October 10, 2009

It’s Virtua Fighter 5 Online, because games just aren’t normally online.

Jonathan bought Virtua Fighter 4 on a whim, once it came out in its cheap updated form back in the PS2 days. I was kind of astounded by it. The original Virtua Fighter, which is all I’d really played, was silly and stupid. I mean, it looked like this. It’s not something to inspire confidence. So when I found that, at some point in between, Virtua Fighter had become this crazily technical thing, filled with amazing depth without involving any sort of “super moves” and was incredibly fun to play. On top of that, they had created this thing called “Quest Mode” which made single player play amazingly fun.

I had been meaning to try Virtua Fighter 5 for awhile now, because of that. It came in from Gamefly, and I gave it a go. My verdict: More of the same, though that’s not a bad thing.

Seriously, I’m not a hyper-technical person with this stuff, but I could see very little difference between Virtua Fighter 4 and 5. I mean, sure, the graphics looked better, and there were a couple new fighters, but it was essentially the same game. You still had the completely excellent Quest Mode, where you run around to virtual arcades to fight the virtual people in them to win tournaments and increase your rank. You still have the large amount of character customization, so you can really make your character look different and unique, and where the better costume pieces are awarded through play, giving you a nice Skinner box to keep going. Especially now that I have an Arcade stick, I was having a lot of fun playing it.

In the end, though, I didn’t decide to keep it. There is just no competition for the game. I wasn’t about to be anywhere near good enough to complete with the people online, who are surely only the hardest core of players at this point, and although I might have gotten Jonathan into a match or two, none of my other friends would really be into a fighter that technical. So I decided to save my cash and send it back. Probably a smart move, what with me deciding to give in, support Tim Schafer, and buy Brutal Legend on the 13th.

Still, Virtua Fighter has one of the best single player experiences of any fighter. I enjoyed Quest mode while I played it, (which was just about to the point where it started being too hard for me to win. I suck.) just like I did last time. At the same time, if you’re going to play it single player, I don’t know if there’s really a lot of reason to get 5 over a super-cheap copy of 4 Evolution in a bargain bin somewhere. They are just so similar because 4 was polished to near perfection. It would definitely seem hard to move from that without completely changing the game up, you know? So instead they just added more costumes, a few more characters, and more pretty. And I guess that’s alright.

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