the other character will probably win.

Necrid controls awkwardly, and his moveset is pathetic at best. He has a strange ability to summon weapons magically, and if I remember correctly, he borrows movesets from other established characters. He has a few interesting tricks, but none of them are worth the downsides.

When the game came out in the early 2000s, gamers on the Nintendo GameCube, Sony PlayStation 2, and Microsoft Xbox all agreed that this guy was terrible. I’m sure he had a few fans out there, including my toddler son for some reason. But I was very disappointed in him over twenty years ago. It’s not surprising that he never made a return in any of the future Soul Calibur games.