QCF: Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown
GeorgieBoysAXE
t one point in the medium of Video Games, Fighting games were on top of the world, overtaking screens across Living rooms and Arcades across the world. It didn’t take long for everyone to come for that piece of pugilistic pie, and while there were many who tried, a few found success, and even fewer redefined what the genre was—one of those releases was SEGA’s Virtua Fighter.
Aside from pioneering the concept of three-dimensional fighting, the series has steadily earned the reputation for being one of the most technical-minded brawlers on the market and has remained a staple where competitors measure their skill of the genre within the fighting game community. Admittedly, the series has struggled to find mainstream success outside of the dedicated niche of players that have kept up with each new installment, but the series has recently found new life in another popular SEGA franchise—Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s Yakuza.
The inclusion of SEGA’s historic fighting series may have been a fun Easter Egg at first, but players quickly took notice of the excellent handling of emulation and coding of the series by RGGS, gradually drawing in new interest for the property once more. Striking while the iron is hot, the wild minds at SEGA have paired the talented folks of AM2 and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio together for a new iteration of Virtua Fighter 5, VF5 Ultimate Showdown
Even though Viruta Fighter 5 has waned on for 14 years in its “Street Fighter II” rut of incremental additions and improvement, the super-group effort from RGGS and AM2 goes on to prove that not only is there still plenty of mileage left in the Polygonal Puncher, but they also deliver the definitive version of the game in the process.
As exciting as the collaboration between these two teams may seem, their work is certainly cut out for them, especially in a climate teeming with so many new and fresh offerings. One of the biggest pain points is the presentation; for as Iconic as its cast and presentation may be, Virtua Fighter 5’s graphics and style are both significantly dated in comparison to its peers. This is where Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is felt more than anywhere else, as Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown features a drastic facelift in its visuals and aesthetics, giving the sequel a noticeably enhanced sense of personality to stand out strongly among the modern generation of fighters
The trademark locales of the quintessential title have always been rendered with an exotic flair of gamma-saturated lighting and eccentric assets, going to be one of the more visually impressive highlights that showed off the game’s graphical prowess, but the upgrades in Ultimate Showdown manage to outclass everything before it with an optical fidelity that’s leagues more gorgeous in detail. From the Eastern pastures of Pai’s countryside stage to the tropical shore side of Vanessa’s combat cage, each setting has been revamped with higher-resolution textures and realistic lighting effects that bring a farm-grounded vibrancy to the Ultimate Showdown’s on-screen spectacle. The environmental enhancements aren’t just surface deep, as the destructible stage elements are also improved on with enhanced particle effects that drive home the impact to their forced collapse much harder than before. Not to be upstaged by the updated settings, however, the new character models for each fighter are another sight to behold altogether.
Where Virtua Fighter 5 has managed to benefit from excellent art design for years on end, the minimal textures and rough-edged rendering of its cast haven’t aged as gracefully as SEGA would like to pretend that it has—which is why the work RGGS has put into Ultimate Showdown’s models are practically night and day.
Never in all my days did I imagine that a fighting game needed the affectations like dynamic hair physics and real-time sweat to look that much better but I now stand corrected because I can’t look at another 3D Fighter the same way again. All the grizzly, smooth, and outlandish details of Virtua Fighter’s roster are seamlessly generated in glorious 4K. In addition to the new eye candy, AM2 also went to work at producing brand new music for Ultimate Showdown, and it’s easily some of the best music that’s ever composed for the franchise. Each stage features a brand new track, all evoking the same kind of synthesized orchestral sound that graced the series during its Dreamcast and Saturn days, especially Virtua Fighter 3.
Thankfully, the modernizations don’t just stop at Ultimate Showdown’s jaw-dropping presentation as the refined gameplay of Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown’s mechanics and setup have also been stepped up for the current generation of competitive fighting games.
Ultimate Showdown does empathizes competition above all else, stripping away most of the Single Player modes like Quest and License modes for new multiplayer-focused modes. The first being the Room mechanic, which allow players to either join or host curated lobbies, where players can choose to take turns sparring with each other, or spectate from the sidelines to see who’s the top dog, is among them.
