Akira is known for being the single most difficult character to use in every game. A good Akira player can make an opponent look absolutely pathetic with his arsenal of moves that require strict timing and foresight, and he hits with such high passion and high damage that you can almost feel the bones breaking.
Kage-Maru is both an uncommon and impressive character due to how strange his moveset is. Incorporating a number of acrobatic flips, rolls, dives, and handstands, a Kage player who knows what they're doing is not a common thing to see.
Aoi's fighting style is based on reversals, parries, and counters, giving her an insanely large repertoire of defensive moves. She doesn't have many combos, she isn't acrobatic or flashy, and she doesn't deal half your life in damage. However, an Aoi that knows what she's doing can read an opponent easily, making the match feel like fighting a psychic. A successful counter also leads to humiliating and bone-crunching animations from Aoi.
Vanessa's difficulty comes from her Stance System and the fact that she has a long moveset in both of her stances. It's not uncommon to find beginner or average Vanessa players who either only know the basics in both stances or just stick to one stance completely. A Vanessa player that knows both stances thoroughly, though? Both rare and scary. Some of her most difficult but devastating abilities in Offensive Stance involve tackling an opponent and mounting them MMA-style, while the ones in Defensive Stance involve counters that brutalize the opponent gruesomely.
Broken Base: Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown was divisive to say the least. On one hand, longtime fans were happy to have Sega finally acknowledge the franchise after so many years of dormancy with a fresh coat of paint and added online features, with it being free with PlayStation Plus on launch potentially helping to build a new audience. On the other hand, people were dismayed by the remaster not doing enough to improve the presentation for casual fans (the sound effects in particular being a sticking point) and the netcode solution being way below par, especially in the midst of a pandemic keeping people out of local events.
Though largely ignored in 3, Taka-Arashi received a lot of love upon his return in VF5R.
Vanessa. When she debuted in 4, Vanessa was one of very fewAmazonian Beauties with a tough attitude, and had a fairly dark skin tone, making her very unique among female fighting game characters.
Goh and Eileen have proven to be fan favorites despite making their first appearances fairly late in the series (4: Evo and 5 respectively), likely because one's a sadistic judoka working for behind-the-scenes villains J6 and the other's a happy-go-lucky practitioner of Monkey Kung Fu (and Pai fangirl). Jean, another J6 assassin introduced in 5 R, has a similar appeal in addition to being the series' first traditional karateka yet averting Boring, but Practical with unique mechanics centered around Charged Attacks, feints, and being able to press the offensive during certain blockstrings.
Siba bears mention despite never actually being playable in a VF game, as he was replaced by Akira late in the original game's development. Ever since the crossover Fighters Megamix, fans have been hoping he'll finally make a proper appearance in the series.
Fan Nickname: The two long rectangular stages with walls on two sides in Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, Lion and Lei-Fei's stages, are referred to as the "taco" stages. Because Lion's is colored blue, it's also called the "Cool Ranch" stage.
Against the A.I., Jeffery's Ass Shove in Virtua Fighter 2 is the strongest move in the game. It's easily punishable during both startup and recovery, but the A.I. gets hit far more often than they should, and two consecutive ones from round start pushes them out of the arena for an instant win. Even if you don't push them out, it still deals a lot of damage and can K.O. them surprisingly quickly.
Taka-Arashi's size was a literal example as his implementation in 3 was buggy and Sega AM2 was forced to leave him out of the following games until 5 R.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Virtua Fighter has long been popular in arcades in the Middle East, and many YouTubers from those countries have commented that they really like Siba and wish he had been in the game, noting both his badass mercenary appearance and the general rarity of Arab characters in fighting games. In particular, Siba is noted as one of the few Arab characters in games who is not explicitly identified as a villain.
Good Bad Bugs: For some reason in Virtua Fighter 2, Pai Chan's jumping knee stamp will connect twice during Dural's underwater stage, dealing twice as much damage to the downed opponent.
