Sometimes, the old ideas are some of the best. In hunting for a way to make the fighting game genre more expansive and attractive to a wider range of console players, Sega has found itself returning to a surprising place from its past for Virtua Fighter Crossroads, the upcoming revival of its iconic fighting franchise.
Sure, the concept that this latest Virtua Fighter will feature exploration of a city of brawlers, a cinematic narrative with branching storylines, and nostalgia-needling encounters with iconic fighters from the series’ past runs parallel to Street Fighter 6’s excellent World Tour mode. It also feels a natural fit for RGG Studio, the house built by the Yakuza series’ unique blend of brawling gangster tales with off-the-wall open world antics.
But, really, anyone of a certain age is going to look at Virtua Fighter Crossroads and think of only one thing: Virtua Fighter RPG, a legendary in-development title of the 90s that eventually became Shenmue.
VF Crossroads creative director and producer Riichiro Yamada gets it. When I ask about Shenmue, I almost expect a wince, a shake of the head, and a repudiation. But instead, he grins, nods, and offers an honest but caveated analysis of his latest work’s connection to one of Sega’s most iconic games.
“Well, it obviously looks kind of like Shenmue,” he admits. “We’re all aware of that! But rather than looking back at what those games were and all that… It’s more like it just happened to be that way.”
Inspiration came from other places. I dare say Street Fighter’s World Tour experiment was eyed, for instance, while the narrative was in part inspired by the comic book series The Watchmen. The latter was considered part of a process of finding tone, trying to build a world that is at once wildly fantastical yet absolutely grounded.
Here is a city where the use of firearms is punishable by death, but battering people to a pulp with your bare fists is simply a matter of course. In the composited original Southeast Asian city of Vilasapara, might is right, and every encounter is a potential opportunity to test your martial arts skill.
It’s a world apart from a righteous revenge story – but watching characters meander the city and dash around in scripted, cinematic chase sequences, it once again is difficult to suppress that echo of Saturn betas and a final Dreamcast release.
“I began to understand, like ‘ah, the creator of Shenmue, that’s what he was going for, that’s what he was thinking of’,” Yamada continues. “But it really just sort of ended up that way, rather than us trying to make it that way.”
“It obviously looks kind of like Shenmue. We’re all aware of that! But rather than looking back at what those games were and all that… It’s more like it just happened to be that way.”
As a fighting game, meanwhile, Crossroads is a curious piece. At one point in a lengthy hands-off meeting to see and discuss the game, Yamada casually mentions that its difference is why the game stops short of being outright called ‘Virtua Fighter 6’ – though the letters ‘VI’ are cleverly highlighted in its title. It is a very different game – half classic VF, part RGG adventure, with a dash of those Shenmue chops.
In another very nineties-feeling touch, the developers have anointed this new cocktail as a new genre. I’m shown a flashy slide declaring Crossroads’ genre to be ‘THE FIGHTING ADVENTURE’. It’s the sort of game, they add, that only RGG could make.
“Player choice really matters,” says Yamada. The trailer you’ll have all seen at Summer Games Fest stars Cielo Salinas – but he is in fact one of only four protagonists whose stories will interweave throughout and show the different sides of Vilasapara. It’s here that we can touch on another name-checked inspiration in the form of PlayStation title Detroit: Become Human.
Yamada says he wants to design a story people will want to experience multiple times, with meaningful branches and differences based on the choices they make. There’s been an enormous effort put into building the world and characters, he says, with an east-meets-west approach to writing and story where veteran Sega Japan writers with experience on games like Yakuza and Persona are joined by Brad Kane (Ghost of Tsushima, As Dusk Falls) and David Hayter (Watchmen, X-Men, and the og voice of Solid Snake).
There’s a range of helpful and friendly allies that RGG seem rather fond of, including a bloke called Jasper Foking, which I loved because in my heart I’m still about twelve years old. Foking is the cast’s resident expert on Virtua Fighter lore, a mega fan of the legendary fighters of old – which is all those guys and gals you remember from past games.
A smattering of these classic characters will show up in the story playing major roles – in the Summer Games Fest trailer, we see series veteran Pai Chan, who has been there since the start, show up to rescue Cielo and friends from some nasty gang members.
“I began to understand, like ‘ah, the creator of Shenmue, that’s what he was going for, that’s what he was thinking of’. But it really just sort of ended up that way, rather than us trying to make it that way.”
The existence of these classic characters in the cast underlines one thing that Yamada is particularly keen to reiterate in his presentation: Crossroads is “definitely still a fighting game”.
The footage tells that story, too. RGG or no, once you get into battles, it looks and moves like a Virtua Fighter of old. There are new mechanics we’ll need to wait for a hands-on to fully understand – a new defense system, a body part breaking system, a new combo system – but the core is visibly pure, traditional Virtua Fighter.
The main difference, I’d suppose, is that the game is built to be pad-first. Like Tekken 8 being the first in the series to not first debut in arcades, this is a Virtua Fighter with no sign of plans for an arcade cabinet – but Yamada is casual about what might happen in the future.
“Before it was arcade into console, and now it really is a pad-led console game first,” he says, when I ask about the death of arcades. “We will think about the other stuff more down the line.”
There’s a delightful snap back against one recent fighting game tradition, though. Designed for pad it may be, but the team sees no need for an ‘easy input’ mode. Virtua Fighter is notorious for being one of the deeper, more fiddly fighters to master, but Yamada isn’t concerned.
“Virtua Fighter is a three-button game,” he coolly shrugs. “It is all easy input.”
Given that this is leading with its single-player story-driven modes, I expect you’ll be able to bash your way through it easily enough. There will still be a versus mode, however, and I’m reassured that a good amount of the competitive Virtua Fighter edge will remain. Still, RGG’s reticence to truly get into it with the media and talk about the actual fighting mechanics in depth leaves my mind hanging on the action-adventure play and the Shenmue comparison.
“Well, we actually did show this to the creator of Virtua Fighter and Shenmue [Yu Suzuki], and when we did, he was like ‘wow, this is really what I imagined Virtua Fighter could be’,” Yamada grins. “That gave us a lot of confidence, and it was really – it felt really good for us to know that we were proceeding in a good direction.
“Funnily enough, when I first entered the company, Yu-san was one of the top creators. We never even met or talked. So getting that sort of confirmation that, damn, I’m doing something really good – it felt really good as a creator.”
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