Posted: 8:39 PM - Sep 22, 2003
I previously posted this on GameFAQs. There is an exclusivity clause, but I figure that doesn't matter on a messageboard (a small one, at that). There's much I would like to change about it in hindsight, but I'm too lazy to do it. I post it here at Gestahr's behest.
Introduction
Virtua Fighter is a pioneer series. This refers not only to its inception, which helped bring gaming into the third dimension, but to the iterations that followed and consistently brought new graphical and gameplay factors to the table, culminating in Virtua Fighter 4 two years ago.
This is Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, and the title is apt. This is not a proper sequel to the VF canon, the traditional two new characters notwithstanding. It is an extension and refinement of the existing gameplay mechanics of VF4, not a revolution of them, and hence, AM2 deigned not to simply repackage and release it as VF5 (unlike some other, less-scrupulous companies). At the same time, it is definitely not its predecessor. In fact, there is no collective element in the whole of this game that is identical to VF4. Gameplay, music, even the lifebars and menus are different. There isn't a single screen in Evolution that is exactly the same as its VF4 counterpart.
This is the Playstation 2 port of the Naomi2 game Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, Version B, the latest and apparently last revision of the game from Sega AM2.
Presentation
The game's interface has been reskinned. Where VF4's main menu was all nice water effects and muzak, Evolution emphasizes chrome and neon. Where the training stage in VF4 was a rusted, abandoned warehouse with Jacky as the punching bag, Evolution has a high-tech white observation area housing Dural.
From a basic GUI standpoint, the new menu is a step backward. It's switched from a column view to a list view, without the inherent benefits of the latter. What this means is that much of the time, you're unable to immediately tell how far down the hierarchy of screens you are. It's a minor quibble, though, as none of the menus go down very far anyway.
Load times have been reduced considerably across the board. This refers not only to the load times between matches, but also to the minuscule pauses before the character portraits are loaded into memory at the character select screen and similar situations. The game also loads less frequently, as character models and other information are kept in RAM instead of being reloaded constantly every time a new option is selected.
The translation from Japanese is barebones, but serviceable. Some small details were lost in the transition, but in the scheme of things they're unimportant.
Graphics
Evolution has been antialiased, which is great news for those who found the jaggies in VF4 overly deleterious. The resulting image is much cleaner-looking, with nary a stair-step to be found on the fighter models and a bit less aliasing in the environments. It's now possible to see details that were obscured by jaggies in the original (the graphic on Jacky's back in his 2P is now more clearly an iridescent hologram, for instance). Shimmer has been reduced as well, and overall the game gives the impression of being higher-resolution than the original, right down to the character select screen bitmaps.
Texture quality is improved as a whole, though most individual textures have been brought through unchanged from VF4. Some of the background textures have been vamped up to more closely approximate their arcade counterparts. The destructible walls in the Colosseum stage, for instance, now have a much more stone-like map applied than the low-resolution bricks in PS2 VF4. New character items tend to have slightly better textures than the old, as those have been almost entirely recycled from VF4. Character textures are basically the same as well, though Vanessa and Jeffry have had their skin maps modified so they no longer look as though they were both heavily oiled. Dural is one of those elements in the game that looks unequivocally better than the previous VF4 version. Simply increasing the contrast between reflecting and non-reflecting surfaces on her body has done wonders for her, giving her a shine well above the somewhat dull VF4 Dural. Additionally, those who were disappointed with the fact that her invisible form was not a playable costume should be in for a treat in Evo. This version of Dural distorts and magnifies whatever is behind her in an effect similar to that of the stealth camouflage in Metal Gear Solid 2.
Environmental effects have been added, as well. The most noticeable is that the Great Wall stage now takes place during a downpour, with small splashes off the platform to indicate individual drops. Exhaled breath now fogs appropriately in the snowy Castle stage, and finer particle effects have been added to the Island's sand. Lens flares have been removed from the new stages in a purely aesthetic decision. The preexisting environmental features (the interactive water and lighting in the City, for instance) also seem subtly different from VF4. Not necessarily better or worse, but simply different, as if the techniques for realizing them have changed.
The lighting is also largely better than that in PS2 VF4. Some of the different-colored light sources on each stage are more affecting, and the high-contrast lighting on Jacky's stage is still there. Specular lighting has been increased on some surfaces as well, and while hit-flashes are more pronounced, the option to turn them off is gone. The lighting in the Naomi2 version is still much better, though, and some of the effects (like the screen being completely flooded with light at the character intros in the City or the lightning flashes in the Colosseum) are downgraded from that version.
