Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. Thoughts

So recently, I took some time to participate in the Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. open beta test over the past few days. I believe today is the last day of the beta, and the game releases in full January 27th next year. I have had basically no experience with Virtua Fighter prior to this. Tekken has, between 7 and the little bit of 8 I played before release (I got into one of the network tests), been a struggle for me to learn and understand how to play well.

I think VF5 is the most fun I've had learning and playing a 3D fighting game from the ground up since like Soul Calibur 2 back in 2003.

It's a 3 button game. Punch, Kick, Guard. Doesn't get much more simple than that in terms of control scheme. The amount of depth they manage to squeeze into that across its 19 characters is actually insane, but it doesn't amount to characters being difficult to play (unless you wanna play the poster character Akira Yuki, who is quite executionally demanding). I think what stood out to me the most when playing the game though is the amount of time it I spent playing before it registered in my mind "Oh, I'm just playing The Game now." Which was after about... 5 hours of play, during a long set with a friend in a Discord server. This is remarkable to me, because even after a while of playing Tekken 7 after release and on and off between updates totaling at about 120 hours, I never felt especially comfortable playing it and had resigned to the thought that perhaps Soul Calibur was the only major 3D fighting game franchise I felt comfortable playing.

One of the first things I learned playing Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. was that it is a property-based fighter, meaning that if two actions with differing properties interacted with each other, the game had a hard-coded answer for how that interaction would end. I do not know if Soul Calibur function like this (I'm pretty sure it doesn't), but I know that Tekken is somewhat notorious for having many oddities when it comes to interactions between actions, even if the game says that one action is supposed to interact in a certain way with another action. Anyway, Virtua Fighter being property-based made understanding interactions a lot simpler for me, as it reminded me of 2D games I was more familiar with such as Blazblue or Under Night In-Birth, which handle attack interactions in the same fashion. There's a certain sense of security in having a consistent answer for how interactions will work, and it's not really something I put much thought into until playing Virtua Fighter.

Another big takeaway for me was how intensely focused on close-up interactions the game was. It's rare that there's a large amount of space between both players unless they intentionally back away from each other. Most okizeme situations leave the opponent directly on top of you, and all of the arenas are pretty tight in terms of size. The threat of ring outs on the relevant stages are also extremely present, as even just collision between characters can cause a ring out. You can win the round just by taking up space, and I find that incredibly entertaining. That said, on the stages where half-fences exist, the height required to ring someone out can vary, and go from "any combo off a launcher can cause it," to "you need a launch above half a character's height to cause it," which is interesting to me. There's even stages with breakable walls that persist between rounds. It brings a lot of variation to each of the stages in the game, which good even though there's an equal amount of stages as there are playable characters.

I played a few characters to see who I had the most fun with, and I ended up settling on Brad, who honestly feels great when he gets to pressure the opponent with his sways and ducking stance attacks. I may end up playing someone else in the future as well, such as El Blaze, Aoi, Jacky, or Jean (the other characters I tried), but Brad feels right for now.

I think that covers most of my thoughts on the game for now that aren't related to the online, which does need some work for handling connections with higher packet loss, but I'll save my thoughts on that for when the game comes out proper. Safe to say that I will be picking it up without any doubts. Helps that the asking price is pretty low as well.