When I decided to work on the Soul Blade Master title belt, I wanted a design that would look very much like the Soul Calibur Master belt (Soul Calibur is the successor to Soul Blade and the two games share many of the same characters). So what I did here was take the original Soul Calibur Master belt design and change the look of the elements to Soul Blade equivalents. I retained the shield and crossing swords centerpiece, but the changed them to the Omega Sword & Owl Shield used by Sophitia in Soul Blade. Then I created a vector of the Soul Blade logo and replaced the Soul Calibur logo. The result was a design that looked like a counterpart to the Soul Calibur Master belt design.

But after printing a sample on plain paper, I decided to abandon the project. Two reasons. The main problems was the Soul Blade logo didn't lend itself to being at the top of a circular main plate in the same way that the Soul Calibur logo did. There was so much left-over space up there and I wasn't sure what to do with it. I thought I came up with the solution when I thought about filling the area with Japanese characters, so I did a lot of research into the Kanji characters for words like yuukan (bravery), meiyo (honor) and hokori (pride). But it still didn't look right. The option at this point was to rearrange the design elements so the logo wouldn't weigh so heavily at the top, but I chose not to do that, since I really wanted the design to look like the Soul Calibur Master belt design. So I gave up.

The other reason I abandoned this design was Soul Blade and Soul Calibur are very similar games. The game strategies and controls are virtually identical, and in all likelihood, the "master" of one game will also rule the other. The idea of giving that candy-ass jabroni, Tonichi, a free ride to another title belt didn't sound right.