Virtua Fighter x eSport

[ItsThere]

A lot of trophy boosters on here at the moment. Just ploughing through losing every match. Rubbish. This is why the lists should be based on wins and not participation.

Johnny Vaughan would be disgusted.

[Neon Ignition]

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[Asura]

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This doesn't surprise me one bit. As I suspect I've said before (perhaps even in this very thread), VF has a problem in that I feel VF5 was the perfection of its formula. As someone who played every version of the franchise quite a bit (probably 3 the least, due to not having its home version until after I had Soul Calibur) 5 really is amazing. The only area I feel it can be improved is in the experience it offers the home/solo player, and that isn't really what the games are about. Even VF-adjacent fighters like Fighting Vipers and Last Bronx feed into this.

I just don't know where VF can "go" without fundamentally changing what it is.

Additionally, it has some legacy stuff that I feel prevents it from mass-market love. For instance, how the game's characterisation is odd; the characters still have pretty awful speech samples and very little personality, which was the game's intention (given how VF1 was visually basic, so they had to paint the characters in very broad brushstrokes).

I know that Tekken ripped a lot off VF in some ways, but for example, Namco have grown Nina Willams into the sort of character they can put on merchandise or in spinoff games, whereas only the hardest of the hardcore VF fans are going to want a shirt of Sarah Bryant. A hardcore VF fan might scoff at this but that's one of the ways those games become big; people get invested. It's one of the many reasons League of Legends continues to do well; they're expanding into movies & TV this year.

I got the recent one on PS4, and [MENTION=16665]Blobcat[/MENTION] and I have played it, and it was really interesting seeing the game through her eyes as a complete beginner. At first it was really tricky, but as soon as she understood that there's the whole thing with guarding, the attack heights etc. she started to do the whole thing where you duck to avoid a throw and punch the other person before they recover, and you end up in that footsies game where the two of you move and make little attacks to look for an opening, and she really started to enjoy it. It shows that with better content to introduce it, the game can work with an entirely new audience.