In the initial arcade version of Soul Edge, Hwang was a palette swap of Mitsurugi for Korean markets (like Arthur in Korean version of SC arcade). In later arcade version, he got his own movelist (like 3AAB, 46K, 1B, etc), but still shared many of Mitsurugi's moves. In the first Soul Calibur he shared some moves with Xianghua, but still had his own staple moves.
All the characters changed SO much in the transition from Soul Edge (Soul Blade) to Soul Calibur so it's hard to tell, if the new characters were clones of the old ones or did the old ones become clones of the new ones. Well, you could look at their weapons and see which axeman/swordsman/sword+shield gurl were in the series first, but I'm talking about their moves. For example: Soul Calibur Kilik is completely different from Soul Blade Seong Mina. SC Kilik and SC Mina are quite similar, but SC Mina still has some unique stuff (like 66KKK, 4A, 6AK, A+K, 9B+K, etc etc) and so does SC Kilik (A+K, 4B, monument, etc etc). But in SC they share many moves and they got that stuff at the same time (except, I don't remember if Mina was playable in the first version of SC arcade). But all in all, to me this whole "who's clone of who" talk is completely pointless. If two or three characters have studied the same style of fighting (Alexandra sisters and the guy who later became Lizardman), of course they will have similarities. To me, that's ok. But would I like it, if the game had 20 samurai characters fighting with Hyoho Niten Ichi Ryu style? Probably no.
Sorry about the possible off topic post.