High-Tier Scrappy: While Final Showdown is a very balanced game, and Jacky isn't even considered the best character, he is still high up thanks to a lot of very good moves. This combined with him being one of the easiest characters to learn and one of the most used makes him unpopular with some competitive players.
Brad bears many similarities to Tony Stark, to the red clothes, black hair and goatee, arrogance and playboy attitude. Granted, Tony's been around since the '60s, but Brad was around before the films (and Marvel Cinematic Universe in general) made the character massively popular outside of comic book aficionados.
The games are commonly used as games-within-the-game in the Like a Dragon series. That said, Virtua Fighter 5 was given to the developers at Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio and remade in their proprietary Dragon Engine in the transition to Ultimate Showdown and an entire DLC pack was dedicated to giving the cast costumes inspired by the series.
Speaking of Like a Dragon, series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu was highly requested as a DLC character for Tekken 7 due to it and Yakuza 0 being released around the same time in the west. With the Yakuza and Tekken 7 DLC outfits in Ultimate Showdown, those dreams are somewhat realized.
Ho Yay Shipping: Sarah/Vanessa has some popularity among fans who can easily see a Bodyguard Crush forming. Even without Shipping Goggles are Vanessa and the Bryant siblings said to be close, though most likely only in the platonic sense.
Jacky's "YEAH!" actually caught on in the tournament scene of Dead or Alive 5. Whenever Jacky appears on screen, expect the stream chat, audience and maybe even the commentators to call out Jacky's "YEAH!" every time he says it.
"Racist netcode."ExplanationIt was discovered that Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown's netcode utilized serverside delay-based netcode via Google relays, with several countries getting an outright broken online experience, leading to this comment.
More Popular Spin-Off: Virtua Fighter was initially part of the Virtua series of early 3D titles developed by Sega AM2, alongside Virtua Racing, Virtua Striker and Virtua Cop. Eventually, the series had not only outlived the three aforementioned Virtua titles, but had also eclipsed them in popularity.
Nightmare Fuel: Dural is a rather unsettling boss character, as she is essentially a tall, bald, naked woman whose skin is covered entirely in metal or stone, whose fighting style is a powered-up amalgamation of every other fighters' own fighting style, which she utilizes with extreme efficiency. She also never makes a sound, except for her ominous breathing whenever she is still. The original Dural is revealed to be Kage's brainwashed mother Tsukikage, who was kidnapped from her home and experimented on until she became a cold, unfeeling cyborg. It would also be revealed that the appearances of Dural in later installments are in fact one of the many mass-produced clones of Tsukikage's Dural with even less traits of humanity than the original, as shown by their ability to float, melt, and change the texture of their skin at will.
It can't be underestimated just how much of a graphical showcase the Virtua Fighter series was for the first three entries. 3D gaming hadn't taken off yet in 1993, and yet even in their blocky designs, the cast of the first title had fully rendered fingers and smooth movements. By the time the third game launched in '96, it was the pinnacle of real-time gaming graphics in the arcades, in a year where Quake and Tomb Raider I made their home debuts. By the time 4 finally came around after a five-year release gap, the competitors had finally caught up and games like Namco's own fighting franchises, Tekken and the Soul Series, had closed the gap significantly. By today's standards, it all seems rote in comparison to what the following home console generations would proceed to put out.
This also applies to the gameplay. At the time, most fighters were still competing with Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, so Virtua Fighter was the first proper 3D fighter and, as many fans tend to hold it, still one of the most pure and refined examples of the genre. However, it was also incredibly bare; early home releases at best added tournament modes, whereas other series were adding thorough training modes and often basic stories. Each successive game added a couple characters and tweaked or added a couple mechanics, all while numerous other franchises within the genre rapidly expanded and underwent alterations within the increasing gap between releases. Nowadays, VF still packs an Excuse Plot as an arcade-focused experience with a cast that is still fairly compact, while the competitors surrounding it focused far more heavily on home experiences and evolved drastically with a large cast; for hardcore fans, this kept that raw purity, but for casual fans this made Virtua Fighter stand out far less.
