Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution

"No Frills Bone Cracking Machine"

On the surface, there’s nothing obviously different about Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution from, say, any other fighting game on the market. In fact, there’s actually quite a lot against it from appearance alone. It lacks the gore factor of a Mortal Kombat game, the strange characters of a Tekken game, the pure over-the-top-ness of Soul Calibur or the sheer pandemonium of any of the 2D fighters Capcom has cranked out in the last decade. In fact, there’s so little obvious reason to own this game that odds are you’d set it down before you even read the back of the box. But this would be a mistake. A very big mistake, as Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution is quite possibly the best, if not the best fighter ever made.

GAMEPLAY 9.5/10

Well, there’s three buttons at work here. A block, a punch and a kick, which sounds pretty primitive. But it only sounds that way. There are hundreds of moves available. While many of them miss the bonecracking intensity of a lot of other games out there, that doesn’t mean there’s any room for improvisation. More importantly, when you press the punch button, you punch someone, when you press the kick button, you kick someone. Your timing is more or less uniform no matter what move (save a few) that you do. While this sounds like it would lend to a lot of button mashing, it in fact does the exact opposite. When I was first playing the game a few months ago just about anyone who picked up a controller stood around a fifty fifty chance with me. Not so anymore, because underneath this simple control scheme lies a maze of counters, holds, juggles and cheap shots unparalleled in gaming. If you are familiar with DOA2, and it’s whole rock paper scissors element (a block will stop a hit, a hold will beat a block, a hit will speed past a hold) then imagine multiplying that kind of thinking dozens of times over. And I mean dozens. Every couple days that I play this game, I suddenly find myself exploring new concepts and linking together different chains of attack. It helps that the computer keeps getting smarter, or if not smarter, aware of anything cheap you’re trying to pull off with grueling repetition. There are a few downers, the AI blocks way too much, and a lower stance block in particular is rather annoying, as only a mid shot really breaks it with any regularity, and while you’d think that most mid range shots are either a forward punch or kick or a backwards punch or kick, this isn’t always the case, making the lower stance block a much more frustrating thing to be up against than a medium stance block. But this is really pointless griping. There are more than a dozen characters at work here, and each has very much their own fighting style, and more surprisingly, just about every character is effective in some way. There’s no one on the roster I would flat out not use, and the vast majority of the characters feel very well balanced.

The progress that you make in the game comes at a small cost, however. As this is truly a game of mastery, a button mashing friend stands little chance of making much more than a sack of flour to be thrown around the ring. While it takes about a minute to explain to someone how to play the game, in all fairness they won’t even make the least bit of competition if you play this game with any regularity. This is very different from other fighting games on the market, as while you can increase your proficiency in say, Tekken, there’s still the likely possibility that you’re hyperactive nephew is still going to wail on you. While it’s satisfying to know that you’re really gaining some ability in a fighting game, if your primary goal behind owning one is playing with people who don’t normally play fighting games, then your money could be better spent elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you’ve got that circle of gamer friends who are looking for a new weekend obsession, then this is most definitely my weapon of choice.

STORY 7/10

The game features the standard modes you’ve come to expect from your standard fighting game. There’s the Arcade mode which plows you through a dozen or so contestants and then a final boss. You’ve only got one shot at this boss each time you play. However, the only reason to actually beat the game is to unlock some goodies, as there’s no full motion video stories or even a plot at all from as far as I can tell. Most of the environments don’t explain anything either. The only one I remember having an audience is a steel cage match. Otherwise you’ve got your rooftops, a fenced in fountain, some snowy plateau, this weird volcanic eruption, a danger room and about a half dozen other locales. None of this is the least bit coherent, and it doesn’t really have to be, it’s a fighting game. But even still, those little nuggets of full motion video still make me feel like I’m doing something when I watch them, and in that regard this game is completely absent.

As one would assume, there is also no story to speak of in either the Versus mode or the Training Mode.

However, this doesn’t mean that there’s a total loss when it comes to plot in all of the modes. There’s a weird metagaming Quest mode, in which you assume the role of someone playing a videogame, which at the very least puts you in a strange method acting position. In this simulation, you travel around town competing in various Virtua Fighter tournaments. It’s actually pretty cool, although you don’t get to look over at the other person slugging it out against you and you don’t get any cross talk and you don’t make any friends either. Each arcade you visit will require you to plow through a couple dozen members of it’s own Virtua Fighter fanboy denizens before you earn the right to compete in tournaments. Once you’ve beaten the tournament and gotten first place, you can still go back and finish off any optional missions available, which are usually pretty simple affairs like winning ten games in a row or using eight throw attacks. Some of the later stuff gets to be a real pain in the neck, but even a novice player should find the first couple arcades satisfying. While the whole arcade quest idea is fun, it’s no substitute for an actual story. Beyond this, I actually have a gripe about this whole idea, and that’s that it drives the concept of an actual plot even further away. Even if a game doesn’t give you an actual plot, it could at least let you think up whatever plot I want to attach to them. The rulebook will tell you that Sarah and Jacky are bother and sister, and that there’s some business about them entering the tournament to fight each other. But who cares, it’s not explained, not even looked into, and beyond this, you are constantly reminded that these are actually videogame characters we’re talking about. Either way, it’s a major backstep for videogames to think this way. At a time in which videogames are finally gathering a little bit of respect as an art form you get a bunch of stuff like this, people hitting each other for no reason at all. Not that a fighting game fan would care.

