The 3D fighting genre has not been okay for a while.
Dead or Alive was poised for both commercial and competitive success with Dead or Alive 6 before a very public falling-out between Koei Tecmo and FGC tournament organizers (and some might say the FGC as a whole) in 2019 cut the legs out from under it before it could even release, and the perpetuation of Dead or Alive 5’s predatory DLC model made things even worse for them, resulting in the development roadmap getting cut short and the game dying prematurely.
Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown will go down as a “forever game” and a true icon of the end of the arcade era, but perhaps due to said end of the arcade era, Sega didn’t seem to care to follow up on it, leaving it as the main Virtua Fighter title throughout the entirety of the 2010s. Meanwhile, it was hard to define what went wrong with SoulCalibur. By all accounts, SoulCalibur VI exceeded sales expectations, and marked a strong return to form for the franchise after the dismal and divisive SoulCalibur V (while also serving as an explicit disavowment of SCV by Bandai Namco), but its lack of a follow-up was finally explained in a lengthy tweet by longtime Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada that detailed the culture at Bandai Namco and why the environment there is, at least for the time being, inhospitable to a potential SoulCalibur VII.
This left Tekken as the sole active 3D fighting game franchise, and with Tekken 7 and Tekken 8 representing the brand during those years, things… aren’t going great on that front, with Tekken 8 season 3 so poorly-received that even content creators who have built their entire brand around Tekken have given up on it. It’s truly a perfect time for other IPs to step up and carry the genre, and thankfully, that seems to be exactly what is happening.
Koei Tecmo surprised the world at the latest PlayStation State of Play, announcing a pair of projects in June’s Dead or Alive 6: Last Round and the still-to-be-dated sequel for later on. They also wasted no time mending fences with FGC event staff, as they secured a side-event slot at Evo Japan 2026 for Dead or Alive 6. As for Bandai Namco and SoulCalibur? Well, nothing is certain at the moment, but…stay tuned.
Virtua Fighter’s resurgence, meanwhile, has been more of a slow burn. First teased at the 2020 Tokyo Game Show as a “Virtua Fighter x esports” project, Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown (or Virtua Fighter eSports in some regions) was released on the PlayStation 4 in 2021 as a remaster of Final Showdown, courtesy of VF’s new stewards at Ryu Ga Gotoku (RGG) Studio. For years, this would serve as Sega’s way of making VF available on a current platform, while also clearly polling interest in further development for the franchise. It was also notable for its lack of single-player content in a manner reminiscent of Street Fighter V, it was deliberately funneling players into the online experience for lack of anything else to do.* Alongside the more substantial announcement of a proper sequel, Sega would follow up in 2024 with Virtua Fighter 5 REVO, a PC update of Ultimate Showdown with rollback netcode and the game’s first balance updates in nearly 15 years, on top of a competitive tour. Virtua Fighter wasn’t just available again, it was alive again.
*That made sense in this case, as the purpose of the release was to rebuild a long-dormant community, and forcing players to connect with each other was an arguable necessity if this was going to work at all.
That takes us to this release, Virtua Fighter 5 REVO: World Stage. This introduces console versions of REVO (PlayStation owners of Ultimate Showdown can upgrade at a discount) in addition to cross-platform support, and with the introduction of a Switch 2 version in this month, another balance update. World Stage does more than just feed the community with both an influx of players and renewed availability, however; the titular new mode, World Stage, follows up on nothing short of one of the best single-player modes in fighting game history, that being Virtua Fighter 4’s quest mode, which took you on a condensed tour of Japanese arcades with AI opponents based on the real-life tendencies and abilities of players of all levels, all the way up to legends like Homestay Akira and SHU.
With even the Japanese arcade scene in decline (we lost another institution just this week as Namco Sugamo closed its doors after four decades), you won’t be visiting real-life VF meccas like Club Segas or Sega Worlds in this game, such venues giving way to generically-named “booths” like “Shark Pool” and “Shinobi” instead. As a result, something also feels a bit lost with the way the simplified, streamlined menus have replaced the overhead maps and building images from VF4. It’s important to note, though, that the functional experience remains largely unchanged from the PS2, and players of any skill level or ambition should have a good time going from booth to booth taking on their respective resident player pools and unlocking cosmetic items and side tournaments as you progress all the way to the World Stage booth and the VF championship.
Even taking the innate limitations of AI opponents in mind, you will be facing very strong competition as you play through World Stage, and you will run into multiple skill ceilings throughout unless you are already a competitive player a strong knowledge and skill base. This is fine, because another thing Virtua Fighter is known for is its extensive tutorial and training modes to help you develop all the ability you need to both clear the game’s single-player campaign and give a good account of yourself against real competition. Without question, its player development tools have been the class of the genre dating all the way back to Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. If there is any drawback at all, it’s that it is clinical to a fault in its delivery of that information (a common complaint I have with how fighting games teach new players). You’ll have a much better time applying the things you learn in the tutorials than you will actually learning them, so just try to focus in the moment on the mileage you’re going to get out of the skills you’re developing, and the rewards will most certainly come.
