The guys over at Eurogamer are running a pretty cool retrospective article on Virtua Figher 4: Evolution, which honestly is one of the best entries to the Virtua Fighter series. I advise all of you to give it a quick read, though it will just make you more angry that SEGA hasn’t announced Virtua Fighter 6.
Please, can we have more Virtua Fighter goodness?
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Virtua Fighter is still the king of fighters, but I doubt it will ever be able to extend further than that and match the excellence of Virtua Fighter 4: Final Tuned.
Which is probably because Yu Suzuki has never been directly involved with the series since then.
In fact, what role he plays at Sega, if any, isn’t well known, which doesn’t bode as well for Virtua Fighter 6.
Yu Suzuki hasn’t done much since the Dreamcast, just the odd stuff here and there, he’s considered ‘the father of gaming’ and Nintendo’s Miyamoto as ‘the mother of gaming’ in one 1up interview lolz.
If this is so, it’s terrible how hard Sega have fallen and not been able to fund Suzuki as much and therefore he’s seemingly slowly just retired year by year.
The king of fighters? Y’okay… If that were the case, the VF series would get more play at fighting tourneys. Virtually (no pun intended) no 3D fighters are taken seriously by the fighter community.
That’s because it is usually too deep for a lot of people, despite only using a very simple set up, P (Punch), K (Kick) and G (Guard), it’s so deep, that a lot of players move onto flashier fighters like Tekken or Dead or Alive, they are not as technical as Virtua Fighter but are easier to get into for most people.
Virtua Fighter does have a lot of Tournaments, but mostly they are Japanese based, where as in the west Tekken seems to get the most attention in the West.
2D fighters usually get played the most in these communities even more than that because they are even simpler to get into than 3D fighters, therefore there is more of cult following crowd to support it.
All fighters have their own perks, but if people were to break it down to what could be the most in a more narrow perspective, it would just end up being Street Fighter as the best 2D fighter and Virtua Fighter as the best 3D fighter, but really all have their own style and something they favour the most, for Virtua Fighter, it seems to be the most technical.
Speaking of Final Tuned, I’d like to play it one day.
Anyway I don’t think Suzuki was THAT involved in VF4, because in the 2001 period he was busy with Shenmue and other things. (Propeller Arena?)
He was a person who didn’t really stick around much for sequels and let other people do the work after he did the basework.
VF6 will almost certainly get made, Sega was hiring for it a while ago I believe. It’s a matter of time. =)
I’ve watched some high level VF4:FT, it looks really tight
The Virtua Fighter series typically has had one iteration installment of the series per generation, so as the next gen is just around the corner, it’s likely they will start work soon.
:/
Virtua Fighter 1 & 2 5th Gen system Sega Saturn (excluding other updates and Remixes
Virtua Fighter 3 & 4 6th Gen Sega Dreamcast & PS2 (excluding update and 10th Anniversary Edition)
Virtua Fighter 5 7th Gen…
I supposed the customization feature introduced in 4 Evolution and DLC made a sequel less urgent but the series has had at least 2 entries every generation.
hey wait where’s my credits i tracked this first xD
(proof my twitter) :3 just kiddin (no proof)
that aside, Yu Suzuki is still with SEGA, didn’t you see his E3 2013 batch while talkin with David Cage?
I think SEGA will let him make it, and VF6 is already under development since they’ve not announced any Ultra Virtua Fighter 5 Final Edition something since Final Showdown.
VF is a top dog @SEGA’s arcades, in fact one of the only reason that arcades still exists in Japan, heck they even wanna help Tecmo for that sister, DOA5U to arrive at arcades on SEGA’s newer boards.
However, that’s true, SEGA has not paid enough respect to father of gaming since 128bit generation.
The man has only made 2-3 mobile games, Shenmue City, Virtua Fighter Cool Champ (which I don’t even know if it’s released or not), and this one which is actually released and plays very well. <3
https://itunes.apple.com/jp/app/id574368185
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.entag.android.osusume_ninki_kaizoku_10237
hey i meant SEGA will let him make Shenmue not VF6,
as I said VF6 is handled by Suzuki’s seeds (AM2 guys) and believe it or not, he still must be giving them advice, (as I remember he’s been attending VF5 tourneys too, here & there in Japan)