The polygon count is high as always, with individual folds of cloth, accurate musculatures, and even ear structures all lovingly modeled. These are, bar none, the most detailed character models in a PS2 fighting game. They appear to be identical to their previous PS2 incarnations in this respect, so unfortunately some differences from the Naomi2 models that resulted from polygon reduction (Akira's face springs to mind) have remained. A bit of a shame, because as well-made as the models already are, the latest generation of PS2 games seems to indicate that the number of polygons could have been upped to fix them. Every character has some dynamic elements on their costume (flapping or crumpling cloth, waving hair, etc.), though none of these elements can be knocked off during the fight as was possible in previous games in the series. Character items add to this dynamism, with many of them featuring fairly accurate physics as they follow your fighter's movements.
Animation in Virtua Fighter is a very nice blend of motion capture, hand animation, and inverse kinematics, in roughly that order. As always, the series' emphasis on accurate motion-capture allows wonderful little details to shine through that would otherwise be lost in the more broad-stroke movements of other fighters, though this additional detail means that some of the animations are longer than equivalent moves in other games. Evolution has upped the ante and redone many of the animations from VF4, invariably resulting in better aesthetic appeal. Everything from tiny details (Akira's arms shaking with effort after a doublepalm) to sweeping changes in stance and moveset (Jacky) is apparent to varying degrees in all characters. Many animations that were held over from previous games have received their first update since VF2 or 3, even longtime staples like the various jumping knees and Akira's trademark combos. The result is that attacks are now more natural and fluid. Watching the more graceful characters in action, such as Aoi, is a joy.
As with any modern 3D fighting game, Evolution is locked at a solid 60 frames per second during gameplay. Unfortunately, however, Evolution is one of the only fighters released this year, PS2 or otherwise, to come without progressive-scan support for HDTVs, even though the feature was rumored before its release.
In the end, the engine and objects haven't been completely rehauled from VF4, but the changes are enough that some the old stages had to have elements taken out and Evolution's graphics are closer to the Naomi2 original than before. From a distance it can be difficult to tell the two apart, but closer up one begins to see the compromises which were made. The transition to the PS2 has lost some of the qualities that made its arcade brethren the unquestionable graphic leader over the System-246 competition. Even so, it's still one of the best-looking fighters on the PS2.
Audio
Much of the sound and music has been changed from VF4; Even the serious announcer from the previous game has been replaced with a younger-sounding, more exuberant actor, with a more pronounced American accent. Right from the menu screen, it's clear that the music has been completely redone, replacing the somewhat techno-oriented themes of the original with more prominent guitar-work, with some distortion and synth thrown in to round it out. The overall sound is a bit different, though the techno influence still remains. It can sometimes be a bit more difficult to pick out individual melodic themes for the stages than in the previous game, causing them to bleed together upon first casual listening, but the new songs are definitely distinct and more often than not better suited to their respective stages. I admit to preferring Dural's old themes to the new, but the new Garden stage theme has won me over. All in all, it's a fine new soundtrack, but as with most game music, it doesn't really rise above background accompaniment. If you have qualms with the new music, Evolution keeps the old stages and music selectable for Versus play.
Punches and kicks are solidly accompanied by a good variety of sound effects, and bone-crunching throws sound suitably painful. The tendency in VF4 for battle cries to continue once started, even if the actual attack was stopped, has been rectified. Now, if you interrupt an opponent in the midst of a kiai, the sound will be immediately and appropriately arrested.
Sound plays its part in gameplay as well. Certain moves will be preceded or accompanied by distinctive cries or sounds, and with extended play these cues will be ingrained into your game and your reflexes (e.g., if you're at frame disadvantage against Wolf and you hear him grunt, raw survival instinct dictates that whatever you do next will probably incorporate inputting f+P+G. If Vanessa comes charging at you, whether or not she yells can tell whether to defend against punches or a catch-throw if you can't differentiate the animations.) Similarly, if one sound or voice clip is played while performing a move, and a different clip plays when performing it again, it's not the same move. This consistency, evident throughout Evo, is one of the subtler strengths it has over the sometimes arbitrary systems of other members of the genre.
No mention of the VF series' sound would be complete without touching on the voice acting. The language is split between Japanese for the Asian fighters and English for all the rest, and the line separating the good seiyuu from the bad seems to fall around the same area. This is a generalization, of course, but Lion and Jacky can be buttock-clenchingly grating. The translated opening-, win-, and lose-quotes are serviceable, nothing more, and a couple of them are questionable, but at least there aren't any glaring translation errors. The voices of the new characters are quite good, I'm pleased to report, with Goh's in particular fitting his design very well. Of course, AM2 isn't about to tarnish its streak of questionable dubbing at this point with a string of successes, so Brad was given at least one terrible win quote to compensate for all of the good ones.
Gameplay and Replay Value
The standout feature of VF and of this review: gameplay. The gameplay in Evolution is, as before, completely faithful to the Naomi2 version. This is one facet of Evolution for PS2 that can clearly be called arcade perfect.
