Virtua Fighter is finally coming back with a brand new entry in the long-running fighting game franchise after a staggering 18 years since the last mainline title in the series dropped.
Sega executive Masayoshi Yokoyama and new Virtua Fighter project producer Riichirou Yamada recently sat down with Famitsu to discuss the upcoming project, and thanks to the efforts of our very own Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor, we are able to learn more about what was said via an English translation. One of the most interesting pieces of information revealed during this interview is that, apparently, the core of what makes Virtua Fighter, well, Virtua Fighter, is also what held the game back from returning all these years.
At one point in the interview, Yamada and Yokoyama provide some insight into how the project came to be. When thinking about a potential new Virtua Fighter project and how to go about making it, Yokoyama noted that the first person that came to mind when thinking of who could be the planner for it was Yamada.
Yamada was no longer with Sega at the time, but was brought back on to specifically work on this new Virtua Fighter title. Reviving the franchise for the modern day was certainly not going to be an easy feat, so in order to prepare Yamada started digging deep into interviews and articles featuring the father of Virtua Fighter, Yu Suzuki, in hopes of finding the “core” of what Virtua Fighter is.
Yamada found that core he was looking for, and when asked what that core was, he had this to say.
“I’m someone who saw the movement of the Virtua Fighter series when it first released first-hand, so by looking at my own feelings from back then coupled with my research into past titles, the result I arrived at was that what the series had always protected as its core was ‘stay innovative’. And because we had stayed tied by these words, we’d been struggling to release a new numbered title in the series for so long,” Yamada explained.
Virtua Fighter was built on innovation, but in a modern landscape where the internet connects the world together more than it’s ever been connected in our life time, technology has advanced by leaps and bounds, and there are major fighting game franchises that continue to implement all of the latest trends and patterns into their games, it wasn’t so easy for Virtua Fighter to simply come back and break the mold.
“It’s easy to say ‘stay innovative’, but actually innovating is difficult,” Yamada continued. “It was probably simpler back when you could say ‘this is a brand new cabinet and you can only play it here!’ in the arcades.
“Having a new circuit board itself was already ‘a part of the future’, and back then we even had the famous movie director Stephen Spielberg see Virtua Fighter 3 and say ‘these graphics and this cross-simulation is incredible!’ as praise for it. So ever since the difference in specs between arcade machines and home consoles disappeared, it’s become more difficult,” Yamada said.
Yamada continues on to explain that on top of innovation being at Virtua Fighter’s core, one of the other things that made the franchise what it is is the focus on “reality.”
“If it was just difficult that’d be one thing, but I think for the new Virtua Fighter to be innovative is a very important point of value. Also, as Yokoyama mentioned earlier, I think the keyword of ‘reality’ is also very important.
“There are various ways of interpreting ‘reality’, but back when the first Virtua Fighter came out into the world it was a continuation of the era of Kung-Fu movies being popular. Because Kung-Fu and realistic movement became the core of Virtua Fighter, it was a game that didn’t feature projectiles and things like that,” Yamada explained.
“[…]The characters’ appearances as well were aimed at being realistic and stylish via the limited techniques we had available at the time. So for the new Virtua Fighter, we wanted the basis of the game to be ‘stay innovative’ and ‘stay realistic’, these two are the core of the game.
“Of course for the gameplay itself, the tension of judging your distance and properly spacing when to go in close or the battle of minds when reading your opponent is different than other titles too, but just at a base concept level we wanted to deeply think about this as the core,” Yamada concluded.
Make sure to check out our previous installment of this interview translation where Yamada and Yokoyama discuss how the new Virtua Fighter aims to compete with the likes of Street Fighter and Tekken.