Leveling Down

Virtua Fighter 5 contains playable characters as this old guy who specializes in drunken kung fu.

I’ve probably spent maybe 10-15 hours playing Virtua Fighter 5 offline and online. The game doesn’t exactly have a storyline or something so I feel like I’ve played it enough to provide a review. My brother has played the online a lot more extensively than I have, and I have also taken his thoughts into consideration when writing this review. After all, he’s the more serious fighting game player that enjoys the online competition; I’m the more casual fighting game player that is just happy with a strong single player component. Is this game good enough to satisfy both the casual and serious fighting game fans? How about even non-fighting game fans?

Intro
The Virtua Fighter series has come a long way since the first one released in the arcades back in 1993. Since then it’s gone from the arcades to the Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, PS3, and finally, now on the 360. The Virtua Fighter series has always been more of a niche title; when the first game in the series was released back in the early 90s, it was the first fighting game to be in 3D. However, its blocky 3D graphics did not attract fans in the way that Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat’s flashier 2D graphics did. Even with its realistic fighting engine, American audiences and their limited attention spans could not get Virtua Fighter since they preferred something prettier. The Japanese loved the game though.

This trend continued throughout the Virtua Fighter series – while the Japanese enjoyed and supported each iteration of Virtua Fighter, Americans were caught up with other fighting games. Each Virtua Fighter game released on American consoles stood in the shadows of at least one other fighting game – Virtua Fighter 1 and 2 couldn’t compete in terms of popularity with the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games, and Virtua Fighter 3 and 4 could not compete against the Soul Calibur and Tekken series. Even Dead or Alive is more popular than Virtua Fighter in the US, as current sales of Dead or Alive 4 are over a million in the US while Virtua Fighter 5 has only sold about 80k copies.

Virtua Fighter 5 was originally released as a PS3 title back in February of this year, and has gone on to sell about 450k copies in the US. Considering the small size of the PS3 install base, that’s actually not bad. With about 2 million PS3 owners in the US, the game is practically in 1 out of every 4 PS3 owner’s game library. I originally considered getting a PS3 as Virtua Fighter 5 was one of the titles I wanted to get (at the time it was not announced for the 360), but ultimately decided against buying the system. Months later there was a huge announcement that Virtua Fighter 5 would be released on the 360, with online play (the PS3 version did not have online play). 360 owners were cheering all over the boards (myself included), but I’m a little surprised to see how little the game has been selling so far on the 360 since its release. At its current pace it may not even outsell the PS3 version, even with online play.

You can collect lots of gear for your character in quest mode, such as sunglasses, earrings, and hats.

Storyline and Premise of the Game
Fighting games generally have very little storyline and are most enjoyed when playing against other human players. When we were young, my brother and I came to enjoy fighting games because we were able to play each other often. As we grew up and went down our own paths, I began to accumulate fighting games that were not very fun to play alone.

I decided to give the Virtua Fighter series a try with VF4 for PS2. At the time I was getting bored of the weak and gimmicky “campaign modes” that several fighting games provided. Virtua Fighter 4 had a fully fleshed out campaign mode that was deeper than any fighting game I had ever played – it had a whole ranking system in a quest mode with hundreds of named “computer profiles” that you had to fight against in different arcades throughout the area. Some were even created based on top Virtua Fighter 4 players, so practically every profile played differently. On top of that, there was an item collection mechanic added to the quest mode, allowing your character to win accessories so you could dress him or her as you wanted. Virtua Fighter 5 continues with this deep campaign mode.

Virtua Fighter 5 contains the expected Arcade mode, Versus mode, Training mode, and Campaign mode, which are present in both the 360 and PS3 editions. In the 360 version an online Versus mode is also present, which I will get to later. The character roster for the game increases by two for each sequel – for Virtua Fighter 5, two new characters, Eileen (a Monkey Kung Fu fighter) and El Blaze (a Lucha Libre wrestler) were added to up the character count to 17.

The training mode isn’t as good as it was in VF4, but it still works.

Game Mechanics
To me, the beauty of Virtua Fighter has always been its deep fighting system wrapped up in its simple controls. Unlike other five or six button fighters, Virtua Fighter 5 uses only three buttons: Block, Punch, and Kick. However, the move list for each character is vast as not only do different combinations of each button pressed present new moves, but the direction the character moves in as well as the stance the character is in present new moves. Simply put, each character probably has over 50 different moves, just from 3 buttons and the directional pad.

Fighting game purists also love the balanced nature of Virtua Fighter 5, as it prides itself on realistic fighting. If it can be done in Virtua Fighter, it can most likely be done in real life. There are fireballs that players are throwing at each other or unrealistic “dial a combos” – just different punches, kicks, and holds. The simplicity of such a fighting system makes it such that each character has a chance against another one.

