Virtua Fighter Crossroads: The Definitive Review
It’s short for virtuoso, actually
This past weekend saw me lugging a considerable fraction of my vintage consoles to a community centre for a grand old day of frenzied retrogaming. It was one of those PTA fundraiser events, where we offered a whole Saturday for kids and adults to bang through five decades of videogaming in one room. My ever-dependable Panasonic CRT played home to a ‘78 Atari VCS and an even older Pong machine1 to ratify the early days, with an X-Box Series X to bring us up to modernity as a Goat Simulator player. Never underestimate how popular Goat Simulator 3 is with children - there were screams of delight when newcomers arrived to find it up and running. Also popular was my McBooted PlayStation 2, which played endless rounds of button-mashed Tekken 4 matches.
In a quieter moment, I snuck onto my PlayStation 2 to boot up Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution to see if I had any synaptic remnants from my glory days of VF scholarship. Dutifully, one of my kids sat next to me and we had a very jolly 20 minutes of me waking up the old combos while they struggled to get any kind of combo out of the button-mashing techniques that had given them entertaining bouts in Tekken. Having run many an after-school Retro Club session, all of my recent fighting game time has been battling juvenile Tekken button-mashers and while that presents a particular and admittedly enjoyable challenge all of its own, it’s hardly pushing my skill envelope. I felt much more guilty destroying my children with Kage Maru and Lau Chan as the imbalance is so much more pronounced. Once you have reached a certain proficiency with Virtua Fighter, the masher is pitifully easy to dismiss, and it seems I still had that proficiency, deep in the ganglia. And despite remorselessly defeating my own children, I fucking loved it. The pace, the rhythm, the opportunities for technical excellence. The gritty weight of the contact, the application of pressure. I could have played Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution for the rest of the day, because it always carries this studious air that the likes of Tekken or Soul Calibur can’t sustain. Every arena is a classroom, every input an opportunity to improve. The competition is almost irrelevant when mastery of the character is the nobler goal, and there’s some magic in the balance and the kineticism, in the complexity arising from 3-button purity, that sets Virtua Fighter so far apart from its peers that it feels like a different species.
Later on in the day, the adult-only session began and Goat Simulator was replaced with FC26, people got down to Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64 four-ways, and Tekken 4 remained on the PlayStation 2. One of the adults was battling a teenager with a suspiciously tasty Forrest Law. All it took was seeing a couple of different juggles and some tactical application of non-masher moves to know this guy was an opponent worth fighting. The teen gave up and I sat down to have some of the most enjoyable multiplayer I’ve had in the last decade. It’d been that long since I’d played a fighting game competitively, and it felt so wonderfully good to be back in a fight. It was like being freed from the shackles of calmly toying with button-mashers and having to actually think for once. Out went the conservatism of artificially carving out slim victories to let kids feel like they’re progressing without letting them think it’s all too easy. In came the old, old memories of how to fuck up an adult. This adult was rustier than me, but had the heart to fight hard and as my skills improved and the flow state picked up, our 50/50 wins started tipping in my direction. I started remembering the right times to deliver Kazuya’s brutal rising mid punches for momentum-stopping crumples, and started banging in godfists with increasing confidence and rapidity. Tekken 4’s stripped-down roster and close-up battling combines with the introduction of walls to add a richer psychological dimension to the power-play game. Kazuya has a small 4-hit combo that doesn’t deliver much health bar damage, but instead has a punishing psychological effect that’s far more valuable. Block one of Law’s grandiose somersaults when near a wall and you can often get a wall push > canned combo run that crushes the spirit and tips the momentum in a wonderfully dominating way. Then it’s godfists and hellsweeps all the way to the win. It’s in that kind of richness where Tekken 4 seemed to find a different calibre of play. I didn’t play much Tekken 5 as I’d switched to full-time Virtua Fighter by then, but it seemed floatier and less intimate, more concerned with whizzbangs and flashiness, more embracing of a cartoonish nonreality. Even though it seems the community sees Tekken 4 as a miss-step in the series, I’d argue it was the one that’s closest to the VF spirit. While it doesn’t have that same urge toward technical mastery that Virtua Fighter conjures so naturally, I took a real pride in opening up my opponent with riskier and trickier juggles than the straight-on maximal-damage orthodoxy. But then, once warmed up, I had the confidence to throw rounds in the pursuit of a brutal wall combo or landing a showboating move.
