#972 Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution (PS2) Boss: Dural playthrough.

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AdmiralMcFish - Bosses and Hidden Characters

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Published on September 4, 2018 7:05:47 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUMkJ-uHBeY

Game:

Virtua Fighter 4 (2001)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 5:31

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A playthrough of the boss Dural in the PS2 port of Sega’s Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution.

An update to Virtua Fighter 4 entitled VF4: Evolution was released into arcades in 2002, around the same time that VF4 was ported to home consoles. VF4: Evolution improves the graphics a fair bit over vanilla VF4, and also introduces two new characters to the franchise; edgelord Goh and the decent Brad Burns. Both decent characters from what I’ve played of them, but I didn’t pick up this game when it came out like I did with VF4, so I don’t have any nostalgic memories of it.

Dural, as far as I can tell here, is more or less the same as she was in VF4 vanilla. Maybe there are some move changes, but I couldn’t personally tell what they were. The only other interesting thing to note is that, even when hacking it, you cannot select the Dural’s icon in the arcade mode of this game. If you try to press a button it simply does nothing, but once the time runs out it will thankfully still select her. This is a very bizarre glitch; one I haven’t seen since G. Axe in Golden Axe The Duel where, upon attempting to hack it, the game will actually list him with a graphic reading “NOT AVAILABLE”, and won’t allow you to select him, though as with here the game will select him if the time runs out while you’re highlighting his icon. Did Sega’s programming somehow get worse when they moved to PS2 development? It seems entirely possible to me.

So, Dural is more or less the same here as she was before. I really don’t have anything else to say on her. As mentioned, I never picked up this version of VF4, given that it came out only a year after vanilla VF4. VF4 was actually one of the first games I picked up upon returning to the UK after living in Dubai. I had one of those early defective PS2s which went kaput, and so it was a damn nice to finally be able to not only play PS2 games again upon buying a new one, but also to finally have a home port of a Virtua Fighter game. Getting to finally own a Virtua Fighter game was a great experience, but there was a bit off about it I thought. Compared to VF2 and 3, VF4 is still a really damn good game but I do feel that it lost a bit of its magic. By this point, I suppose, graphics were stagnating in general and the technical feats that were VF2 and VF3 had long since become standard. Virtua Fighter had something of a boom in popularity throughout much of the 90s, but that seemed to fade away somewhat come the turn of the millennium. Sega exiting the console market probably had something to do with it as well, but the cracks in the fighting game genre were really starting to become apparent in the early 2000s. Namco had released the experimental Tekken 4, SNK had actually gone bankrupt, arcades outside of Japan were generally dying and the ubiquitous interest which fighting games had seemed to hold before appeared to be drying up, even if we didn’t quite know it at the time. Games like Smash Bros Melee and SoulCalibur II saw fighting games reaching a larger audience than ever before, but at the same time mainstream appeal for the genre was beginning to dry up.

VF4, in this way, sort of encapsulates a bit of a last-hurrah for that era. Although fighting games didn’t go away during the 00s, their general influence definitely waned for a fair while, until the revivals started at the end and turn of the decade, leading to titles such as Street Fighter IV, KOF XIII, Mortal Kombat 9 and numerous others. Things like DLC, EVO and the internet in general mean that fighting games will probably never lose influence in that way again, as numerous companies fight to keep their titles in the spotlight, with ideas and inclusions ranging from brilliant to downright bizarre. Makes me thankful, in hindsight, to realise just how much we really have to enjoy nowadays, and especially what we have to look forward to.

Next time, more Dural. But slightly more classic.

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