Virtua Fighter 3TB

There was a time not so long ago when the words "Model 3" were acknowledged with equal proportions of awe and respect. It was Sega's newest arcade hardware, and a mighty three million polygons it did move. These days, such numbers are almost commonplace, with the arrival of the Dreamcast and the impending arrivals of polygon crushers from Sony and Nintendo. However, when the Model 3 hardware first debuted, it was with Virtua Fighter 3, the flagship fighter borne of Yu Suzuki's AM2 development team.

To think that in 1997 Virtua Fighter 3 almost made it to the Sega Saturn is, in hindsight, practically hysterical. To this day, the Model 3 hardware has only recently been superseded by the relatively inexpensive but comparable-in-performance Naomi arcade board. As PlayStation fans got every installment of Tekken ported right to their favorite console, Sega fans had to languish until more powerful hardware arrived.

Now that time has come, and the question is whether Virtua Fighter 3 (the complementary "Team Battle" tag amended), with all its encompassing history, has been worth the wait.

As fans of Virtua Fighter will attest, VF3 (as well as its predecessors) is one of the deepest games you will ever play. When it comes to technique, move combinations, and overall feel, few games can boast the sophistication of VF3's fighting engine. While not as instinctive, perhaps, as a 2D fireball-throwing, dragon-punching series that will go unnamed, VF3 features a depth nearly unsurpassed in the 3D arena. Certainly, button mashing will certainly get some gamers a fair amount of success in the one-player mode, but match a novice up against a skilled Virtua Fighter veteran, and the difference in their skills will quickly become apparent. Building on the simple three-button interface of the groundbreaking VF2, part three adds a dodge button to the mix as well as two new characters, Aoi and Takarashi. With the established VF fighting engine already in place, the dodge button adds a whole new slate of moves to the labyrinthine arsenal of attacks and defensive strikes. Unfortunately, since games like Soul Calibur have used the benefit of hindsight to further the genre in a more refined manner, VF3's dodge function could have, admittedly, been implemented in a more intuitive manner (see Tobal 2 for a good example) than simply having you thwack an extra button. After all, Virtua Fighter 2 had practically perfected 3D gameplay on a 2D plane, offering such an array of offensive possibilities that Tekken 2 could never seriously approach. By adding a fourth button to what was basically a perfect configuration, something was simultaneously gained and lost.