Taking on a challenging opponent in a fighting game and gaining the advantage carries a satisfaction and pleasure all of its own. It’s a joy that’s unique to fighting games, for it comes from that intimacy of the 1-on-1, but also from the push to domination. As mentioned previously, it’s in the rhythm and in the imposition of yours against theirs. It’s where standout characters like Akira Yuki gain their charisma - Akira infamously has such an odd and quixotic rhythm that imposing it feels like trying to mesh incompatible gears under duress, but once Akira’s force of will determines the cadence, it’s all over. And it’s in dissecting the clashing chaos of competing rhythms, to gallop out with punishing momentum to a dominating victory, that the intellectual umami of the great fighting game really flows. I cannot get that same sensation from FPS shoot-offs, or from virtual wheel-to-wheel racing. Only the fighting game gives you that sense of imposing your order on the chaos of two players clashing. There’s a special sort of clarity that emerges, like a bell ringing through to drown out a cacophony, that seems unique. And for my money, no bell rings any clearer than that of Virtua Fighter.
My VF history starts on the Sega Saturn and the original Virtua Fighter. It was here that I first tried mangled attempts to get Akira’s flow going, where I first tried Kage’s ninja theatrics and, fatefully, first voiced an audible “choo choo!” as I got the Lau train running. Our group dallied with VFs 1 and 2 as an alternative to our quotidian diet of Tekken 2, the stalwart fighter which first saw me print out an FAQ for the arcane arts of unbalanced forbidden techniques and undocumented juggle combos. I ended up getting a Saturn with Fighters Megamix and put a surprising amount of time into the full VF roster as smashing the gaudy Fighting Vipers characters through the walls with heavy finishers never got old. It was in Megamix that I found a real love for Akira, where the input windows felt more lenient and hence his more rapid-input combos became reasonably fluent. If you must know, I was indeed bashing out juggled DLCs into the wall like they were mere low jabs. I think it’s here that I got the bug for the VF scholarship. You could sense a technicality to its underpinnings that rewarded study and practice, and with those wall conditions I loved probing the moveset for the most fun, most spectacular combos. Virtua Fighter 3 TB passed me by on the Dreamcast, as my buddies only ever wanted to do Soul Calibur. Understandable, of course, and I maintain that the Dreamcast version is one of the closest things to perfection on that machine, but it had an oddly charitable imprecision that felt woolier than Tekken, let alone Virtua Fighter. It was only in the PlayStation 2 era, when a new friend group and a diktat to play Virtua Fighter 4 for its Kumite mode, that I really fell in love. After that came Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution, a game that I absolutely treasure. Later editions are superb, of course, but it’s VF4 Evo that’s the king for me. It has an uncanny magnificence to it, both in the fundamentals of its battling but also in its incredible RPG mode, which stands as the best example of how to expand the single-player fighting game I’ve ever seen. To recreate a Japanese metropolis with a string of arcades as an RPG overworld has a kind of simple genius where the end result is so perfect, so obviously right, that you can’t believe it took them a decade to come up with it.
This brings us to Virtua Fighter Crossroads. A game that I am almost feverish in anticipation of. We’ve been watching the peeks and previews that Sega has dripped out, right up to the more formal reveal last week. The step to merge the Virtua Fighter proposition with an RGG urban fable is certainly an interesting one, and I hold an unshakeable faith that a trad Virtua Fighter 6 will exist somewhere within its architecture. Certainly, the glimpses we’ve seen of 1-on-1 combat have a fluidity and realism that feels genuinely exhilarating as an advance for the form. The grander structure of a narrative-led, fixed-character story impresses me far less, but given the past history and my ability to stomach such a thing in its Yakuza guises, I’m not as upset as I could be. But really, as excited as I was about a new Virtua Fighter in any form, it was that battling at the retrogames day that’s ignited a burning excitement to get my hands on it. This is helped, of course, by the fact that my friends are equally thrilled. We’ll all be back in the studious game of practice for eternal battle, even if we’re more likely to meet online than on the couch. Virtua Fighter Crossroads’ title may be as literal as it sounds - a real crossroads for the fighting game in a single player context, but I have little doubts about RGG Studio as the developer to manage such a grand idea. Just the notion of trying to move the greatest 3D fighting game into the classic Yakuza mould feels like an idea that deserves applause, even if it might be ten years too early for some.
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A pong machine so old it looks like it was assembled from Maplin catalogue parts and ran entirely on discrete transistors or something. Not happy with its requested 12 volt supply, which inexplicably made it lose video sync, it played a weirdly quirky and incomplete game at 9 volts. This provided a screen filled with insane analogue noise that can only come from a pre-CPU gaming machine. The bats, ball and walls were all oscillating with horizontal spikes as snow faded in and out on the black voids. Beautifully, this noise subsided the longer the machine was switched on but the logic was still incomplete so it only randomly detected ball/bat collisions. Truly a relic from a lost age, it should come as no surprise that the kids couldn't give a shit about it.