It’s been nearly a year since Sega announced the new Virtua Fighter project at The Game Awards 2024 presentation. The only characters we know about thus far are Akira, Stella and Wolf Hawkfield. Much about the newcomer, Stella, is still shrouded in mystery, but she bears an uncanny resemblance to longtime veteran Sarah Bryant.
Riichiro Yamada, producer for the unnamed Virtua Fighter project, recently participated in an interview with Automaton Media. During this exchange, he revealed some interesting things about the development team’s design goals with the new Virtua Fighter project.
“What aspects did you feel had to be refreshed in order for the series to move forward?” asked Automaton Media.
“One thing is the common perception that Virtua Fighter is a difficult and complicated game.” — Riichiro Yamada
This was no doubt a fair question considering that Virtua Fighter 5 was originally released nearly two decades ago. Of course, Sega has recently transformed Virtua Fighter 5 into Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage, keeping it somewhat modernized with current generation platforms.
“One thing is the common perception that Virtua Fighter is a difficult and complicated game,” responded Yamada. “I think this impression is especially strong among people familiar with the fighting game genre.”
Following this, Yamada then highlighted the irony of this perception considering that Virtua Fighter has always used a three-button control scheme: punch, kick and guard.
“The controls are based on just three buttons (Punch, Kick and Guard), so it should be straightforward, but I think the series has accumulated some complexities over time,” continued Yamada.
“I want to break away from that perception.” — Riichiro Yamada
“I want to break away from that perception.”
While this might initially come across as concerning to experienced fighting games that have become tired of developers “dumbing down” the genre, Yamada would later reassure longtime fans within that same interview that they won’t be neglecting core players in order to achieve this.
“That said, we’re not simply ‘making things easy’ and neglecting core players,” later added Yamada. “No matter what, a certain degree of challenging aspects and depth must remain.”
Ultimately, Virtua Fighter is a fighting game, though Yamada has made it clear that he also wishes for Virtua Fighter to break free of just being in the fighting game mold. Based on all of this, it really sounds like the developers are making an effort to cater towards both new and old players with this new Virtua Fighter project.