There are three buttons used for control in VF: Guard, Punch, and Kick. This minimalist interface still manages to give access to movelists that can grow much larger than those in games with a larger number of buttons, and the benefits derived from always having a finger hovering readily over every button at all times are obvious. The guard button may feel strange to those raised on fighting games where you press back to block, but it adds a greater degree of control simply not possible with that system. A limited comparison might be made between the guard button and the clutch pedal in manual transmission cars: it may take a period of adjustment for those raised on automatic, but there's a reason high-performance racecars use stick. Once you realize how much more sense it makes to have a context-insensitive block in 3 dimensions that opens up a whole new world of cancels and buffers, there is absolutely no reasonable argument against it.
One of the many good things that can be said of VF's engine is that it is solid. There is no such thing as an infinite or a game-breaking glitch in Evo, and there is very little that is unintentional or unknown by its creators. The game system has been refined and tweaked from VF4 in a myriad of little ways: New, unstruggleable stun animations have been added to tighten up ground combos; The okizeme game has been expanded, with the window for bounce combos much longer and the hitbox higher; This is balanced by the fact that attacks which slam the opponent into the pavement can now be instant-recovered, though the timing required is almost a just-frame; The low kick dynamic seems to have been largely rethought, with standing lk's handed out wholesale and the dual crouching low kicks of several characters removed in one way or another; Ground throws are now escapable, but the attempt is a pure 50/50 guessing game between two commands; Open rings have been enlarged to make ringouts less of an immediate threat; There is a new stage type; etc., etc..
This is just a small sampling of the changes to the game engine as a whole from VF4. Descriptions of character-specific changes would easily fill several pages more. With Evolution, something that has been gradually eased into the series since VF2 has finally come to fruition: All characters now have at least one completely unique alternate stance or movement to add variety to their game. These stances cover a huge range from simple evasion and retaliation, to powerful defensive parries or offensive salvos, to entire movesets.
Roster balance in Evolution has once again been sharpened. AM2 is known for its anal-retentive balance, having top players play each other over and over to discover the strengths and weaknesses of each character, then tweaking them and repeating the process. The introduction of VFNet in the arcade version of VF4, however, has allowed AM2 to gather detailed additional data from all player cards in use. Just glancing at how much information is collected in your player file in the console game should give you a taste of what a VFNet account accumulates.
Many people find Virtua Fighter difficult to learn. I'm not really sure why. Evolution, expanding on VF4 before it, includes the most comprehensive training mode in any fighting game to date. It takes you by the hand and guides you through the very basics of the engine, after which there are character-specific pseudoguides, combo lists, and replays from some of the biggest names in the game to supplement your advancement. If you want more, there are a series of gameplay challenges available to test your dexterity. The game is simple to grasp at its core, as long as you pay attention and put in the minimal effort to practice. If you're unwilling or unable to put in a modicum of effort, you'll barely be able to move around the ring, let alone win. It must be said that VF is not friendly to the player who doesn't bother to learn its intricacies. Unlike other fighters, Virtua Fighter does not do double duty as a casual party game among people who don't know the fighting system. I've tried. It simply doesn't work. One friend refuses to play unless the game is set to Hyper Action Battle mode so he can mash and at least look good while he loses.
If you're serious, you'll become proficient with one or two characters (or all of them, if you're ShinZ) after several weeks or months of extensive play. Yes, this is an investment of effort, but the payoff is without equal. Matching and strategizing against a good player in VF is one of the great, peerless gaming experiences that just makes up for all the disappointments that more mass-market games dole out. It's some of the best fun you can get from the medium.
Evo is a fighting game, and as such, its multiplayer is the aspect which decides its longevity. Thus, replayability is simply immense. But even as a single-player game, Evolution excels. VF4 was known for its Kumite mode, with ranks, items, and challenging AI. Evolution takes that concept and expands it into Quest, a virtual tour of major Sega arcades in Japan that culminates in a massive 64-man simulation of the World Martial Arts Championship 2 (better known as Kakutou Shinseiki II, the official national Japanese tournament which was actually held earlier this year), pitting you against AI representations of the best of the best in the VF4 scene. To those with only a passing interest in VF culture (and it is a culture), the prospect of fighting Chibita, Kyasao, and a bevy of other players is as meaningless as their ringnames. But to the rest of us, having the opportunity to battle tetsujin, even simulated, is a terrific opportunity. The AI is nowhere near a duplication of the way the real counterparts play, of course, as evidenced by the fact that it's defeatable by normal players. But it does put up a good challenge and gives a nice sense of accomplishment when beaten.
It will take an average gamer weeks of regular play and certainly dozens of hours of gametime to complete Quest mode to its fullest extent with even one character. This is an undertaking that requires literally hundreds or thousands of matches. Repeating the process for all fifteen characters is almost incomprehensible for the casual player.
Virtua Fighter has no story mode. It has a story, but it exists only within the manual and not in CG endings. While the Arcade mode isn't as useless as it was in VF4 (you can now earn money and items through it), you shouldn't go in expecting anything other than a pat on the back from AM2. Not a problem: stories are largely superfluous to fighters in the first place.
