PixlBit

I'm something of an anomaly when it comes to fighting games. Okay, I'm something of an anomaly when it comes to a lot of games. Anyway, a new version of my favorite fighting game of all time was released last week. I speak, of course, of Sega's Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown, which came out on PS4 and is currently free to PS+ subscribers. 

The Virtua Fighter series has fallen on hard times in recent years as Japanese arcades followed their American counterparts into decline. Its one-time rival series, Tekken, has thrived on home consoles, and is currently the third best-selling fighting game series behind Super Smash Bros and Mortal Kombat. VF being tied to the Saturn and Dreamcast until VF4 came out on the PS2 didn't help matters, nor did the departure of VF creator Yu Suzuki after Shenmue's failure. VF5 was originally released in 2006, with its most recent revision up until now having released in 2012 on PS3. Since then, the series has largely been kept alive as a minigame in Sega's popular Yakuza series. 

That's a big part of why this new revision exists.  VF5 was remade through the joint efforts of AM2, the Sega studio that traditionally handles VF, and Ryu ga Gotoku Studio, which makes the Yakuza games. It was remade using the Yakuza engine in an attempt to bring the now 15-year-old game up to more modern standards.  Sega has expressed an interest in making VF a part of the e-sports scene. Hopefully VF5 Ultimate Showdown will be the first step towards that goal.

I've been a fan of Virtua Fighter since the beginning, it being one of my earliest exposures to the bitmapped polygon models that underpin modern games, and when I was a teenager I could be found at the VF2 machine at the local arcade. When Sega brought Virtua Fighter 4 to the PS2, hoping to make it a success now that it was no longer tied to Sega's unsuccessful post-Genesis hardware, I bought it day one. Virtua Fighter 5 online was a powerful impetus for me to invest in a Xbox 360, my first (and currently only) Microsoft console. I prefer its graphical style over Tekken (incidentally, both VF and Tekken's art styles were originally designed by the same person, Seiichi Ishii), its fighting engine is incredibly versatile yet simple to learn, and in contrast to the four-to-six button layouts most fighting games use, Virtua Fighter uses just three buttons - punch, kick, and block. This simple interface is still no less versatile than its competitors.  Virtua Fighter also makes much better use of 3-D space than Namco's fighting games do. 

So I've been spending a lot of time on PS4 lately, playing this game online. The games visuals look fairly crisp and are well-animate thanks to the Yakuza engine, though it still looks like a 7th-generation game.  Right now there is a plentiful supply of online competition, and I hope it can build a following and not turn into a ghost town like so many other online games. It's actually the first time I've had a PS+ subscription in some time, as my primary online activities these days have been Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Smash Ultimate, and Animal Crossing New Horizons. The game is definitely geared towards online play and spectator modes, in keeping with Sega's goal. Compared to the story modes in games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken, its offline play will no doubt seem bare bones to a lot of people, and that's part of why the series had such a hard time catching on outside of Japan - Sega has never been interested in the kind of CG narratives that Namco creates for Tekken and Soulcalibur, so there are no story modes here. But this game is so much fun to play and watch online, I don't really care. Hopefully Virtua Fighter will finally get its due, and hopefully that will encourage Sega to make Virtua Fighter 6 for ninth generation consoles. Virtua Fighter truly deserves to shine. Check it out, and let me know if you want to have online matches with me.