Is it me, or is The Game Awards really good this year? It’s made all the better because one of the key announcements was the upcoming arrival of a brand new entry in the Virtua Fighter series. Seriously, if you lived on the Sega side of the street, you never needed to bother with Tekken, because Virtua Fighter was – to my mind anyway – vastly superior. The fact that it’s going to go up against the fantastic Tekken 8 means that 3D-fighting fans are really eating well right now.
The teaser trailer was a particularly teasy trailer, as it only gave us a few details. First amongst them was that once again it’s the Ryu Ga Gotoku studio that’s working on this new entry in the Virtua Fighter series. You might know them as the team behind the huge Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, and given that Yakuza’s own combat was a hand-me-down from Shenmue, which in turn fed from Virtua Fighter, made them the perfect team to take the series’ reins.
Thus far, we’ve only seen Akira and Sarah Bryant going at it in a sandy cityscape, with Akira sporting a new undercover look – that’s a fedora and trenchcoat if you were wondering – before then shifting perspective to point us towards an upcoming VF Direct where we’ll learn (hopefully) all the most important details.
Fans of the series – myself included – have been waiting patiently ever since the original launch of Virtua Fighter 5. While it leapt through the past couple of generations, and is still very playable on modern consoles, there’s little to no online community right now, so I’m hoping that with the new title coming a few more people will hop in so I can practice poking them with Lion’s silly pointy fingers.
The VF Direct will take place on December 13th at 12am ET. Stay tuned for more as we have it