The downside to not having a story is that the characters in VF have little personality outside their post-battle poses, a long-time complaint against the series. Traditional outfits and differing character designers only serve to reinforce this sense of blandness. While the new characters in Evolution are a step away from this and feature more...well, character...they do so only by looking like visitors from the Tekken universe. They stick out a bit amongst the other fighters, yet still don't have very clearly defined personas given the lack of character interaction.
AM2 has taken this weakness of VF and managed to successfully manipulate it into a strength in VF4. With customizable character appearances, your fighter is a blank slate for you to imprint and advertise your own personality. The same character in different hands will almost certainly look completely different (although you will never mistake one character for another, no matter how customized). One player may dress his Jeffry in gaudy colors and add an articulated shark biting his ass for comic effect. Another may display only difficult-to-obtain items and a golden outfit on her Akira to represent her rank and skill. And, inevitably, someone will choose Goh, give him silver hair and name him Kakihara. It is completely up to the player. Evolution makes this even more personalizable by both increasing the number of items and allowing such details as eye and hair color to be changed. Character names can also be changed at any time to reflect evolving tastes.
There is one problem related to this, though, and it's big. The save file has been unified since VF4, and while this means faster card access, it also means that customized players cannot fight each other from different memory cards. It's a negation of much of the point of having individual player files in the first place, and a major flaw by AM2.
The AI mode from VF4 is gone, causing a pang of disappointment to ripple through all four of its serious users. This mode allowed you to "train" a character through a simple reward and punishment system. While cool in principle, the actual implementation was hampered by poor documentation and a general inability to teach advanced techniques beyond juggles and combos. These problems could certainly have been fixed to make a more enjoyable mode, but AM2 decided against it and simply removed it entirely. While most will not mourn its loss, I must say I will miss having my character glance eerily over his shoulder at me through the screen, if nothing else.
In return for the removal of this single mode, AM2 has given us a dozen alternate modes for Versus and Quest play. These modes change various factors of gameplay, and while most of them are unsuitable for serious competitive play due to their upset of the game's careful balance, they're still quite fun and introduce some variety. Hyper Action Battle mode is probably the most interesting of them all, and is undoubtedly a draw for many players. An import from Virtua Fighter's sister series, Fighting Vipers (the development team of which was largely incorporated into VF4's, with clearly visible influence), this mode cancels the recovery of all attacks under certain conditions. What this means is that all bets are off. HAB is a completely different game. Almost no attacks are punishable. Characters zip from move to move faster than the eye can follow. The only thing preventing 14-hit (there's a handy counter onscreen) superjuggles from swallowing lifebars whole is similarly beefed damage scaling. It's turbocharged chaos, almost an antithesis of VF. Other modes are interesting to play as well, with conditions like having a single lifebar seesaw between the two fighters, or making wall or floor hits deal extra damage.
US gamers are in for a treat, by and large. 10th Anniversary mode is a special game in itself that was showcased at KSII and only available in other territories as a very rare, stand-alone disc. It's included on the US DVD and immediately accessible. This mode is an amalgam of the original Model1 Virtua Fighter and Evolution, with the former's game mechanics and much of the latter's moves and characters. It's certainly one of the more unique additions to fighting games, and an interesting exercise in nostalgia.
One final note is that the non-JP games have been censored. The same thing happened to the arcade versions, but I didn't expect it to carry over to the console. The three affected characters are Vanessa, Shun, and Brad. Vanessa has lost her original P1 costume completely, Sega having replaced it with what amounts to a simple khaki palette swap of her P2 military outfit. Her accurate grappling uniform has apparently grown to offend the sensibilities of prudish Westerners in the year since it was included in VF4. Shun no longer drinks. He only "pretends" to. As such, his face and hands no longer turn more and more red with each sip, a loss of a handy visual cue to how strong he is and an amusing thing to watch. His artificial sobriety, which was also present in VF4, flies in the face of the fact that he practices drunken fist kung-fu and still has a counter under his lifebar that now only measures imaginary drinks. Brad's P2 costume has undergone a strange change. One of his character items, a flowered Hawaiian shirt, has become the default in lieu of his red shirt, and his black slacks have been replaced with khakis. Why? Only Sega knows. They might as well have renamed him Steve and been done with it. The changes to Vanessa and Shun can at least be explained (poorly) as removal of elements of sex and drugs from the game, respectively. The changes to Brad are simply baffling and have no logistical basis whatsoever. None of these censorships affect the gameplay, thankfully, but they're still an annoyance that really shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Final Recommendation
Buy, of course. There's no way to properly appreciate Evo through a rental. For whatever reason, the game is retailing at launch in the US as a Greatest Hits title for around twenty dollars. Hell, buy two and give one away to a friend so you can have some much-needed local competition, it's still a bargain compared to normal retail price. At full price Evolution is a must-buy. At less than half that, no real fighting fan has an excuse not to get it.---
Behold Drakkael, legendary slayer of topics.