If there's anything the console versions of the various versions of Virtua Fighter 5 are known for, it's two things:
They look prettier than their arcade counterparts.
The online netcode is considered by even the most casual fighting game fans to be the best netcode for fighting games at the time of its release, with practically no lag except in the most extreme conditions. noteKeyword: at the time. When Ultimate Showdown was released almost a decade and a half later, it would retain the exact same delay-based netcode infrastructure that Sega had been using ever since the original VF5 (plus some aid by way of Google relays), to less than stellar results.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 ports of Virtua Fighter 2, which thankfully port the arcade version instead of the inferior Sega Genesis version.
While the Saturn version of the original Virtua Fighter is perfectly playable, it's a graphical mess, due in no small part to Sega rushing the game for the system's stealth launch. Fortunately, the situation was rectified six months later when Sega released a free update to the game titled Virtua Fighter Remix via mail order.
While the game isn't unplayable and it is quite decent, the Genesis port of Virtua Fighter 2. The game was 2D obviously, but you can tell by gameplay footage that the magic is lost. Clunky animations and very basic feel makes this game compare very poorly to the 3D arcade version. Made worse by the fact that inevitably when porting Virtua Fighter 2, this is the port Sega uses, ranging from online game services like GameTap to iOS, both of which are easily capable of handling 32-bit graphics and gameplay.
The Scrappy: A very mild case, but Lion's high-toned and bratty voice acting and dialog can be very grating for some fans. This seemingly reached a nadir in 4, only for 5 to dial Lion's cocky mannerisms down a bit. Ironically, in VF2, where he debuted, his voice acting is considered to be more tolerable.
Self-Fanservice: A strange example in that this is used to revert a canonical design change between games. In VF4 and Virtua Quest, Vanessa was shown to be dark-skinned and rather buff, accentuated by her wearing only a sports bra and shorts as combat attire. Her first outfit was swapped out for a differently colored version of her far less revealing special forces uniform in Evolution, though it returned in the Japanese arcade-only Final Tuned, but the real point of contention came in 5, where Vanessa suddenly lost most of her muscularity and had a progressively lighter skin tone. While some fans originally complained that Vanessa looked mannish in 4 because of her physique, many more disliked the unexplained changes for 5 and continued to portray Vanessa in fan art as she appeared in the previous game. Sega AM2 must've caught wind of this, as Final Showdown has customization itemsthat bring Vanessa's skin color and build more closely in line with how they were originally.
Jacky's somersault. It does insane damage on a counterhit, and it's a very easy move to execute. Many players tend to throw out this move, even though it's incredibly unsafe on block and can be reversed by Akira and Aoi.
Kage-Maru's frontkick in Virtua Fighter 4 and 4: Evolution is an absolute nightmare to play against. He can launch it when his combo appears to be over and easily intercept your counter attacks or throw attempts (it has a small time delay just to trick you into an attack). Whenever he hits, the player is completely defenseless against another devastating combo.
Wolf's Burning Hammer in Final Showdown, the single most damaging move in the game. Actually a subtle example of Truth in Television as the real Burning Hammer is so dangerous that some promotions have actually banned the move.
In a rare instance of this being encouraged by the community, the universal 2P (crouching Punch or "dick jab") and 6P (forward + Punch, usually an elbow) can be seen frequently at all levels of play thanks to their utility in interrupting pressure and opening up crouching opponents respectively.
Toy Ship: Lion/Elieen for some. Granted, both of them are teenagers, but they're still the youngest characters in the cast.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Like with most of the Virtua titles, each game was a visual poster child of its release period to the point that no console versions of the games ever quite matched up with the arcade (at least until the Like a Dragon games emulated the arcade releases). One of the best examples is 3, where the character models were almost an entire gaming generation ahead and various effects and rendering techniques were flat out the best in the industry. In 1996.
