Soulcalibur VI, perhaps unsurprisingly, can be quite unsettling when it wants to be.
- Soul Edge is pure evil as always. It's an Artifact of Doom with a mind of its own and has an eye right on it. The sword lives to cause more death and destruction, and by god does it succeed. Nightmare is described as slaying innocent lives as if they were merely stocks of corn.
- Kilik, with the Evil Seed awakened, will kill anyone in sight, no matter how close they are. You could be his closest loved one, and you will still suffer his bloodlust should you be unfortunate enough to be in his way during this state.
- Astaroth leads an army of lizardfolk on Kilik and Maxi. Repeat, a giant golem leads a bunch of evil, savage reptiles on a rampage. This was probably not the only such case of this happening.
- Astaroth in general is Nightmare Fuel. One such example is when he finishes his opponent with his Critical Edge, with his massive axe still in his victim.
- Voldo is very creepy, as you can expect. He's barely human, devoted to his deceased master, and thinks nothing of killing others to protect the treasure. The worst part happens in game. Should you lose to his Critical Edge, you'll be treated to the camera looking at him from your character's perspective, as he slowly inches towards you while staring directly in your face.
- Tira is only 17, and is a vicious and psychotic murderer who was raised that way in her youth by the Bird of Passage. She left the Bird of Passage not because she didn't want to kill, but because she didn't want to kill for them. When she was adopted and made some kind of attempt to live a normal life, her instincts kicked over a fit of petty rage and she murdered her family in cold blood. But the real kicker? Her reaction wasn't a My God, What Have I Done? moment, but rather the complete opposite.Tira (Jolly): This is what I was born to do... ahh, pure heaven.Tira (Gloomy): So peaceful... I wish this moment would never end.
- What truly makes this chilling is the Adaptational Villainy Tira undergoes in this course of history. In her debut, Tira's character profile notes that she was so emotionally traumatized by having to kill her Mother Bird in a Sky Burial
that it gave birth to her trademark mental instability note , suggesting that, on some level, Tira really did see her Parent Bird as a mother figure. Here, Tira is already so unhinged that her psyche had split in two quite sometime before the events of the game, and she went through with the student-teacher Duel to the Death without any hesitation or misgivings. (It doesn't help that VI describes the Sky Burial as gouging out the victim's eyes and carving very specific marks into their mutilated body.) And if that wasn't bad enough, Tira also spares no thought in killing every other fledging assassin in her own nest, who might as well have been her surrogate siblings, as well as the ones in competing nests. And this was after she watched many more children starve to death during the organization's "Hatching" process. The original Tira, though a very cruel and manipulative figure, had some sympathetic elements to her character and backstory, perhaps enough to qualify as a Jerkass Woobie. This Tira, however, takes the "bloodthirsty killer" angle of her character to new heights, to the point that she comes across as even more heartless and sadistic.
- What truly makes this chilling is the Adaptational Villainy Tira undergoes in this course of history. In her debut, Tira's character profile notes that she was so emotionally traumatized by having to kill her Mother Bird in a Sky Burial
- The face Azwel makes when he loses to Grøh in his Chronicle. Hell, not just that, but Azwel's demeanor in general. He talks to everyone as if they're his friend, even when making them suffer or watching them despair.
- Azwel's master plan to reach the "next level" of human evolution is to create an even more powerful version of the Evil Seed, called the Ultimate Seed. After lots of enthusiastic research conducted within the ranks of the Aval Organization, Azwel goes on a mad chase to acquire fragments of the cursed and spirit swords, consume enough power from the astral fissures, then proceed with his ceremony and combine their powers to unleash his product onto the world. Based on the arisen suspicions from Zasalamel and the Aval Organization, what he proclaims as the "salvation" of his beloved human race is anything but, and had the Conduit not stopped Azwel from accomplishing his goal, as his Soul Charged Critical Edge demonstrates...
- The fact that Azwel is revealed to be the one responsible for giving Raphael his insane motivations for obtaining Soul Edge. Even worse, it's revealed that not only are both Raphael and Amy merely pawns in his grand plan to achieve the Ultimate Seed again after he survived his encounter with the Conduit, but they've been factored in as early as they came into the service of Lord Dumas, as Dumas himself was a "comrade" of Azwel's.
- Late in Libra of Soul, you go to Norway to confirm whereabouts of Grøh, or at least the Black Demon that everyone is talking about... only to have a rather terrifying and sudden encounter with a Malfested Grøh sporting a very nasty Nightmare Face.
- Early on in Libra of Soul, you can take on a sidequest near Ostrheinsburg. In it, you come across the aftermath of carnage left by Nightmare, the narration describing it in surprisingly graphic detail alongside other unsettling sounds, giving off a very eerie atmosphere. Throughout it all, your character feels a rising sense of dread as you carry forward, and you eventually come face to face with the Azure Knight himself finishing off his latest victim. The fight itself pits you against him at Level 60, requiring you to defeat him with a Critical Edge. Nothing else can finish him off. By that point, you're likely about half his level, so it will likely be a difficult fight. Afterward, you're left with a choice: fight again or flee. If you do flee, the Azure Knight will give chase, barely out of reach, and you end up running until dawn breaks. You quickly conclude that no mere mortal can take up arms against him, and only sheer luck lets you live. If you do fight to the death, however, Nightmare wins easily enough. Just as he goes for the killing blow and prepares to devour your soul, he mysteriously vanishes and you miraculously survive, leaving you to wonder if he was real and whether or not you were still alive. The fight and the accompanying narration emphasize just why Nightmare is considered The Dreaded.
- Cassandra's Soul Chronicle ends with her fighting her future self from the original timeline, who has been driven mad due to her prolonged exposure to Astral Chaos and has taken on traits of a Malfested, complete with glowing red eyes and Voice of the Legion.
- The story updates alongside Season 2's final DLC character Hwang have dropped a terrifying bombshell: Soul Edge has living, sentient fragments. In other words, offspring. These beings were once many souls, until they eventually merged together to become amalgams. The amalgams wandered aimlessly throughout Astral Chaos, until the day Sophitia and Taki killed Cervantes. Suddenly, one of these amalgams became sentient, taking the form of a silver-haired boy who appeared as a hallucination to the traumatized, insane Siegfried and manipulated him into becoming Nightmare. When Nightmare was ultimately defeated by Soul Calibur, the amalgam that tormented Siegfried, along with several of its kin, awakened once more, but this time gained corporeal forms and was able to cross over into the physical world. Siegfried's tormentor, the silver-haired boy, was reincarnated into a girl named Iska Acht - a master manipulator and extension of Soul Edge's will. Acht's "brothers" and "sisters", her fellow amalgams, also serve to gather Soul Edge's lost fragments, each serving as one of the reborn Nightmare's attendants to those within his new inner circle.
- The stage Motien Pass Ruins can come across as creepy. It hardly even looks like an actual place, just a triangular battlefield surrounded by rock spires. The sky is enveloped by black clouds with occasional flashes of lightning and a burning red to the west. Not helping is how foreboding the stage theme "Hidden Saga" is.