REPLAYABILITY 9/10

Getting all the moves down alone for one character should take you a couple months. And for once, you’ll want to know every last one of them, as a quick leap off of a wall could very well mean victory. And odds are, you won’t find yourself leaping off a wall very often. But when it comes, and it will come, you will want to be ready. The same goes for just about every move in the game, it has a place, a purpose, and a time when it’s absolutely the move you should be using. No more crazy wind up kangaroo punches, these fighters have a reason to move the way they do. Beyond that, getting through everything in Quest mode for a single character will take dozens of hours, the Training mode alone can be enjoyed for evenings on end, digging through every last tutorial and practicing, practicing, practicing. The Quest mode, and to a lesser extent the Arcade mode both offer a horde of unlockable goodies by way of new accessories and colors of clothing for your fighters. There’s also a bunch of movies which consist of different openings for the game and finishing poses and taunts to spruce up you’re character’s frightening lack of clever things to say after beating someone to a blood pulp. My main gripe with all of this is the amount of time invested into each unlockable. Many of the objects in the game cost upwards of 1000 points, which is quite a substantial amount of play time when you consider that I’d say I guess I pull in around 1000 points an hour. sometimes it’s more, however, I also think there’s no way to get points by revisiting a tournament you’ve already beaten, a major folly for anyone other than truly the best players trying to unlock everything. However, persistent players will slowly watch as their character transforms, changing their hair and jewelry if not their obsession with different colored versions of the same outfit. But yes, there are hundreds of hours of game here and you can continue playing it long after there’s any reason to, or any reason left in your mind at all.

GRAPHICS 9/10

Oh, they’re good graphics. Jaggies are rare if ever seen, and on the snow level you can watch as you make little fight angels everywhere you knock someone over or get knocked over. Most of the back drops have wonderful amounts of detail. The characters look great, but no so good close up, which is how you’ll be seeing them only during their opening or finishing taunts. The audience members in the cage match are clearly robotic but you won’t care, and if you do, you’re really watching the wrong part of the screen. I can’t complain about the graphic at all, but it gets a nine just because there’s very little in the way of a “wow” factor and also because of the lack of full motion video, which I don’t care much about but still want a little bit of. Eye candy doesn’t mean as much as it used to anyway.

SOUND 7/10

The punches and kicks sound appropriately painful. The music’s fun enough at first, but considering the number of hours you’ll put into this game you’ll probably turn it down or off long before you put down the controller. The music is what you’ve come to expect, a bunch of techno beats, mostly high energy and mostly forgettable. There’s very little in the way of voice acting, which is as to be expected, but I’m personally sick of listening to the same half dozen utterances out of a character for hours on end. At least these victories aren’t strengthening the soul of anybody. Stuff like that drives me nuts.

WHAT’S WITH THE EVOLUTION

In case you’ve played Virtua Fighter 4 and are wondering what the big deal is, it’s Goh and Brad, two new characters. Goh I can take or leave, but Brad’s a really fantastic addition. Goh seems a little too slow for my taste but with his Hawaiian shirts and his boxing style fisticuffs Brad is one of the first characters I select when sitting down to play. Otherwise, the Quest mode, which sort of existed in the previous game, is larger and has more stuff in it. It’s worth the buy if you love Virtua Fighter 4 enough. But if you love it enough, then odds are you’ve already bought this expansion.

TO BUY OR TO RENT?

Buy it. It’s twenty bucks. If you’ve ever enjoyed a fighter before, and I mean any fighter, there’s no reason to not just toss it in your collection. Odds are, in renting it you probably won’t even notice how great of a game it is.

And what a game it is. There’s not a whole lot of zip and pow in Sega’s Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. Instead, Sega hasn’t bothered with the frills and instead has crafted some of the best gameplay ever seen in a fighting game. The responsive control and the variety in characters is more than enough to satiate you well past any of the more novel fighters out there. Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution is a bare bones machine of pure fighting action, and it warrants your investigation.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/20/04