[Sega Saturn] Virtua Fighter ~ Ranking Mode

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FamilyTeamGaming

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Published on May 17, 2022 3:09:53 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AajtJYanbM

Game:

Virtua Fighter (1993)

Duration: 9:19

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Contender for the most important videogame ever released, Virtua Fighter was released to the Model 1 Arcade Boards in 1993 as the first ever polygonal 3D fighting game, putting relatively realistic mixed martial arts fighting front and centre, defining much of the character of the game over a sea of Street Fighter 2 imitators and even rivaling Mortal Kombat 2 as the most popular arcade game of its year. In the same line as Daytona USA, the original Virtua Fighter got a *very* rough port to the Sega Saturn as its pack-in title both in Japan and Worldwide in 1994/1995.

Rushed to market in an unfinished state, the Saturn version suffers from a lot of completely avoidable issues that mar down the experience of the game considerably. Exactly like the Model 1 original, this game is completely untextured - it's flat shaded polygons as far as the eye can see. And that is completely fine honestly, from our perspective of today. The "art style" of the original game is extremely iconic today. But from a contemporary perspective, this is just not the kind of graphics people wanted to see coming out of their expensive new console, especially not in the West. One must also have to admit this is absolutely not the best game to show off the Saturn's potential, especially not when it's this unfinished. The characters are noticeably lower poly than the arcade version. While I don't exactly think the Saturn could quite push as many polygons as the Model 1 board, looking at later releases in the console, you really can't tell me Sega couldn't have at least given the character models fingers... but this is the least of this game's problems. The first thing you'll immediately notice is that the game struggles to fully render the tiny 14x14 ring without some really serious and blatant pop-in. Coming along with that, while the game's 30FPS is decently consistent, it does still noticeably dip to nearly half that at times. This is a very poor show especially when the 32X version runs flawlessly.

Gameplay, thankfully, is (almost) intact from the arcade version, despite the incredibly poor show the game gives in performance and visuals. The game is nearly devoid of actual content, only consisting of Arcade Mode, Versus Mode and Ranking Mode (which is just the Arcade Mode, but always on factory settings, you can't continue and you get graded for your peformance in the end), but for a 1994 release, you could argue this is okay and no different than any of its contemporaries.

While you can absolutely still have fun with this game, probably the biggest problem with the gameplay is just the game itself. Though this is a technical marvel of its time, few would argue the original Virtua Fighter aged too well on the gameplay department. While superficially similar to its much superior sequel in many ways, Virtua Fighter 1 is a far slower, more deliberate and limited affair, as if the game was trying to strike a balance between an arcade-y fast pace and realistic hand-to-hand combat but it's pending uncomfortably towards the latter while having too many elements of the former. This is not at all a lenient game when it comes to inputting moves. The fighters are very stiff in their movements and all moves have a lot of startup, endlag and blockstun. Combined with the grab-boxes for throws being so minuscule pretty much only the CPU can consistently land them, punishing out of of block becomes extremely difficult and physically dodging out of the way of moves via crouching or hurtbox-shifting so you can actually punish someone pressing buttons on your block becomes far more attractive. While combining this with the stiffness of the characters and the overall sluggish frame data makes the game rather awkward to play nowadays, I can't deny this approach to the combat is really interesting to see in concept, as it draws some noticeable (if loose) parallels to real MMA fighting you don't really see in any of the later games. Other than that, though, as we know, Virtua Fighter 2 came out barely a year after this game and did literally everything it did much better. Of course, the original Virtua Fighter was breaking so much new ground that some growing pains were expected and it's only fair to excuse them given the context.

Thankfully, all of the sins of this version of the game would later more than be redeemed by the release of Virtua Fighter Remix, fixing all the serious issues of this port and sporting a brand new fully-textured look, far more worthy of the Saturn hardware (if also far less iconic). It's always fun to go back to the original Virtua Fighter for its historical significance alone and thankfully, both the original release and Remix are still very cheap nowadays if you would like to play them, though arguably a better way to play the original Virtua Fighter at home is to get "Virtua Fighter PC" to work on your modern Windows machine, as it can toggle between the untextured and the "Remix" look and comes with more modes.

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