Well, look at that! This isn't the reinvention of a Sega Saturn game exactly, but it's definitely along the same lines! This is a revival of a franchise that we all can get behind and bash someone's teeth out! All of your favorite characters are back, with some others... but the favorites are still here! Jeffry and Pai-chan are still here, and that's all I need to make mince meat out of everyone!
This game, being more online savvy, is mostly for the internet fighting bunch, and that's fine and dandy. The great news is, you don't need to be online and you don't need to fight other people if you don't want to. It will make you feel like you're fighting other people, but what they're actually doing is just using other people's character design with the different cosmetics on them and making their A.I. fight you like they normally would. Some of these cosmetics are pretty cool, actually, but some of them also don't make sense. Aoi wasn't in the first Virtua Fighter but she still has a retro character skin in the same vain! Weird...
The game modes and game mechanics are all still here. The prim and proper game controls are back in all of their fighting majesty. You still have the ranking matches, where you fight versus the computer en masse, one after the other. The ranking matches and viewing all of the beautiful backgrounds is awesome by itself, but then there's the matches where you need to fight in cages and can't ring out, or fight against wooden rails where you need to really work to smash them out of the ring!
They kept it simple, as Virtua Fighter does, and kept the game modes from becoming too broad or overwhelming in their scope. They're simple and concise: random matches, ranked matches, online matches, tournament, practice matches. You can create online rooms so you can fight opponents in multiple matches or you can just hop from online match to online match.
Now, be careful while doing this, because there are plenty of people out there who are just wanting to have wins on their ranking sheet. So, some of them will try to avoid the L by exiting the match in the middle of it. This happened to me. I still haven't even checked to see if I was labeled to win that match or not, but I won 2 matches out of 5 and they bailed before I could win the third. It's a common occurrence but we're just here to play the game.
Virtua Fighter keeps its reputation as being one of the tightest fighting games on the market. Ever since it debuted the very first 3D fighting game through the first title, the game only improved over and over again as AM2 locked down the most awesome face smasher they could make. Virtua Fighter 2 still remains the king as far as Planet Virtua goes, but any one of them can be considered the best of the lot. They're just that awesome! So, check out the new VF5 and let's hope the success it pulls in will bring us a Virtua Fighter 6!
