(DC) Virtua Fighter 3 ~ Normal Mode
0In the arcades, 1996's Virtua Fighter 3 was famous for being yet another tremendous leap in technology coming from SEGA, one not unlike Daytona USA 3 years prior. Jaw dropping graphics with very detailed character models and true-to-life highly dynamic stages, boasting realistic locations, different layouts, physics and now, even uneven terrain and elevation, all on rock solid performance to boot. It was a sight to behold. One that costed ten thousand dollars for the arcade operator and upwards of 2 dollars in dollar bills for the arcade goer.
One needed to take but a glance at Virtua Fighter 3 to know that the Saturn, PS1 and N64 could never dream of pulling off half the stunts this absolute unit of a hardware was doing. Apparently, this didn't stop Sega from trying, as Sega heavily advertised the year after the arcade's release that a port to the Saturn was being produced, going so far as making a teaser trailer for it, completely pre-rendered however. Perhaps due to hardware limitations, the fact that the Saturn was already being phased out by 1997, or both, development instead followed on the steps of Sonic Adventure and Shenmue and moved over to the upcoming Dreamcast, where all would become early releases for the console. Purportedly, according to the rumour mill, this cancelled Saturn port of VF3 was combined with a cancelled port of Sonic the Fighters to create the game that would ultimately become Fighters Megamix. While that seems entirely believable looking at that game, I have no idea if that was or ever will be confirmed.
Virtua Fighter 3 eventually released as a launch title for the then-new and exciting Sega Dreamcast, both in Japan in 1998 and the west in 1999. I want to make it clear: yes, this game is absolutely very fun and is extremely loyal to the arcade version, but this is undeniably yet another case of a Sega console releasing with a somewhat botched Virtua Fighter game.
The graphics in the Dreamcast version of VF3... are hard to describe. For 1998 standards, it does look incredible if you compare it to its contemporaries in other consoles. It genuinely does look like a dead ringer of the arcade version a lot of the time. But the 90s were a time of extremely fast technological growth. 2/3 years were a small eternity and by the Dreamcast's release, it wasn't that unfair to expect better. Case and point, the Dreamcast rubbed release shoulders with fellow 3D fighting games Dead or Alive 2 and Soul Calibur and both were far more exciting to look at.
It's hard to believe Sega couldn't have done some additional touch-ups to pretty up this version, but this game does give off a bit of a "rushed" vibe despite having more than enough dev time behind it in other small ways: there are little graphical quirks pretty much everywhere, like the menus and the characters themselves, there are some really ugly cases of system fonts being used and the save feature is both barely used with NO autosave and hidden behind an option labelled VS. RECORDS for some reason. It does feel like they put enough work to get the game up and running as desired but stopped just short of giving it some much needed layers of polish on the presentation end of things. It unironically feels like this is one version short of just being debug menus with white system font on black backgrounds.
As for gameplay, this is infinitely closer to modern Virtua Fighter games than either Virtua Fighter 1 or 2 were, what with the characters' movesets more closely matching their current ones and almost a complete absence of the classic "moon jumps", even though at first glance, the odd stages would make you think otherwise. They're the biggest and most memorable feature of the game, now stages no longer are just arbitrary squares on the ground but real life locations, with all their nooks and crannies, twists and turns. While these are much cooler to look at than anything before or since, they were done away with instantly for a reason. For as good and cool as they look, they honestly don't play all that well. In practice, they do very little during a fight but get in the way during a fight, potentially giving unfair advantages to people in certain parts of the stage or arbitrarily cutting combos short or extending them beyond reason. I don't want to make it sound like the game is unplayable, much of the opposite, this does give the game a very unique feel to its fighting, but it really needs to be driven home the point why we haven't seen stages like this since.
I think if you collect for the Dreamcast, you should absolutely have this game in your collection. Lack of polish aside, it is still Virtua Fighter, that means it is Virtua Good.
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