Gather round and hear the tale of the man who saw the future and said, "Meh…"

In the wisdom of my early teenage years, on a rather routine visit to a local arcade, you know, those places where people went to play the latest cutting edge games, because home gaming consoles were a mere shadow of the Real Deal™, I saw the future of gaming. Yet remained unaffected by it all, eh, whatever, even games like Space Harrier and After Burner still looked more impressive when cabinets were still around, on account of their fast speeds, crazy scaling, and awesome use of color. Street Fighter 2? Yes please! Awesome graphics, colors, and sound with expertly crafted control along side hidden moves you had to learn no less! Yet, here, running at a silky smooth, for its time anyway, 30 frames per second (FPS), were mannequin people sparring off against one another.

Yes children, fellow grey beards, age defying matrons, readers of all ages, cultural backgrounds, and home planet origins, I saw Virtua Fighter running and thought, "What's up with the creepy wooden people?" and passed right on by to the latest Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, or Neo Geo cabinet. Perhaps a Gauntlet, Galaga, or even Dragon's Lair game for those arcades still sporting them, initially at least, as I did end up giving this creepy little marionette game a whirl. Since most people were happy to play the Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats of the time instead, the Virtua Fighter cabinet was not always in use. It played okay, but did not leave a lasting impression. Alas…

~We are all Virtua Fighting!~

Graphics

Let us dismiss any possible misconceptions, the 32X cannot hold a candle to the arcade original, but everything present in this hybrid 16/32-bit port remains identifiably Virtua Fighter! That is the key to a successful home port of the era. Even the System 11 and System 12 arcade originals, built on a slightly suped up PS1, often had graphical reductions in their port home. The excellent home ports of 2D fighters such as Street Fighter Alpha 1/2 on PS1 and even the arguably better Saturn ports, were not quite arcade perfect{2}. However, when considering the Saturn version of Virtua Fighter, man, the 32X holds its own. The colors are close, the backgrounds reasonable downgrades given they are drawn by the Genesis itself, even with the the polygon count further reduced, the game is visually more stable than the same game running on the Saturn. Technically, the Saturn port should be better, given the higher polygon counts and better color, the latter more apparent on the background bitmaps, but the Saturn version had notoriously unstable graphics with too many examples of flickering and clipping.

{2} No, please do not start with the blue shadows debates, for the love of the tripart!

Sound

The 32X had terrible sound, or so we are lead to believe time and time again. Yet, this little add-on more than adequately translates the arcade hit's aural deliciousness. Not sure the 32X hardware is offering much improvement soundtrack wise but it seems to be helping the crisp sound effects and voice. Punches and kicks come through with the right amount of snap/crunch, the voices are all pretty decent, not garbled as they generally are on the Genesis itself, and even if the music is not 32-bit Enhanced™, the tunes offer a nice Genesis-y rendition. I cannot lie, the Saturn Red Book audio soundtrack remains the best version, to me anyway, surpassing the coin-op original, let alone its downmarket brethren. Yet, thine ears shall not hurt listening to these tunes, this I shall promise. From my memory, which could be fading after all these years{3}, kudos to including all the sound effects and tunes from the big brother Saturn release. That should count for something, yes?

{3} I have not played Virtua Fighter or Virtua Fighter Remix on real hardware in decades and my attempts to emulate those games on Retroarch with the Beetle core have proven too glitchy to play. Even Yaba Sanshiro on Android has been a little glitchy. As such, hard to do a direct comparison between the Saturn and 32X version. Sorry.

Controls

I am far, far, far from a Virtua Fighter maestro, I can put together a few decent combos with a couple of the characters, Lau and Kage generally, but the full symphony of maneuvers? Dozen moves per character with resulting counters, timing down to the specific frame count? Nah. I dabble a bit and still routinely lose to computer opponents, especially on higher difficulty levels and a true fighting game professional would destroy me, even if we blindfolded our hypothetical opponent.

Where does this leave us? The controls feel pretty good to me, mere novice. The six button controller is extra nice as you can map key combinations to x, y, or z. However, since the basic controls boil down to a for defense, b for punch, and c for kick (barring the other two alternate control layouts), a three button controller should suffice as well. Virtua Fighter on the 32X feels tight to me and I only curse the controls as much as I curse any game when the computer starts giving me the business. Jumping is floaty, but that is standard for Virtua Fighter, especially the original game.