Introduction
Virtua Fighter is a pioneer series. This refers not only to its inception, which helped bring gaming into the third dimension, but to the iterations that followed and consistently brought new graphical and gameplay factors to the table, culminating in Virtua Fighter 4 two years ago.
This is Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, and the title is apt. This is not a proper sequel to the VF canon, the traditional two new characters notwithstanding. It is an extension and refinement of the existing gameplay mechanics of VF4, not a revolution of them, and hence, AM2 deigned not to simply repackage and release it as VF5 (unlike some other, less-scrupulous companies). At the same time, it is definitely not its predecessor. In fact, there is no collective element in the whole of this game that is identical to VF4. Gameplay, music, even the lifebars and menus are different. There isn't a single screen in Evolution that is exactly the same as its VF4 counterpart.
This is the Playstation 2 port of the Naomi2 game Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, Version B, the latest and apparently last revision of the game from Sega AM2.
Presentation
The game's interface has been reskinned. Where VF4's main menu was all nice water effects and muzak, Evolution emphasizes chrome and neon. Where the training stage in VF4 was a rusted, abandoned warehouse with Jacky as the punching bag, Evolution has a high-tech white observation area housing Dural.
From a basic GUI standpoint, the new menu is a step backward. It's switched from a column view to a list view, without the inherent benefits of the latter. What this means is that much of the time, you're unable to immediately tell how far down the hierarchy of screens you are. It's a minor quibble, though, as none of the menus go down very far anyway.
Load times have been reduced considerably across the board. This refers not only to the load times between matches, but also to the minuscule pauses before the character portraits are loaded into memory at the character select screen and similar situations. The game also loads less frequently, as character models and other information are kept in RAM instead of being reloaded constantly every time a new option is selected.
The translation from Japanese is barebones, but serviceable. Some small details were lost in the transition, but in the scheme of things they're unimportant.
Graphics
Evolution has been antialiased, which is great news for those who found the jaggies in VF4 overly deleterious. The resulting image is much cleaner-looking, with nary a stair-step to be found on the fighter models and a bit less aliasing in the environments. It's now possible to see details that were obscured by jaggies in the original (the graphic on Jacky's back in his 2P is now more clearly an iridescent hologram, for instance). Shimmer has been reduced as well, and overall the game gives the impression of being higher-resolution than the original, right down to the character select screen bitmaps.
Texture quality is improved as a whole, though most individual textures have been brought through unchanged from VF4. Some of the background textures have been vamped up to more closely approximate their arcade counterparts. The destructible walls in the Colosseum stage, for instance, now have a much more stone-like map applied than the low-resolution bricks in PS2 VF4. New character items tend to have slightly better textures than the old, as those have been almost entirely recycled from VF4. Character textures are basically the same as well, though Vanessa and Jeffry have had their skin maps modified so they no longer look as though they were both heavily oiled. Dural is one of those elements in the game that looks unequivocally better than the previous VF4 version. Simply increasing the contrast between reflecting and non-reflecting surfaces on her body has done wonders for her, giving her a shine well above the somewhat dull VF4 Dural. Additionally, those who were disappointed with the fact that her invisible form was not a playable costume should be in for a treat in Evo. This version of Dural distorts and magnifies whatever is behind her in an effect similar to that of the stealth camouflage in Metal Gear Solid 2.
Environmental effects have been added, as well. The most noticeable is that the Great Wall stage now takes place during a downpour, with small splashes off the platform to indicate individual drops. Exhaled breath now fogs appropriately in the snowy Castle stage, and finer particle effects have been added to the Island's sand. Lens flares have been removed from the new stages in a purely aesthetic decision. The preexisting environmental features (the interactive water and lighting in the City, for instance) also seem subtly different from VF4. Not necessarily better or worse, but simply different, as if the techniques for realizing them have changed.
The lighting is also largely better than that in PS2 VF4. Some of the different-colored light sources on each stage are more affecting, and the high-contrast lighting on Jacky's stage is still there. Specular lighting has been increased on some surfaces as well, and while hit-flashes are more pronounced, the option to turn them off is gone. The lighting in the Naomi2 version is still much better, though, and some of the effects (like the screen being completely flooded with light at the character intros in the City or the lightning flashes in the Colosseum) are downgraded from that version.
The polygon count is high as always, with individual folds of cloth, accurate musculatures, and even ear structures all lovingly modeled. These are, bar none, the most detailed character models in a PS2 fighting game. They appear to be identical to their previous PS2 incarnations in this respect, so unfortunately some differences from the Naomi2 models that resulted from polygon reduction (Akira's face springs to mind) have remained. A bit of a shame, because as well-made as the models already are, the latest generation of PS2 games seems to indicate that the number of polygons could have been upped to fix them. Every character has some dynamic elements on their costume (flapping or crumpling cloth, waving hair, etc.), though none of these elements can be knocked off during the fight as was possible in previous games in the series. Character items add to this dynamism, with many of them featuring fairly accurate physics as they follow your fighter's movements.