Pai lost her mother because of her father Lau's obsession with martial arts, and has spent years trying to defeat him. She has only recently started to patch things up with him, right when he's dying of an illness. Now Pai just wants her dad to be proud of her before he dies. To twist the knife further, it's implied multiple times that Lau is indeed proud of Pai's growth and accomplishments as a martial artist; the problem is he's never openly said as much to her.
Everyone who has been a victim of J6:
Kage-Maru and his mother Tsukikage. Kage's mother was abducted and turned into Dural, not to mention his father being killed and his entire clan being wiped out. Even after he saved her, Kage's mother ended up turning back into Dural, and he resolved to finally mercy kill her. The poor ninja has lost almost everything. The only bright side is the Dural he destroyed was just a mass production model.
Jacky suffered a massive injury that took two years to recover from because of J6 sabotaging his race car, and then they kidnapped Sarah and brainwashed her into trying to kill him when she investigated what happened. Jacky failed to save her in the first tournament, and even after he did in the second she suffered amnesia and felt no connection to him. Thankfully, Sarah got her memories back, but now she's left wondering if she subconsciously really did want to kill her brother. She sees Jacky as a rival now, and they have become much more distant. Jacky is trying to reach out to Sarah, but the ordeal has changed her. And J6 still continues to harass them.
Lion has some major father issues, and is implied to be a Lonely Rich Kid since he lost his friend Jean when they were young. It doesn't help that his father's company is being manipulated by J6 and Jean, who has little memory of their past friendship, has been sent out to kill several of the tournament competitors, Lion included.
Vanessa's parents were killed, she was kidnapped, and she had her body experimented on when she was just a child, all to turn her into another of J6's assassins. She was rescued by Lewis, but he was killed by J6 years later. When Vanessa entered the fourth tournament, she was captured and experimented on yet again for who knows how long before being rescued. She has no memory of what happened, and is struggling to remember. Vanessa became friends with Jacky and Sarah, and her missing is implied to be a big deal to them.
Goh and Jean could each be considered Jerkass Woobies, as neither of them were rescued from J6 and ended up becoming the brutal assassins that Sarah and Vanessa managed to avoid.
Big Bad Wannabe Liu Kowloon bears a striking similarity to Guizhang Chen from Shenmue, right from the hairstyle down to the nice suit. Interestingly enough, it's said that Guizhang's design was originally intended for the Big Bad, Lan Di.
The description "well-muscled and correspondingly endowed dark-skinned blond" fits not only Vanessa, but villainous Canon Foreigner Nyon from Season 2, to the point it's speculated Vanessa was inspired by Nyon's design.
When Akira tells Pai that she's going to use her body to get money for Jacky's bail, she's naturally horrified, but it ends up being a Bait-and-Switch as the next shot shows them working in construction. The same gag would appear again in Yakuza 5 in one of Akiyama's substories where he makes a similar demand for a woman looking for a loan, only for her to be shown in a hard hat later on. Not so hilarious when he also put Mirei Park through the same thing and it's Played for Drama.
Narm Charm: The unseen announcer who describes each signature move in the English dub is considered one of the most memorable parts of said dub. This is because his Large Ham delivery is absolutely hilarious, and his wordplay is quite well done.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: When Liu Kowloon sacrifices himself to save Lau in the climax of Season 1, it's treated as an Alas, Poor Villain moment. But Liu has done nothing all season to warrant such sympathy, beyond internally revealing a flimsy, at best, backstory about how he and Lau met. Which just further paints him as an Ungrateful Bastard for trying to kill Lau and take over his empire after Lau took him in when he had nothing. And right as he dies, he claims to have "missed" his master with tears in his eyes. The climax tried to paint him as a troubled and tragic character, when in actuality, he was nothing but a selfish, power-hungry sociopath only out for his own ends, and murdered and ruined countless lives in order to achieve them.
Woolseyism: The English dub has a lot of these, making some jokes work better in English, adding in some extra funny lines, and making characters like Jacky and Pai more snarky.
the attract intro for 4: Evo. Really gets the blood pumping.