Virtua Fighter 2

Moby ID: 1124

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Critic Reviews add missing review

Average score: 84% (based on 45 ratings)

Player Reviews

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 76 ratings with 5 reviews)

Martial-Arts with superior control.

The Good
One thing about VF2 is the variety in characters to choose from. Ok, there are 'only' 12 to choose from but most of them are very different to control. It's called the thinking man's beat'em'up for a reason. The learning curve is pretty steep which you'll realize as soon as you got smoked by a seasoned player. The other thing is the steering and the animations. It doesn't get much smoother. Forget the choppy Tekken rubbish. This is how it's done.

The Bad
There really isn't much to rant about. At it's time it was the best 3D beat'em'up out there. Hell, for me it still is! I still find myself playing once in a while despite being spoiled by all the cool graphics nowadays.

The Bottom Line
It's a classic. Go try it yourself but look under the surface. You're bound to find a true gem. If you can't get a hold of it then go and try at least VF4:Evo for the PS2. That will give you an idea - but you better don't use the standard PS2 pad since that one doesn't quite fit for this kind of games.

SEGA Saturn · by Hazuki (41) · 2004

Probably the best

The Good
Graphically, the game ranks among the best in the platform. Nicely detailed backgrounds, high resolution, nicely designed characters, flicker-free graphics, and all this running at an impressive frame-rate, showing what the Saturn can do, as long as the developers know the internals. Which many didn't, sadly. If graphics are impressive (even lacking a lighting engine), gameplay is the true king in the game. All moves can be pulled with a bunch of punk/kick presses and d-pad nudges, and the result is awesome to look at. The animation of the moves is perfect, and if you are a wrestling fan, after playing with Wolf for a while you start wondering "why haven't Sega done a wrestling game?". It's a joy to pull some of the combos, like Sarah's double punch followed by her trademark somersault or one of many of Akira's moves, and personally, as long as I'm having fun throwing away the moves, the game is good. Simple as that.

The Bad
The game lacks a lot of unlockables that would be featured on other Sega fighters, such as the CG renders/drawings and extra fighters of Fighting Vipers and Fighters Megamix or the FMV clips of Last Bronx. Yet, it requires 180 memory blocks for bookeeping, when most other fighters are happy with taking 20 - that's like having a 2006 PC game (considering an average HD is 200 GB) requiring a 60 GB installation. The unlockables available are hardly notable - Sega's trademark "Option+" menu with stage select, rink size and fight with underwater physics aren't in par with games that held me until I could unlock everything, such as Super Puzzle Fighter 2 or Fighters Megamix. And with only 10 fighters to choose from, VF2 is more a matter of perfecting your style than to spend hours trying to find out what winning "like this" would do.

Finally, sounds (particularly voices) sound a little muffled, and incredibly, at a quality barely better than the Mega Drive version.

The Bottom Line
VF2 is a gem - the killer app of the Saturn, and one of the best 3D fighters of the 32-bit generation. However, until I find a memory card, it will be regularly played only when I'm terminally bored and don't mind deleting a few savegames from other games - while I do like bookeeping options, VF2 goes too far. For me, hours played, a top 20 in the arcade mode and a move checklist is enough. Of course, hardcore fans really don't mind that much, but would it harm to allow the player to select the level of bookeeping ?

In the end, VF2 is a title every Saturn owner should have. Had Sega followed it with another mainstream titles of the same quality, and the platform might have succeeded.

SEGA Saturn · by Luis Silva (13444) · 2006

Virtually Perfect

The Good
There is no genre that is devoid of clones and perpetual rip-offs, but one of the most popular genres for "idea borrowing" is the one-on-one fighting genre, to the point that pretty much every game out there can be called a newer version of Street Fighter 2. The continuous cloning of ideas and gameplay mechanics means however that when something innovative does come out you immediately take notice and that's just the case with Virtua Fighter 2.

Well, actually the revolution began in Virtua Fighter 1, a fully-polygonal fighting game that came out when 3d acceleration wasn't even an idea yet and that took a different stand on the whole one-on-one ass-kicking thing. Instead of taking cues from animation and comic books and introducing wacky characters like half-human monsters or limb-stretching yoga masters and giving each character super-human powers (like the ability to shoot fireballs, jump over 3 times their height and move at blinding "arcadey" speeds), the designers of VF went for the realistic route and crafted relatively realistic fighters that fought using real motion-captured martial arts, moved at realistic speeds and had no superpowers whatsoever. The control scheme that emphasized co-ordination and precision over fancy joystick moves (a typical move in VF is accomplished by hitting a button while moving the stick/pad to a specific orientation, while special moves in most SF clones involve making loads of semicircles and pressing a button at the end) made things even more technical and "brainy" and the limitation of some functions only added to the mix, such as the "floating" effect on jumps that renders aerial attacks completely useless and forces you to go mano-a-mano.

Essentially, VF added the right amount of technique, realism and gameplay mechanics to make it the "thinking man's fighting game", however.... uh, well ... I would be lying if I said I got all that when I first got my hands on Virtua Fighter. You see, VF1 well.... looked like ass. Sporting only shaded polygons and single colored backgrounds, VF1 had as much graphic appeal as a text-based game, and to top that off the game required an immense amount of dedication to get used to (specially if you came from the traditional school of fighting games) and made no attempt to introduce players to it's unique mechanics. Result? I, as well as pretty much every kid out there took a shot at that weird and ugly looking fighting game, saw that the characters floated instead of jumped, couldn't deploy a barrage of combos in 2 nanoseconds, got my ass handed to me by the second round and vowed never to touch that piece of crap ever again.