Animation in Virtua Fighter is a very nice blend of motion capture, hand animation, and inverse kinematics, in roughly that order. As always, the series' emphasis on accurate motion-capture allows wonderful little details to shine through that would otherwise be lost in the more broad-stroke movements of other fighters, though this additional detail means that some of the animations are longer than equivalent moves in other games. Evolution has upped the ante and redone many of the animations from VF4, invariably resulting in better aesthetic appeal. Everything from tiny details (Akira's arms shaking with effort after a doublepalm) to sweeping changes in stance and moveset (Jacky) is apparent to varying degrees in all characters. Many animations that were held over from previous games have received their first update since VF2 or 3, even longtime staples like the various jumping knees and Akira's trademark combos. The result is that attacks are now more natural and fluid. Watching the more graceful characters in action, such as Aoi, is a joy.
As with any modern 3D fighting game, Evolution is locked at a solid 60 frames per second during gameplay. Unfortunately, however, Evolution is one of the only fighters released this year, PS2 or otherwise, to come without progressive-scan support for HDTVs, even though the feature was rumored before its release.
In the end, the engine and objects haven't been completely rehauled from VF4, but the changes are enough that some the old stages had to have elements taken out and Evolution's graphics are closer to the Naomi2 original than before. From a distance it can be difficult to tell the two apart, but closer up one begins to see the compromises which were made. The transition to the PS2 has lost some of the qualities that made its arcade brethren the unquestionable graphic leader over the System-246 competition. Even so, it's still one of the best-looking fighters on the PS2.
Audio
Much of the sound and music has been changed from VF4; Even the serious announcer from the previous game has been replaced with a younger-sounding, more exuberant actor, with a more pronounced American accent. Right from the menu screen, it's clear that the music has been completely redone, replacing the somewhat techno-oriented themes of the original with more prominent guitar-work, with some distortion and synth thrown in to round it out. The overall sound is a bit different, though the techno influence still remains. It can sometimes be a bit more difficult to pick out individual melodic themes for the stages than in the previous game, causing them to bleed together upon first casual listening, but the new songs are definitely distinct and more often than not better suited to their respective stages. I admit to preferring Dural's old themes to the new, but the new Garden stage theme has won me over. All in all, it's a fine new soundtrack, but as with most game music, it doesn't really rise above background accompaniment. If you have qualms with the new music, Evolution keeps the old stages and music selectable for Versus play.
Punches and kicks are solidly accompanied by a good variety of sound effects, and bone-crunching throws sound suitably painful. The tendency in VF4 for battle cries to continue once started, even if the actual attack was stopped, has been rectified. Now, if you interrupt an opponent in the midst of a kiai, the sound will be immediately and appropriately arrested.
Sound plays its part in gameplay as well. Certain moves will be preceded or accompanied by distinctive cries or sounds, and with extended play these cues will be ingrained into your game and your reflexes (e.g., if you're at frame disadvantage against Wolf and you hear him grunt, raw survival instinct dictates that whatever you do next will probably incorporate inputting f+P+G. If Vanessa comes charging at you, whether or not she yells can tell whether to defend against punches or a catch-throw if you can't differentiate the animations.) Similarly, if one sound or voice clip is played while performing a move, and a different clip plays when performing it again, it's not the same move. This consistency, evident throughout Evo, is one of the subtler strengths it has over the sometimes arbitrary systems of other members of the genre.
No mention of the VF series' sound would be complete without touching on the voice acting. The language is split between Japanese for the Asian fighters and English for all the rest, and the line separating the good seiyuu from the bad seems to fall around the same area. This is a generalization, of course, but Lion and Jacky can be buttock-clenchingly grating. The translated opening-, win-, and lose-quotes are serviceable, nothing more, and a couple of them are questionable, but at least there aren't any glaring translation errors. The voices of the new characters are quite good, I'm pleased to report, with Goh's in particular fitting his design very well. Of course, AM2 isn't about to tarnish its streak of questionable dubbing at this point with a string of successes, so Brad was given at least one terrible win quote to compensate for all of the good ones.
Gameplay and Replay Value
The standout feature of VF and of this review: gameplay. The gameplay in Evolution is, as before, completely faithful to the Naomi2 version. This is one facet of Evolution for PS2 that can clearly be called arcade perfect.