Gameplay

What's to say? The basic arcade one on one fighting mode is here. A dedicated VS (versus) mode is also included (you can of course have a second player jump in at any time during arcade mode). These modes default to best two out of three matches, but you can adjust the match points anywhere between 1-5. Likewise you can adjust the life gauge to any of five settings, defaulting to "normal". Half a minute rounds make for quick combat, but again, there are options for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 60 seconds, and no time limit if one prefers shorter or longer matches. Enemy Level, aka difficulty{4}, can be set to Easy, Normal (default), Hard, and Expert. Even the ring size allows adjustment, normally 20m (let us assume m stands for meters), but you can make sumo style ring out matches by going down to 4m, in addition to allowing 8m, 14m, and even 24m rings. AM2 was kind enough to add a 16x9 mode (Squeeze) in addition to 4x3 (Normal) for Display settings. Camera has five options, but honestly Normal and High Angle seem the most playable given the two quarter views can cause an opponent to obscure the other opponent during moves and distance between fighters is likewise hard to ascertain. Skycam should be fine as well, it does make the fighters look a little too small for my tastes, but it avoids the rare, but occasionally present camera hangups (the camera swings around during combat and can ever so rarely lock in an awkward spot). A sound test rounds out the options. {5}

Additional modes include Ranking Mode, which allows you to fight though until total victory or a match loss. Once finished, you are graded for your performance. I actually enjoy this mode the most in some ways as it gives me a rough estimate on how well I am performing in a given run through the opponents. I tend to stick here or in Arcade mode given my penchant for late night solo matches. The grades come with tips to raise your score.

Lastly, we have Tournament, which is a 32X exclusive! Crazy how this port was given so much love, it even sports extra modes over the Saturn port! Tournament is okay as a solo experience, but really shines with two or more friends around. Essentially, you get to pick up to eight fighters, duplicates allowed, and for any participants you do not select, the computer will fill in the rest and take control of those challengers. For human opponents, no multitaps needs, being a one on one fighting game, two controllers will suffice. Otherwise, the fighting is exactly the same as Arcade, VS, and Ranking modes. Set your options, choose Tournament mode, select fighters, and go to town. Pretty neat and while only so-so for a single player, definitely a nice multiplayer bonus.

{4} In Arcade mode and Ranking mode the opponents are always presented in the same order. As such, Jacky, the first opponent, will be the easiest and Akira, the last opponent (prior to Dural) will be the hardest. In theory anyway, as I find Kage strangely difficult to beat and he is a mid tier opponent. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

{5} The aforementioned Options only apply to Arcade, VS, and Tournament, Ranking only seems to respect Display, Camera, and Pad Control.

While the additions of Ranking Mode and Tournament are all well and good, your enjoyment of such a title will boil down to how much you enjoy this genre of game. Virtua Fighter is not doing anything special to convert 3D fighting game naysayers. As the earliest example of the genre, everything is pretty basic, but there are enough wrinkles in the different play modes to extract extra game time once you have mastered the basic fighting.

Players used to the tight game play of 2D fighters like Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter Alpha series might not feel at home with the floaty jumping and 2.5D movement (largely 2D movement in a 3D environment but the camera does spin around and players can get pushed a bit in and out of the z axis). While the steady 30 FPS is far from choppy, not running at 60 FPS{6} allows the fluid pixel art mastery of those Capcom gems to really shine in comparison to Virtua Fighter. An even tougher sell might be the dearth of flashy moves as seen in the aforementioned seminal 2D Street Fighter series, the rival Tekken series, or even from, goddess forbid, long lost, but not lamented, Battle Arena Toshinden series. A fighting game that seemingly only allows basic punches and kicks, well, let us not forget the throws too, could be at a disadvantage to its glitzier contemporaries. Yet, if you put in the time to study each of the character's move lists, all containing a plethora of regular attacks, small jump attacks, giant leap attacks, stomp attacks, and special attacks, a deceptively deep level of strategy will be uncovered. Easy to grasp, hard to master definitely applies to Virtua Fighter as even recovering from a knock down offers seven different options for recovery (this part of the move list is shared by all eight characters). Everything from counter attacks to rolls to quick standing to get you ready to fight once knocked prone. The speed and timing of attacks will differ per character and even just figuring out the best way to defeat the computer controlled opponents will prove a challenge on normal difficulty let alone hard or expert.

Given the limited 32X library, Virtua Fighter could very well be the best game on the system, but if nothing else, it certainly remains the best fighting game available.{7} This may seem damning with faint praise but Virtua Fighter on the 32X is better than any fighting game on the CD-i, Atari Jaguar/Jaguar CD{8}, 3DO (barring SF2 Turbo){9}, and Nintendo 64{10}. Even when compared to the Genesis and SNES fighting game selection, it is easily top ten in the genre. I am not even kidding. For sure.

{6} Virtua Fighter 2 would bring that improvement and what a port to the Saturn that proved! Not arcade perfect either, but really, truly, amazingly, fantastic effort by AM2 on the sequel.

{7} Although I could make an argument that Mortal Kombat II on the 32X might be the best 16/32-bit port of the game, I think Virtua Fighter might be the better game overall.

{8} Primal Rage on the Jaguar CD is probably the best fighting game on the system as Kasumi Ninja, Ultra Vortek, and Fight for Life are all pretty terrible. Yeah, I just stated Primal Rage is the best fighting game on the Jaguar, so make up your own mind what that means for this poor cat.

{9} Samurai Showdown was a pretty decent port too, but the Street Fighter II Turbo port was on another level, might be the best port of any SF2 game until the collections on Saturn and Playstation.

{10} For crying out loud, why do so many systems not have good fighting games?!!? While sporting a worthy port of MK Trilogy, nothing else remains in the same league. Sorry Killer Instinct fans, no, just no, the N64 was a terrible system for fighting game fans.