It wouldn't be until VF2 got released that the game would become more attractive to other newbies and that was when I got to taste what VF was really all about. Sporting a much more balanced difficulty curve that allowed a more progressive learning if you catched on quickly, new and perfectly balanced characters, and a remarkable facelift in the form of fully textured backgrounds and models as well as higher poly-counts for the former, VF2 became much more accessible for the average gamer and allowed everyone to notice everything that made the series so unique. Gloriously animated moves that made every fight look like a professionally coreographed martial arts demonstration complete with varied and truly original styles (the main character, Akira, fights using the visually striking but hardly known Hakkyoku-ken 8-point-star technique, and Lion uses the praying-mantis style) and intense action with an emphasis on speed and precision rather than on fireball wars or other arcadey tactics thanks to the easily depletable health bar and the ring-out penalization. Over 1000 unique moves, and a precise control scheme that was remarkably easy to master yet rewarded timing and technique (instead of turning fights into button-mashing fests that allow a newbie to kick a seasoned player's ass like on Tekken)... etc. etc...

In short a kick ass game, but of course, the question as usual was wether the game could come home intact, and to my surprise the PC version is even better than the original!! First of all unlike the console versions, there is no graphic loss in the game at all! You can use the lower poly-count models of the saturn version or go for the much smoother arcade ones as well as even allowing you to output the video signal as the actual Model 2 arcade video mode!! (only really useful if you want to output the display to a cabinet monitor or similar device), every frame of every move of every animation is there with every sfx intact and every music tune included as redbook audio cd tracks. In short? It's Virtua Fighter 2. Like in the arcades. Only on your PC!

But wait! The PC version boasts the loads of extras available in the saturn release plus even more! You have Arcade mode, VS, Ranking mode (which ranks you based on speed, technique, accuracy, etc.), Expert Mode (which records your progress and learns from your fighting style via save files and makes for an interesting challenge since basically you end up fighting an AI that blocks and counters most of your attacks), Team Battle Mode (turn your VF into a KOF Game!), a playback and watch mode where you can put the game on a perpetual "demo mode" or take a look at your saved replays or the extremely impressive collection of recorded tournament fights that come bundled with the game, a CG gallery, and of course, the crown jewel of the pc version: full modem / serial / TCP/IP multiplayer modes. I played serial mp games a while back and it was a blast, not to mention extremely fast on a couple of good computers.

The Bad
At the risk of sounding extremely bitchy the game does have that weird function key-based interface so common in the early SEGA PC games, and for some weird reason it has never kept my graphics configs. (not now on my Athlon and not then on my P1 and P3).

Lastly the endings suck ass (just a grainy "congratulations" picture) though you have 1 small fmv cutscene if you finish the game right. And I would have killed for a tournament mode....

Oh yeah, and while you can easily play the game nowadays on it's day SEGA snubbed gamers the hard way by neglecting to add hardware acceleration support, a dumb stupid move that meant only those with real monster systems could get the game running smoothly (though they did add lots of detail tuning options).

The Bottom Line
Virtua Fighter 2 is a gameplay dream come true, unique, rewarding, exceptionally executed and truly a blast to play. There's no beating around it, this is the definitive fighting game on the pc and one of the most significant entries in the genre ever along titans like Street Fighter 2, Soul Calibur, Bushido Blade, et al.

Windows · by Zovni (10503) · 2003

Even better than the arcade version

The Good
All 1200+ moves from the arcade are there, and gameplay is still deeper than any other PC contender. The 3-button controls make learning the moves easy, but the demanding combo system makes every 5-hitter a real payoff. Every single character has won a tournament somewhere, meaning game balance is amazingly good. Characters look very nice and are based on real martial arts, so there are no super lightning moves or fatalities, but the realistic animations more than make up for this. The game will run at arcade-perfect 60fps. New features to the PC version include team battle, saving replays, included matches between 3 of Japan's best players, and plenty of CG character renders.

The Bad
The system requirements are very steep (your average Pentium 2 will have difficulty running on medium detail) and the "endings" for each character are just CG art. The stages aren't as impressive as the arcade version. The music and sound is still cheesy. The characters move like they would in real life: most moves are slow to recover and will miss completely in some situations, so it's very very difficult to pull off impressive combos.

The Bottom Line
If you liked VF2 in the arcades, this game is a no-brainer. If you like games like Tekken or Soul Calibur and want to try something new, be prepared to spend several weeks learning to beat the excellent AI, much less human competition. If you're new to 3D fighters, this is way too hard; try something else instead.

Windows · by Robyrt (46) · 2001

A decent fighting game

The Good
Virtua Fighter has good graphics and a nice "arcade" feel to it. The vocals are good and the gameplay is decent.

The Bad
The characters move too slow and are sometimes difficult to control. Special attacks are at a minimum, which is disappointing news to many gamers.

The Bottom Line
A good game, but try Last Bronx if you really enjoyed this game in the arcade.

Windows · by James1 (240) · 2001

Contributors to this Entry

Critic reviews added by Kohler 86, SlyDante, Big John WV, Kayburt, yellowshirt, Tim Janssen, RhYnoECfnW, Alsy, Patrick Bregger, Riemann80, Jeanne, Scaryfun, garkham, Omnosto, Bozzly, Luis Silva, mikewwm8, Pseudo_Intellectual, Wizo, Emmanuel de Chezelles.