There are three buttons used for control in VF: Guard, Punch, and Kick. This minimalist interface still manages to give access to movelists that can grow much larger than those in games with a larger number of buttons, and the benefits derived from always having a finger hovering readily over every button at all times are obvious. The guard button may feel strange to those raised on fighting games where you press back to block, but it adds a greater degree of control simply not possible with that system. A limited comparison might be made between the guard button and the clutch pedal in manual transmission cars: it may take a period of adjustment for those raised on automatic, but there's a reason high-performance racecars use stick. Once you realize how much more sense it makes to have a context-insensitive block in 3 dimensions that opens up a whole new world of cancels and buffers, there is absolutely no reasonable argument against it.
One of the many good things that can be said of VF's engine is that it is solid. There is no such thing as an infinite or a game-breaking glitch in Evo, and there is very little that is unintentional or unknown by its creators. The game system has been refined and tweaked from VF4 in a myriad of little ways: New, unstruggleable stun animations have been added to tighten up ground combos; The okizeme game has been expanded, with the window for bounce combos much longer and the hitbox higher; This is balanced by the fact that attacks which slam the opponent into the pavement can now be instant-recovered, though the timing required is almost a just-frame; The low kick dynamic seems to have been largely rethought, with standing lk's handed out wholesale and the dual crouching low kicks of several characters removed in one way or another; Ground throws are now escapable, but the attempt is a pure 50/50 guessing game between two commands; Open rings have been enlarged to make ringouts less of an immediate threat; There is a new stage type; etc., etc..
This is just a small sampling of the changes to the game engine as a whole from VF4. Descriptions of character-specific changes would easily fill several pages more. With Evolution, something that has been gradually eased into the series since VF2 has finally come to fruition: All characters now have at least one completely unique alternate stance or movement to add variety to their game. These stances cover a huge range from simple evasion and retaliation, to powerful defensive parries or offensive salvos, to entire movesets.
Roster balance in Evolution has once again been sharpened. AM2 is known for its anal-retentive balance, having top players play each other over and over to discover the strengths and weaknesses of each character, then tweaking them and repeating the process. The introduction of VFNet in the arcade version of VF4, however, has allowed AM2 to gather detailed additional data from all player cards in use. Just glancing at how much information is collected in your player file in the console game should give you a taste of what a VFNet account accumulates.
Many people find Virtua Fighter difficult to learn. I'm not really sure why. Evolution, expanding on VF4 before it, includes the most comprehensive training mode in any fighting game to date. It takes you by the hand and guides you through the very basics of the engine, after which there are character-specific pseudoguides, combo lists, and replays from some of the biggest names in the game to supplement your advancement. If you want more, there are a series of gameplay challenges available to test your dexterity. The game is simple to grasp at its core, as long as you pay attention and put in the minimal effort to practice. If you're unwilling or unable to put in a modicum of effort, you'll barely be able to move around the ring, let alone win. It must be said that VF is not friendly to the player who doesn't bother to learn its intricacies. Unlike other fighters, Virtua Fighter does not do double duty as a casual party game among people who don't know the fighting system. I've tried. It simply doesn't work. One friend refuses to play unless the game is set to Hyper Action Battle mode so he can mash and at least look good while he loses.
If you're serious, you'll become proficient with one or two characters (or all of them, if you're ShinZ) after several weeks or months of extensive play. Yes, this is an investment of effort, but the payoff is without equal. Matching and strategizing against a good player in VF is one of the great, peerless gaming experiences that just makes up for all the disappointments that more mass-market games dole out. It's some of the best fun you can get from the medium.
Evo is a fighting game, and as such, its multiplayer is the aspect which decides its longevity. Thus, replayability is simply immense. But even as a single-player game, Evolution excels. VF4 was known for its Kumite mode, with ranks, items, and challenging AI. Evolution takes that concept and expands it into Quest, a virtual tour of major Sega arcades in Japan that culminates in a massive 64-man simulation of the World Martial Arts Championship 2 (better known as Kakutou Shinseiki II, the official national Japanese tournament which was actually held earlier this year), pitting you against AI representations of the best of the best in the VF4 scene. To those with only a passing interest in VF culture (and it is a culture), the prospect of fighting Chibita, Kyasao, and a bevy of other players is as meaningless as their ringnames. But to the rest of us, having the opportunity to battle tetsujin, even simulated, is a terrific opportunity. The AI is nowhere near a duplication of the way the real counterparts play, of course, as evidenced by the fact that it's defeatable by normal players. But it does put up a good challenge and gives a nice sense of accomplishment when beaten.
It will take an average gamer weeks of regular play and certainly dozens of hours of gametime to complete Quest mode to its fullest extent with even one character. This is an undertaking that requires literally hundreds or thousands of matches. Repeating the process for all fifteen characters is almost incomprehensible for the casual player.
Virtua Fighter has no story mode. It has a story, but it exists only within the manual and not in CG endings. While the Arcade mode isn't as useless as it was in VF4 (you can now earn money and items through it), you shouldn't go in expecting anything other than a pat on the back from AM2. Not a problem: stories are largely superfluous to fighters in the first place.
