Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. isn't just a PC port of a 19-year-old game: it's the reason a diehard fighting game community can 'lastly reach out and play with each other across the world'
What is a legacy? I’ve struggled with that query as I’ve tried to write down about Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O., the newest entry in the sequence that invented 3D fighting video games earlier than finally fading from the public consciousness. R.E.V.O., a new model that just hit Steam final week, is a probability to reset that, for one of the most beloved fighting video games ever made to search out a new worldwide viewers.
But the very first thing it’s a must to perceive about Virtua Fighter 5 is that it is outdated. The unique game launched in Japanese arcades in 2006. To put that into perspective, that is a yr after the Xbox 360 launched; Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare have been nonetheless a yr away, Street Fighter 4 was two years out, and Apple’s App Store did not but exist. I’ve been asking fighting game gamers why a port of a 19-year-old game issues in 2025—and why Virtua Fighter issues typically, regardless of accumulating mud for longer than it was lively as a common sequence, no less than in the West.
The reply runs deeper than Virtua Fighter pioneering 3D fighting.
“It’s hard to describe the feeling to someone who’s never played it before because it’s not flashy like a Tekken or Soul Calibur or even Dead or Alive, but everything about the fighting system just clicks,” mentioned domaug, who’s been taking part in competitively since 2001’s Virtua Fighter 4. Domaug defined that the lack of bombastic supers and combos can make it appear to be not a lot is going on in a Virtua Fighter match, however in skilled fingers the video games transfer quick.
“It’s like you’re watching a kung fu movie unfold in front of you. I think why it’s survived this long is because its fluid fighting system hooked its players, never letting go. It’s a fighting game that’s truly unique; no other fighting game ‘feels’ like Virtua Fighter.”
You really feel that if you play it. Unlike Tekken, Virtua Fighter has a block button and less complicated inputs: as an alternative of mapping a limb to each button you may have a punch, kick, and block button, and that is it. Virtua Fighter appears very straightforward to choose up and play, nevertheless it’s as deep as an ocean, and matches occur quicker than you can spit.
Commentator Lawrence “WingedRegent” Maldonado described it this manner: “Virtua Fighter is a lot more grounded … if a game like Tekken or Soul Calibur or even Dead or Alive is your favorite shonen anime, then I would say Virtua Fighter is your favorite martial arts movie … It’s a lot more reined in in terms of what the characters can do … When you see two VF players at a top level do what they do, you get to see that beautiful flow of combat.”
Having spent a lot of time in varied variations of Virtua Fighter 5 over the years and R.E.V.O. itself, it is onerous to disagree. Virtua Fighter is a game of transfer and countermove. It’s pure and centered, and in a style the place video games are more and more fantastical and characters extra and extra highly effective, it feels more and more uncommon. Nobody is reworking into a satan and taking pictures eyebeams or conjuring vitality from skinny air.
Cory “Virtua Kazama” Mewborn jogged my memory that Virtua Fighter’s fame for cutting-edge tech is not just all the way down to pioneering the 3D fighter in 1993. “Virtua Fighter has always been the blueprint for the 3D fighting game because it always makes itself into something brand new,” he mentioned. Mewborn has been lively in the scene since 2010 and organizes tournaments along with competing and commentating. Considering how lengthy it has been since the sequence has seen a new entry, its diehard gamers have had loads of time to brush up on their historical past.
“Virtua Fighter 2 gave us motion capture for the very first time,” he mentioned. “3 gave us environments [with stairs and slopes] and eye tracking. Virtua Fighter 4 gave us sabakis, which is basically an attack with reflective properties.”
If being leading edge is Virtua Fighter’s legacy, although, R.E.V.O. is not that. It’s nonetheless, at its coronary heart, a revision of a game that’s practically 20 years outdated. But R.E.V.O. is the first time the sequence has appeared on PC since some historical Windows 95 ports; it additionally marks the first time the sequence may have rollback netcode, a now-genre staple that has made taking part in with other gamers round the world potential with out main drawbacks. While R.EV.O.’s rollback can have lag points if one participant’s connection is dangerous, I’ve solely ever had wonderful matches on it.
But that is about greater than a netcode resolution: It implies that a community that has beforehand been considerably segregated by areas and totally different game variations can lastly play collectively.
“Even with Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown, when that came out, there was… the global version of the game, and then there was Virtua Fighter eSports, which was the Japanese version of the game that was on arcade and PS4, and those two player bases could not interact,” Maldonado defined. “With VF5 R.E.V.O., that last remaining sort of border has eroded, and now players can just finally reach out and play with each other across the world.”
It’s a enormous win for a community that has survived, in some ways, on sheer love and drive of will. And that is saying one thing for a nook of the already fiercely loyal and protecting FGC.
“The community has welcomed everyone, trying to get as many new players as possible through community tournaments, locals, Discord servers, and overall positive attitudes,” domaug informed me. “I know many of the long-standing members of the North American and European VF communities have done everything they could to get Sega’s attention as the game’s focus has almost exclusively been on Japan. They wanted to show Sega that Virtua Fighter is beloved outside of Japan, and they eventually noticed and rewarded that loyalty in a huge way.”
Mewborn places it extra merely. “We try to bring it all together. We try to level each other up.”
It’s been a tall ask, however R.E.V.O.’s launch has proven that Sega is listening, and I’ve not often seen a community extra deserving to have their work rewarded. R.E.V.O. is not just a port of Ultimate Showdown with new netcode (itself a prettier model of Final Showdown, a game from 2012). It’s additionally bringing stability modifications to Virtua Fighter 5 for the first time in 13 years. Imagine if Capcom hadn’t touched Street Fighter in any respect for greater than a decade, and instantly introduced Street Fighter 4 to trendy platforms, prettied it up, and even rebalanced it and added in some favourite strikes from earlier video games in the sequence.
“The gameplay is still Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown, but the balance patch was what made a difference because there were moves that we never thought we would see again,” mentioned Mewborn. “There’s some moves, some throws, that were taken out. It really made us rethink how to play our characters that we know and love.”
Rediscovering how issues work is now a new expertise, even for sequence veterans. “It’s a trippy experience,” mentioned Maldonado. “Even people who’ve been playing since VF5: FS in 2010, even in the arcades, they’re now learning new things about their characters after not having had a new thing to discover for 14 years.”
And Sega is clearly listening to fan suggestions. The community found, as an illustration, that a change to 1 of Eileen’s strikes may produce a pseudo-infinite as a result of of an added stagger impact on regular hits, however Sega rapidly fastened it. It’s onerous to overstate how a lot goodwill a fast response like that builds.
Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. is resurrection. Rebirth. An opportunity for one of the best, longest-enduring fighting video games and its community to lastly get their probability in the solar once more, revitalizing them earlier than the launch of Virtua Fighter 6 from the similar staff that develops Like a Dragon.
If you are half of the FGC, you may have that fighting game that defines you; that, to cite Mewborn, “will stick with you no matter what.” Those gamers believed in Virtua Fighter when even Sega did not appear to. That religion has been rewarded, and they’re excited to see new folks play Virtua Fighter for the first time. If that community has a message, it is this, from domaug: “I really hope you enjoy Virtua Fighter going forward and I want it to make you as happy as it’s made me over the years.”
What’s a legacy? Maybe it is so simple as that.