The structure can be set for Gauntlet style, where the winner of the exhibition is lined up to face off against the next player in line, while the remainder of the room spectates the action on standby, cheering or jeering the fighters as they see fit with special stamp icons that would fit right at home on any Discord Server. The other arrangement can be done as a “League Match” where players can participate against one another based on skill-matching, pseudo tournament brackets, or free for all pairing, where the results of everyone’s bout will officially record against their Ranking stats. While the Room concept is hardly a new one in 2021, its addition to Virtua Fighter 5 is a welcome one, especially when it comes to the series infamous accessibility issues for new players, providing more options to foster novice players with minimal anxiety over factors like mismatching or toxicity from the online player base.
The other new mode is the Tournament mode, which as of this writing is currently unavailable, and will likely get patched shortly after the game hits the PlayStation Network Store. It’s a real shame too because, this is the first time such a mode has been added to the series; once it’s been launched, I’ll be sure to come back and update this review with my thoughts on the mode.
The other multiplayer modes are the standard competition modes we’ve seen before, and admittedly, when SEGA announced that they would be re-using the delay-based netcode system from Final Showdown, there was some genuine concern over how well this enhanced version would encode during online play. Thankfully, after pouring eight hours into the title on PSN, I can safely say that this best online edition that Virtua Fighter has ever had. One of the biggest improvements to the system is the matchmaking system—it’s easily the most sophisticated setup I’ve played in a fighting game of this magnitude today. The Rank tiers are broken down into twenty-four different levels; players will start at Kyu level, beginning from 10th Kyu to 1st Kyu, to Dan Group, ranging from 1st Dan to 10th Dan, before ascending to the legendary tiers of Virtua Fighter 5.
The levels are fairly accurate assessments of skill as they’re not only based on win/loss ratio, but the minutiae of the matches like individual rounds won, number of Ring Out victories/losses, and number of characters used. Factoring all of this data into the grand scheme of Ranked mode definitely helps the climb to the top feel like less of a grind, and more of a journey, especially when you pit your Rank during a League match in Room mode. Of the 10 hours, and hundred or so hours I invested into Ultimate showdown, I only had a laggy connection three spate times—which is impressive, to say the least for the 2012 tech it’s using. Now whether or not that'll be the case post-launch is another story, but as for now, it would seem Ultimate Showdown is performing just fine without Rollback Netcode for its online connection.
The only gripe I have is that a large majority of the Character Customization options are gated behind a paywall as downloadable content—which, yeah, I get it, but it does limit some of the incentive for replay fact for casual players who aren’t too in making they don’t arrive ten years too early on the Leaderboards. The lack of the Quest and License Modes from previous entries could have been brought back for some exclusive costumes, or items no available for purchase—especially when you factor all of the Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio crossover potentials, like a Kiryu or Majima skin for Akira and the gang would have been brilliant here. Sadly, there's no such thing here, at least not yet anyway. The game did launch with some neat fan service with some low-poly VF1 skins that you can purchase for the entire roster, including all of the new fighters introduce after the 1993 original, like Eileen and Taka-Arashi. Beyond the nostalgia of seeing the classic blocky visage of Pai and Jeffery, you get this sort of “way-Back Machine” makeover for characters who never got to chance to show what they were made of in the nineties. I can’t overstate just how eerily accurate every polygonal build and texture looks to the Sega Model 1 engine—it’s just such a neat touch
In all honesty, even after fourteen years, it doesn’t take much to convince the Virtua Fighter fandom to buy another version of Virtua Fighter 5, and SEGA knows that—which is what makes Ultimate Showdown so special because it truly delivers on levels that go beyond the scope of the fighting game community. Virtua Fighter Ultimate Showdown is just plain stupid competitive fun, and is not only an accessible online fighter, but objectively may be one of the most accessible online titles available on the PlayStation 4 today. It’s a no-brainer out for anyone who has PlayStation Plus, this game is an absolute must for your library, but even so, if you’re not a part of Sony’s premium club, this game is absolutely worth your hard-earned space bucks—download it as soon you can, and get ready for the whooshing and thumping you swing a kick at.
