Considering that it has been nine years since the last game in the series was released, and fifteen years since the last mainline release in arcades, you may be wondering why there is so much buzz surrounding this week’s release of Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, a remaster that brings Sega’s fighting series to modern platforms (or just one of them for now, at least). What is it about Virtua Fighter that has made it so popular?
Permit me to clarify, as a rather dedicated fan who has been waiting for an encore performance for quite some time. Just as OutRun sold the adolescent ideal of being behind the wheel of a Ferrari, so Virtua Fighter is all about putting poster star martial artists against each other. Both games take a complicated concept and simplify it into something that is intoxicatingly plain. These two games represent the pinnacle of Sega’s development.
So it’s great to see Sega’s flagship studio, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (whose games have so much of the old flair and swagger), working on Virtua Fighter’s return, even if the project they’ve been given isn’t as magnificent as some might have imagined. This is essentially a stripped-down port of Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown, which originally debuted in arcades in 2010 and only recently made its way to consoles with some light updates for better performance.
Cover stars Akira and Kage look fantastic, but the rest of the cast only seem to have received minor tweaks, and there are just a few new visual effects. The colored clouds of gas that greet each impact are one such feature; they’re present in other 3D fighters like Tekken as well, but, unfortunately, they can’t be disabled here.
The available choices are so limited as to be practically nonexistent in this area. There are no replays or other extra features, and the user interface has been completely revamped from the original Virtua Fighter 5 (although I must admit that I like the new one, which gives the whole product a more modern feel).
The lack of modes from the console release of Final Showdown, such as license and score attack, and the lack of solo-player content beyond the extensive training options (I was hoping for the return of vanilla Virtua Fighter 5’s Quest Mode until I realized with horror that many of the arcades it featured, such as Shibuya’s Club Sega, no longer exist) make the Ultimate title here a bit of a misnomer.
Because of its focus on online play, Virtua Fighter Ultimate Showdown is noticeably pared down in terms of content. Players can enjoy the game in 16-player rooms or a respectable ranked mode. This begs the question of why rollback code hasn’t been implemented, and if the netcode is hardly a disaster – a weekend’s play has revealed it to be pretty much the measure of the Virtua Fighter 5 online experience last time out, albeit with matches available in contrast to the mostly deserted Xbox Live version – it feels like less than Virtua Fighter deserves.
Despite these complaints, RGG Studio has mainly stayed out of the way of Virtua Fighter, which has allowed the game to maintain its status as the granddaddy of fighting games. By mostly ignoring the game’s core flaws, the developers implicitly admitted that Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown was great, confirming what a select number of us had long suspected.
Even after spending several late nights playing Ultimate Showdown offline and online, you still have the same impression: Virtua Fighter is the only truly graceful and poised fighting game. The encounter momentum is explosive, and the play’s ebb and flow are as interesting as they have ever been.
Classic Virtua Fighter’s approachability is there, as is the depth added when the series hardened with the fourth installment at the turn of the century — this is a series designed for the masses that used to assemble at the likes of the Trocadero when Sega’s arcade machines were the very cutting edge of technology. By the time Virtua Fighter 5 was complete, it was a complex web of contrasting fighting styles that worked together well.
Even while Ultimate Showdown isn’t quite the ultimate release of Virtua Fighter 5, it’s still a joy to get lost in the rhythms of what remains an all-time classic and a timeless one, and it just serves to emphasize all of the above. For longtime fans like myself, the opportunity to play Virtua Fighter 5 with a new audience is more than worth the less-than-perfect netcode, the lack of periphery frills, and the lack of anything in the way of new content. It’s not exactly the triumphant return to form that the franchise needs, but it’s still a game worth playing.
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