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Review: Virtua Fighter Animation [Game Gear] |
Sega’s portable Game Gear never had a big source of fighting games to it’s name. Which is too bad, since the technical possibility of quality fighters being made for the system was certainly present. Proving that point was a late entry into the Game Gear’s dying life span, Sega’s own Virtua Fighter Animation. Now at this point you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “A polygon fighter on the 8-bit Game Gear? That’s impossible!”. And you’re right, it is. But that didn’t stop the ingenius minds at Sega from successfully porting it over anyway. As a result, we have a fighter with 2D graphics all the way through, but featuring the Virtua Fighter characters and gameplay left amazingly intact.
Since this is essentially a port of Virtua Fighter 1, you won’t find characters like Lion or Shun in there anywhere. Also, Jeffrey has been removed from the character roster, likely due to memory restraints. All of the other characters are present and playable though, including the final boss Dural. And most of their moves from Virtua Fighter 1 are present too.
You might find one or two things missing here and there, but overall they’ll act surprisingly like their 3D Virtua Fighter counterparts. Unlike Virtua Fighter though, the characters are 2D sprites, as are the backgrounds. At first the different look seems quite suspicious, but after playing you soon realize just how ‘2D’ Virtua fighter really is. When you think about it, the only thing really 3D about Virtua Fighter was it’s graphics. Movement was always limited to forward and back just like in any 2D fighter, at least in the earlier Virtua Fighter games. So turning it into a 2D fighter really wasn’t a big deal. Take out the roving camera angles and keep it at a side view, change the graphics to sprites instead of polygons, and you’ve got a game looking like Street Fighter II but playing like Virtua Fighter. And I must admit it worked out amazingly well.
There are a couple different game modes to choose from. One is an arcade mode similar to the original Virtua Fighter, where you simply fight through all the characters in a pre-set order. There’s not really any storyline here – just bash your way to the top. In true Virtua Fighter fashion there isn’t even any character endings, though there is a varying ending screen showing the shadow of your specific character in the background. Then there’s the Storyline mode where things get a little more interesting. Here, you’re presented with comic-style storyline screens inbetween each round, developing a plot to the game and showing what leads up to each fight. This mode is based on the short-lived Virtua fighter animated series, and hence where the name ‘Virtua Fighter Animation’ plays into the title. The story screens are all drawn with an anime style and it feels like reading through a comic book. We’re not talking about a mature-themed manga comic with any real deepness though. In this rendition of Virtua Fighter we’re presented with a much sillier Akira, spunky tom-boy Pai, cool guy Jacky, and other rather light-hearted cartoon versions of so constrastingly serious looking characters in the arcade game. This is all presented in colorful anime graphics that really show their roots coming from a Saturday morning cartoon. This is by no means a put-down though. I really enjoyed the Storyline mode, since what it lacks it depth it makes up for in it’s silly
humor and attractive anime cuteness.
When a fight occurs during the story, you can choose which fighter you wish to use out of whoever you’ve picked up for your team so far. Initially the story starts with Akira, so he’s the only one you have available. Then when he runs into Pai (literally) you’ll have to fight her and get her on your team for the next fight after winning. By the end, you’ll potentially have access to everyone for use against Dural. Just to note, Dural is the only one you won’t have access to playing in this mode, since beating he/she/it marks the end of the storyline game. One interesting twist is that if you lose one of your battles, you lose the ability to choose the character you were using any more. If you have other characters in your team you’ll have to switch to one of them and try the battle again. Only when you lose with all of them is it game over. It works out pretty well for the most part. The computer opponents keep getting better as you advance through the fights, but you gain more characters as you go along to hopefully compensate for the occasional loss. One somewhat bad aspect though is that the storyline always progresses the same way, making it kind of pointless to watch through after beating it a few times. But that’s where the arcade mode comes in, which basically gives you all the fighting while leaving out the story. I found I initially enjoyed the storyline mode and ignored the arcade mode, but when the story got tiresome after beating it a few times I was glad I could play the arcade mode and not have to read through all that stuff over and over anymore.
All in all Sega did a surprisingly good job on this project. A lot of companies would have tried porting to the hand-held format as directly as possible, simply leaving out what they couldn’t reproduce and not adding anything in it’s place. Sega’s angle of adapting the game to fit the console more appropiately was ingenious, and the addition of the Animation storyline a brilliant idea to set it distinctly apart from it’s original parent title.
One strange thing is the omission of a two-player mode though. Two-player games were never that practical for the Game Gear anyway, considering it requires two copies of the game being played on two seperate Game Gears linked together. But a fighting game like this seems like it would be justified in having a two-player mode at least as much as any other game.
That aside, it’s a bit lacking in long-term play value, since the computer becomes fairly easy to beat with a little practice. But I certainly enjoyed it for a while, and although not perfect, I’d have to say that Virtua fighter Animation still stands out as the best fighting game produced for the Game Gear portable system.
