My favorite feature in Virtua Fighter 5: R.E.V.O., a new PC port of Sega’s classic fighting game, isn’t its rollback netcode or 4K visuals. It’s that you can watch other people play matches from the main menu.
I don’t know how this works; whether it’s real-time, whether it’s pulling replays, or some other kind of wizardry. I kind of don’t want to know, to be honest. All I know is, whenever I fire up Virtua Fighter 5: R.E.V.O., and I’m deciding what I want to do (do I want to practice some combos with my boy Jean? See if my friends are up for some games? Venture online? Try out somebody new?), I have to actively pull myself away from that screen. You can even watch the matches in full-screen if you really want.
It’s a great feature, and I wish every fighting game had it. Every time I watch another match, I learn something new, whether it’s something I want to try myself or something I want to learn how to beat. That’s what makes fighting games great: mastery, watching yourself improve, seeing something new, and saying “I wanna do that.” And it’s right there, front and center, as soon as you boot it up. Players from all over the world, playing Virtua Fighter together.
Maybe R.E.V.O. is trying to make up for lost time.
Virtua Fighter 5: R.E.V.O. is kind of weird; it’s the latest edition of Virtua Fighter 5, a video game that first released on consoles in 2007 and in arcades in Japan in 2006. It’s important that you understand this. Street Fighter IV is widely credited with reviving the fighting game genre after a (relatively) lean decade in 2008. I’ve never liked this story; there were plenty of good fighting games during that time: Guilty Gear, Tekken, Soul Calibur, and yeah, Virtua Fighter, had excellent entries during that period, among many others. There just wasn’t any Street Fighter.
I don’t tell you this because I think you need a history lesson; I’m trying to help you understand how old Virtua Fighter 5 is. When the first version of this game came out, George W. Bush was president, the iPhone was new, and World of Warcraft, which just celebrated its twentieth anniversary, was just over a year and a half old. Virtua Fighter 5 is old, and its design is from a different era.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at R.E.VO., which is the PC release of Ultimate Showdown, a visual update to 2012’s Final Showdown. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio is in the driver’s seat now, and its Dragon Engine upgrade of Final Showdown is pretty gorgeous, though the in-game audio effects don’t seem to have gotten the same level of love. It feels weird to play a game that looks like this but sounds like it’s playing a twenty-year-old MP3 file when you hit someone. And that voice acting? Good Lord.
Okay, so it looks better and the sound effects don’t have the juice when you punch somebody. But under the hood, this is still Virtua Fighter 5, though it’s a little more barebones than previous releases. You’ve got a standard arcade mode, local and online versus modes, an official tournament that’s held every weekend, a basic training mode, and … that’s it. If you’re looking for single-player stuff, it’s not here. You’re here to fight, preferably online, against other people. And that’s where Virtua Fighter 5: R.E.V.O. sings.
See, Virtua Fighter 5’s sauce comes from the actual core gameplay, and that’s as good as ever. R.E.V.O. is the first major balance patch Virtua Fighter has seen in thirteen years, making not only major balance changes but actually returning moves characters had in previous iterations of the series. Combine that with new rollback netcode, which has its issues (though it’s worked just fine for me), but is far better than the delay-based netcode that’s appeared in previous games, and this is a big deal.
All of this, to be clear, is wonderful, and it makes it easier than ever to play Virtua Fighter with people from all over the world. But what makes Virtua Fighter unique is its gameplay. This is a high-damage game. It moves fast, but it’s far more grounded and realistic than something like Tekken, focusing heavily on real martial arts. There are no demons or fireballs here. It’s also incredibly easy to pick up and play. Virtua Fighter has three buttons: punch, kick, and block. Everything you do comes out of those three buttons or some combination of them.
Virtua Fighter’s real depth is in its defensive systems. You can evade most attacks by stepping left, right, or backward and that opens up a world of counter-play in which transitioning from an evade to an offensive move and canceling that into an attack will allow you to attack from the side, giving you a greater advantage. And that’s before you get into character-specific defensive options.
Virtua Fighter, at its best, is a dance between your character and your opponent: you’re looking for openings, places you can evade, a predictable moment in their offense while trying to keep your opponent from finding holes in yours. A single interaction can flip a round in Virtua Fighter, and every second is intense as a result. It feels incredible, nearly 20 years later, even if you’re not playing at a high level. And somehow, despite all this time, nothing else plays quite like it.
R.E.V.O. is the first time that Virtua Fighter 5 is available on PC and the first time most people will play it. But I’ve rarely seen more excitement for a re-release. Virtua Fighter is something of a forgotten fighting game outside of genre enthusiasts, despite inventing the 3D fighting game and its popularity never fading in Japan. R.E.V.O. represents a new lease on life for a classic series, an opportunity to pick itself up off the mat and prove it still has what it takes to be a contender.
With Virtua Fighter 6 on the horizon, R.E.V.O. feels like a statement from Sega, a rollout of the red carpet for players old and new alike. Don’t call it a comeback. Virtua Fighter was always here, just a little early or a little late to really catch on. But now, at last, it’s got a chance to remind us why it’s endured at just the right time.
Virtua Fighter 5: R.E.V.O. is available now on PC.