The game is a more defensive-oriented game than most other combo heavy games. Knowing when to sidestep certain attacks creates opportunities to punish, and successfully blocking attacks provides your character with a frame advantage in retaliating. In that sense, it means if you can successfully block all of an opponent’s combo or attack, you have a slight window of opportunity to punish the opponent for being predictable. Countering an attack (i.e. attacking someone with an attack that counters their own attack) does more damage than normal damage, rewarding a more patient play style.

I personally cannot go too deep into dissecting why the game mechanics are so great, as I don’t have that kind of skill level to judge. But I enjoy the fact that even with just three buttons, I find myself still going through the training mode over and over to learn new moves that I haven’t yet learned. It’s unfortunate that in VF5 they took away the “classroom training” that was in VF4. The “classroom training” was amazing in teaching you how to best play each character, noting what combos and hits were most effective when and such. Now in VF5 it’s just the move list you go through for training.

Although this shot is from the Japanese version, this is the online match-up screen. Here you can decide if you want to play your opponent or not. If both players hit “Ready” the match will start.

Multiplayer
I tried out a few matches of unranked online and my opinion is that it’s functional but could have been a lot better. First of all, the lag is actually not bad. In the games that I played, I noticed some input lag very rarely in all of my fights against random people and my brother. There was one game that contained significant lag (I felt like I was playing Dead or Alive 4 online or something) but after the game I checked and found out that the guy I played against was hosting from UK.

My brother feels differently though; he says that when he plays online without playing offline first it’s passable and he doesn’t really notice the lag. But when he plays offline and switches over to online, the lag is quite prevalent. I personally feel that if a casual player such as myself doesn’t notice it and a serious player like my brother only notices if he plays offline first, it’s pretty good.

So the connection isn’t bad, but the way the actual matchmaking works is shoddy. First of all, the way online is set up is that you can decide if you want to host or join a match. Doesn’t host get an advantage on lag time? Matchmaking should make who hosts random (or even the person with the better connection) instead of allowing the players to decide.

I’m also spoiled by the “online room” that Dead or Alive 4 and Puzzle Fighter have. In those games, you can have an online room that can be joined by four people so that it feels like it’s four of you at one arcade cabinet all trading turns yet watching and socializing with the two that are up playing. Obviously this can potentially cause more lag to the game with 4 people in the room instead of two, but such an option is quite welcome.

Finally, there is one practical deal breaker that my brother told me about for online ranked play. In unranked play, you are given the option when you join a potential match to either accept or reject playing against the player that you are matched with. That’s fine for unranked play, as you’re not playing for records or anything but just for fun. But this same mechanic exists as well for ranked play! My brother had a hard time playing it because of that.

Whoever he beat in Ranked play would refuse to play him again, so he was forced to only play against players that were ranked higher than him that hadn’t played him yet. One should not have a choice with who they play against in ranked play – there should have been some type of matchmaking to at least put two similarly ranked players against each other. What is the point of Microsoft’s “Trueskill” algorithms then? What is the point of ranking in Virtua Fighter 5 if you can choose who you will or will not play against?

I have to play this old geezer to rank up?

Achievement System
I can say that I’m happy with the way the Achievements are implemented in Virtua Fighter 5. There aren’t any Achievements for online play (a peeve of mine) and the offline Achievements aren’t ridiculous either. Most of the Achievements revolve around the quest mode, giving you Achievements for not only reaching higher ranks from playing, but also from winning tournaments. There are also Achievements for collecting all of the items as well as beating all of the opponents in Quest mode (probably 500+ different opponents). There are Achievements for collecting everything in Quest mode, which allow one to really spend a lot of time playing the single player game.

One thing that I applaud Sega with is the decision to keep the Achievements in Quest Mode to just one character. Beating all 500+ other opponents and collecting the 100 or so gear pieces for your character will take dozens of hours. Sega could have made things worse by having Achievements for you to do this with every character, but instead they kept the Achievements for the Quest Mode to just one character. They have my thanks for that.

Replays automatically are shown at the end of each round.

Final Thoughts
Virtua Fighter 5 is among the best fighting games I’ve ever played. It has a lengthy and enjoyable single player Quest mode, the fighting is smooth and balanced, and the 360 version even has online play and well thought-out Achievements. However, the online play for the 360 is rudimentary and leaves more to be desired.

Even though Virtua Fighter 5 is a great fighting game, it’s not for everyone. It’s a fighting game with very little story and if you don’t appreciate pulling off fighting moves while sparring against another character for hours at a time on a small playing field, it’s not going to float your boat. I give the game a B+. It does a lot of things well for a fighting game (even with the poor online features), but I can’t possibly recommend that everyone buy it. It’s still a niche title – just a very solid one at that. I’m curious to see when Soul Calibur 4 comes out next year and how it will compare to Virtua Fighter 5.

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