For the period they were on the market concurrently, I struggle to think of a PS2 game that looked as good as Soul Calibur, and even for the entirety of PS2's life I'd say the majority of games look worse than SC.

Versus Xbox is a whole 'nother kettle of fish but by then you're looking at a 3 year difference in time of release so its kinda understandable that hardware had moved forward a lot.

Wasn't much of a leap? Are you serious? Unless you are talking solely about graphics (which sure it wasn't the best over there, as no Yakuza have the best graphic on the gen they are).

The battle is much better than the clunky system of Shenmue, and I platined both shenmue like less than half year ago. It is a really shallow game in comparison, perhaps we can say that at the time Shenmue launched nothing was similar, but truly Yakuza is what Shenmue was trying to be.

No, it wasn't a 70 man battle, it was like a 5 man at a time in waves. I don't remember seeing more than 10 enemies at once in no point in that battle. Also the combo linking was just rubbish.

Nope the argument curl-6 was making is totally different than what you seem to have picked from it. His point was that DC hold pretty well against PS2 even launching 2 years prior, while PS2 was destroyed by Xbox that launched only one year after. All that info is wrong, since PS2 launched 1y4m after DC and Xbox launched like 1y8m after PS2 and considering the whole library of the 3 systems PS2 held itself much better against Xbox than DC against PS2.

Because if we were to just cherry pick a couple of games to claim DC held pretty well and use game like fighting game or racing game to compare against open world or the like that is pretty much useless comparison. Because we could put a racing game on PS3 versus an open world game in PS4 (and in case choose the best graphic in one and a average to bad on the other, like GT6 vs Mad Max) and say PS3 holds it self wonderfully against PS4 even if it released 10 years earlier and that is factually wrong.

Soul Calibur is a fighting game with 2 chars on screen at a time, so at the time of course very few games would compare. Like how would you expect GTA San Andreas with dozen NPCs at all times, plenty of constructions, etc to look better than SC? You can't really cherry pick a single game to say because it looks better than most on another system then they had similar power or performance.

Or should we go and say that since GT4 could output 1080i and had a very good graphics, photorealistic at the time, that PS2 was basically stronger than Xbox?

I said I can concede that it was a good HW and that it had a good performance. The problem was your comparison on timeframe and power that was really all out of the window.

Shenmue used the Virtua Fighter moveset so it wasn't shallow. Maybe you just mashed the same buttons over and over.

I won all the fights, and yes I hate Virtua Fighter so that may be the reason why I hated the fighting on Shenmue. So slow and no fluidity.

Virtua Fighter is the best 3D fighter ever.

I preffer Tekken, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat in this order and hate VF, but sure you can like it and I know there is a big fandom who say it is the best and most deep fighting series.

SF and MK are not 3D arena games and VF is still better than them.

Dreamcast catches up and takes the lead in the poll; once numerous votes behind Xbox, it now leads by 1.

I never compared Soul Calibur to GTA. I simply chose the best graphics available on the Dreamcast.

And GT4 doesn't actually render in 1080i, it only upscales to it, its rendering resolution is just 448p according to Digital Foundry.

PS2 was closer to DC than to Xbox graphically in my opinion; the latter's more modern GPU, equipped with DX8 tier programmable shaders, allowed for results like Conker Live and Reloaded, Chronicles of Riddick, and Halo 2 that were a class apart from what either PS2 or DC could ever hope to produce.

You are comparing Soul Calibur to "most of PS2 library". Which in essence again is picking a very close and controlled environment of a fighting game and comparing to the biggest open world and everything in between. If you had just done something like "SC vs Tekken 5" or similar comparison that would at least make sense. Next should we compare FFX during CGI on PS2 versus Code Veronica in DC?

The problem is that performance and hw aren't opinion, they have the hard numbers. You just like DC more so you try to favor it in comparison.

There aren't many games that would look better than FFX on GC or Xbox, but that doesn't mean both weren't considerably more powerful than PS2.

My contention was only ever that while PS2 is naturally more powerful as a system that released over a year later, DC can hold up impressively well as it was so capable for its age.

Xbox though benefited from advances in shader technology that arrived too late for both DC and PS2 and made a significant difference to graphics.

Like DC, PS2 could still hold up in its own right. The difference made by programmable shaders though made PS2's overall graphical makeup look more similar to DC than to Xbox.