The downside to not having a story is that the characters in VF have little personality outside their post-battle poses, a long-time complaint against the series. Traditional outfits and differing character designers only serve to reinforce this sense of blandness. While the new characters in Evolution are a step away from this and feature more...well, character...they do so only by looking like visitors from the Tekken universe. They stick out a bit amongst the other fighters, yet still don't have very clearly defined personas given the lack of character interaction.
AM2 has taken this weakness of VF and managed to successfully manipulate it into a strength in VF4. With customizable character appearances, your fighter is a blank slate for you to imprint and advertise your own personality. The same character in different hands will almost certainly look completely different (although you will never mistake one character for another, no matter how customized). One player may dress his Jeffry in gaudy colors and add an articulated shark biting his ass for comic effect. Another may display only difficult-to-obtain items and a golden outfit on her Akira to represent her rank and skill. And, inevitably, someone will choose Goh, give him silver hair and name him Kakihara. It is completely up to the player. Evolution makes this even more personalizable by both increasing the number of items and allowing such details as eye and hair color to be changed. Character names can also be changed at any time to reflect evolving tastes.
There is one problem related to this, though, and it's big. The save file has been unified since VF4, and while this means faster card access, it also means that customized players cannot fight each other from different memory cards. It's a negation of much of the point of having individual player files in the first place, and a major flaw by AM2.
The AI mode from VF4 is gone, causing a pang of disappointment to ripple through all four of its serious users. This mode allowed you to "train" a character through a simple reward and punishment system. While cool in principle, the actual implementation was hampered by poor documentation and a general inability to teach advanced techniques beyond juggles and combos. These problems could certainly have been fixed to make a more enjoyable mode, but AM2 decided against it and simply removed it entirely. While most will not mourn its loss, I must say I will miss having my character glance eerily over his shoulder at me through the screen, if nothing else.
In return for the removal of this single mode, AM2 has given us a dozen alternate modes for Versus and Quest play. These modes change various factors of gameplay, and while most of them are unsuitable for serious competitive play due to their upset of the game's careful balance, they're still quite fun and introduce some variety. Hyper Action Battle mode is probably the most interesting of them all, and is undoubtedly a draw for many players. An import from Virtua Fighter's sister series, Fighting Vipers (the development team of which was largely incorporated into VF4's, with clearly visible influence), this mode cancels the recovery of all attacks under certain conditions. What this means is that all bets are off. HAB is a completely different game. Almost no attacks are punishable. Characters zip from move to move faster than the eye can follow. The only thing preventing 14-hit (there's a handy counter onscreen) superjuggles from swallowing lifebars whole is similarly beefed damage scaling. It's turbocharged chaos, almost an antithesis of VF. Other modes are interesting to play as well, with conditions like having a single lifebar seesaw between the two fighters, or making wall or floor hits deal extra damage.
US gamers are in for a treat, by and large. 10th Anniversary mode is a special game in itself that was showcased at KSII and only available in other territories as a very rare, stand-alone disc. It's included on the US DVD and immediately accessible. This mode is an amalgam of the original Model1 Virtua Fighter and Evolution, with the former's game mechanics and much of the latter's moves and characters. It's certainly one of the more unique additions to fighting games, and an interesting exercise in nostalgia.
One final note is that the non-JP games have been censored. The same thing happened to the arcade versions, but I didn't expect it to carry over to the console. The three affected characters are Vanessa, Shun, and Brad. Vanessa has lost her original P1 costume completely, Sega having replaced it with what amounts to a simple khaki palette swap of her P2 military outfit. Her accurate grappling uniform has apparently grown to offend the sensibilities of prudish Westerners in the year since it was included in VF4. Shun no longer drinks. He only "pretends" to. As such, his face and hands no longer turn more and more red with each sip, a loss of a handy visual cue to how strong he is and an amusing thing to watch. His artificial sobriety, which was also present in VF4, flies in the face of the fact that he practices drunken fist kung-fu and still has a counter under his lifebar that now only measures imaginary drinks. Brad's P2 costume has undergone a strange change. One of his character items, a flowered Hawaiian shirt, has become the default in lieu of his red shirt, and his black slacks have been replaced with khakis. Why? Only Sega knows. They might as well have renamed him Steve and been done with it. The changes to Vanessa and Shun can at least be explained (poorly) as removal of elements of sex and drugs from the game, respectively. The changes to Brad are simply baffling and have no logistical basis whatsoever. None of these censorships affect the gameplay, thankfully, but they're still an annoyance that really shouldn't have existed in the first place.
Final Recommendation
Buy, of course. There's no way to properly appreciate Evo through a rental. For whatever reason, the game is retailing at launch in the US as a Greatest Hits title for around twenty dollars. Hell, buy two and give one away to a friend so you can have some much-needed local competition, it's still a bargain compared to normal retail price. At full price Evolution is a must-buy. At less than half that, no real fighting fan has an excuse not to get it.---
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