Virtua Fighter Is Finally Back, Here’s Why It’s Important

After being teased repeatedly over the past few months, SEGA have announced that the Virtua Fighter series is back, with Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown launching exclusively on the PS4 (and playable on PS5 via backwards compatibility) on June 1st. Yes, the exclusive aspect of that announcement might have robbed the game of some of its hype, but still: Virtua Fighter is back, baby.

For the uninformed, it might be difficult to know why the return of a landmark fighting game series is such a huge deal, but it is, and we’re here to explain why Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is an important release for one of game’s most important franchises.

 

Virtua Fighter Is Considered The Grandfather Of 3D Fighting Games

We all know that the fighting game genre was pioneered by Street Fighter, particularly the arcade and home console success of Street Fighter 2. The first game was absolute crap, but Capcom managed to reverse the series’ fortunes in the sequel. Now, it’s the most globally recognised fighting game in the genre, outside of maybe Mortal Kombat. That’s a debate for a different day.

While the 2D fighting game scene has been defined by Street Fighter, SEGA and AM2 decided to revolutionise the genre by exploring that mythical third dimension with Virtua Fighter. The brainchild of Yu Suzuki, who had already worked on the likes of OutRun, Space Harrier and Super Hang-On, AM2 experimented with 3D graphics with Virtua Racing using a Model 1 hardware board developed in partnership with the aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

SEGA wasn’t the first to experiment with 3D though, as Atari’s Hard Drivin’ brought polygonal graphics to the arcades in 1989. However, Virtua Racing rendered 3D graphics better than anything else on the market, with the Model 1 capable of 180.000 polygons per second. AM2 then got to work on adapting the Model 1 for use in a fighting game, Virtua Fighter, and while the polygons led to rough looking characters that have aged like an awful joke from an edgy comedian, the animation was considered groundbreaking.

VF would launch in 1993 in arcades, giving way to the likes of Tekken and Dead or Alive, both of which were heavily influenced by the success of Virtua Fighter. The original Dead or Alive was even built off Model 2 hardware, which was used in the creation of VF2. The Virtua Fighter series might not have the same mainstream appeal as Tekken these days, but SEGA and AM2 certainly walked so that Namco could run.

 

VF’s Inspired Half Of The Gaming Industry

Far from just being the impetus for the 3D fighting game genre, Virtua Fighter had gone on to inspire countless other development teams and game studios in various ways, with perhaps the most notable being how Virtua Fighter inspired the development of the original PlayStation. The 3D graphics featured in Virtua Fighter convinced Sony to ditch 2D hardware and focus on 3D hardware, meaning it’d be more competitive with the likes of Nintendo’s N64 and the Sega Saturn.

Shigeo Maruyama said in an interview that: “Once Virtua Fighter was out, the direction of the PlayStation became instantly clear.” Now, Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is a PlayStation exclusive. Despite my salt about it (because my PS4 is broken), there’s an undeniable poetry to it.

Not only did Virtua Fighter inspire Sony to develop the PlayStation into the world-beating console it is today, but it also triggered Tomb Raider creator Toby Gard to create the game and the Lara Croft character, stating in a 2001 interview that: “I was a big fan of an old first person game called Ultima Underworld and I wanted to mix that type of game with the sort of polygon characters that were just being showcased in Virtua Fighter. I thought by mixing that up we could make it a sort of real-time interactive movie and that was basically the concept for Tomb Raider.”

For all Virtua Fighter’s benefits though, it also appears to have been responsible for John Romero creating Daikatana. In an interview with Edge, he states how his original vision for Quake was Virtua Fighter in a 3D world, but differences with id Software led to his departure: “My original idea was to do something like Virtua Fighter in a 3D world, with full-contact fighting, but you’d also be able to run through a world, and do the same stuff you do in Quake, only when you got into these melees, the camera would pull out into a third-person perspective. It would’ve been great, but nobody else had faith in trying it. The project was taking too long, and everybody just wanted to fall back on the safe thing – the formula. I wasn’t going to go against everybody else in the company, so once I finished work on Quake I was done.”

Not all inspirations are positive, especially when it comes to Daikatana, but it’s hard to dismiss the sheer level of cultural impact the Virtua Fighter series has made over the nearly three decades it’s been around. Here’s to hopefully a few decades more.

 

Its Controls Are Simple But There’s Huge Amounts Of Depth

Knowing the history of Virtua Fighter is one thing, but if the game played terribly, it wouldn’t matter. However, the Virtua Fighter series has consistently been one of the most fun and engaging fighting games on the market, thanks in no small part to how simple the game’s control scheme is.

At its core, Virtua Fighter is a three button fighting game, with one button each for blocking, kicking and punching. It doesn’t sound like a lot when compared to Street Fighter’s six button layout or even Tekken’s four button configuration, and it especially sounds limiting when you consider that one of the buttons is purely for holding block.

Despite this perceived limitation, Virtua Fighter manages to find its strength. Each character boasts a command list that rivals and even beats any 3D fighting game ever made, largely because the command list makes use of pretty much every possible permutation of those three buttons. On paper, Virtua Fighter could be seen as the simplest 3D fighting game on the market. In practice, it’d take years to truly master these games.

 

Virtua Fighter Has Collaborated With Pretty Much Everything

One of the key signs of a truly successful franchise is how much the series has crossed over with other properties, and Virtua Fighter has had its fair share of crossover potential, with one of the most recognisable being with Dead or Alive 5. Akira, Sarah and Pai were available as guest characters in DOA5, while DOA5 Ultimate saw Jacky added to the roster.

You also know a game is incredibly successful when it makes some kind of appearance or nod in Super Smash Bros., and Virtua Fighter is no exception. Mii Brawler costumes for Akira Yuki and Jacky Bryant have been featured in the past, and Akira himself was even included as an assist trophy in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, shoulder checking anyone silly enough to get in range of him.

Akira and Jacky also cropped up in Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, where they drove an Outrun-inspired red car and would smack it to go faster. That happened.

 

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio Are Involved

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio are best known for their work on the Yakuza series, and it would be fair to say that for the past decade, the Yakuza series has been the one franchise that still burned a candle for Virtua Fighter. Set in a fictionalised version of Japan, Yakuza featured Club Sega locations filled with Virtua Fighter arcade machines, allowing you to play one of the best fighting games ever made inside one of the best RPGs ever made.

RGGS and AM2 are collaborating on Ultimate Showdown, which is a remake of VF5 in the Dragon Engine, meaning that the series looks better than ever before. The Dragon Engine has allowed the Yakuza series to be a fantastic looking game, pushing realistic visuals even further, so it makes sense that a trailblazing franchise like Virtua Fighter would want to use a revolutionary graphical engine like Dragon Engine.

Also, it means we’re one step closer to the possibility of Kazuma Kiryu in a fighting game. I need this in my life.

While the idea of a remake of an already released Virtua Fighter game might not be the huge announcement some fans were expecting (VF6 on PS and Xbox with crossplay please SEGA), the fact that the Japanese developer are acknowledging their flagship fighting game series after nearly 10 years of silence is a good sign of things to come. Hopefully, the success of Ultimate Showdown will lead to more VF games in the future.

READ MORE: 20 Best PS4 Fighting Games You Should Play