Of course, none of this would be worth anything at all if the game it was all built onto wasn’t inherently of an extraordinary quality, but at this point, that’s something you can take for granted with Virtua Fighter. I could go on for pages about its technical, competitive, and cultural accolades, from the way it fostered its own unique culture within the FGC to its very presence in the Smithsonian. VF5 being 20 years old itself arms the developers at RGG Studio with nigh-unprecedented volumes of data to fine-tune an already spectacular fighting game around, and you feel every bit of it with each match you play. That it accomplishes all of this with an extremely simple and easy-to-learn three-button layout – punch, kick, and guard – is even more remarkable now than ever.
The beauty of Virtua Fighter has always been in how quickly it onboards you to spending the rest of your life mastering its nuances. Now, however, all of those tutorials and the powerful CPU opponents you’ll fight on your way through the single-player mode are actually preparing you for something tangible, as the rollback netcode and cross-platform support provide you with immediate access to the whole of Virtua Fighter’s rich and enduring community. That this now includes a Switch 2 version that doesn’t feel even slightly out of place when held up to the PC, PlayStation, and Xbox versions is brilliant, and means that no matter what platform you prefer, you have an inroad to the world of Virtua Fighter.
At a time when 3D fighting games are struggling to reinvent or rediscover themselves, Virtua Fighter 5 REVO: World Stage is steady and refined, never having wandered off-course and continuing to improve and adjust itself over time. It’s hard to even refer to it as VF5’s swan song; an official 2026 tournament season was recently announced, and with, clearly, plenty of time between now and Virtua Fighter 6, whatever shape that may take by the time we actually have it in our hands, Seiji Aoki and his legacy VF team might find plenty of opportunities to improve this legendary title further in the future.
If you feel burned by false promises of long-running franchises going “back to basics,” it’s comforting to know that Virtua Fighter never left its fundamentals behind, and it is all the better for that. The 3D fighting world may finally be healing, and it’s only fitting that the game that started it all is the one to start turning things around.
Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown will go down as a “forever game” and a true icon of the end of the arcade era, but perhaps due to said end of the arcade era, Sega didn’t seem to care to follow up on it, leaving it as the main Virtua Fighter title throughout the entirety of the 2010s.
The 3D fighting genre has not been okay for a while.
Dead or Alive was poised for both commercial and competitive success with Dead or Alive 6 before a very public falling-out between Koei Tecmo and FGC tournament organizers (and some might say the FGC as a whole) in 2019 cut the legs out from under it before it could even release, and the perpetuation of Dead or Alive 5’s predatory DLC model made things even worse for them, resulting in the development roadmap getting cut short and the game dying prematurely.
Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown will go down as a “forever game” and a true icon of the end of the arcade era, but perhaps due to said end of the arcade era, Sega didn’t seem to care to follow up on it, leaving it as the main Virtua Fighter title throughout the entirety of the 2010s. Meanwhile, it was hard to define what went wrong with SoulCalibur. By all accounts, SoulCalibur VI exceeded sales expectations, and marked a strong return to form for the franchise after the dismal and divisive SoulCalibur V (while also serving as an explicit disavowment of SCV by Bandai Namco), but its lack of a follow-up was finally explained in a lengthy tweet by longtime Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada that detailed the culture at Bandai Namco and why the environment there is, at least for the time being, inhospitable to a potential SoulCalibur VII.
This left Tekken as the sole active 3D fighting game franchise, and with Tekken 7 and Tekken 8 representing the brand during those years, things… aren’t going great on that front, with Tekken 8 season 3 so poorly-received that even content creators who have built their entire brand around Tekken have given up on it. It’s truly a perfect time for other IPs to step up and carry the genre, and thankfully, that seems to be exactly what is happening.
Koei Tecmo surprised the world at the latest PlayStation State of Play, announcing a pair of projects in June’s Dead or Alive 6: Last Round and the still-to-be-dated sequel for later on. They also wasted no time mending fences with FGC event staff, as they secured a side-event slot at Evo Japan 2026 for Dead or Alive 6. As for Bandai Namco and SoulCalibur? Well, nothing is certain at the moment, but…stay tuned.
Virtua Fighter’s resurgence, meanwhile, has been more of a slow burn. First teased at the 2020 Tokyo Game Show as a “Virtua Fighter x esports” project, Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown (or Virtua Fighter eSports in some regions) was released on the PlayStation 4 in 2021 as a remaster of Final Showdown, courtesy of VF’s new stewards at Ryu Ga Gotoku (RGG) Studio. For years, this would serve as Sega’s way of making VF available on a current platform, while also clearly polling interest in further development for the franchise. It was also notable for its lack of single-player content in a manner reminiscent of Street Fighter V, it was deliberately funneling players into the online experience for lack of anything else to do.* Alongside the more substantial announcement of a proper sequel, Sega would follow up in 2024 with Virtua Fighter 5 REVO, a PC update of Ultimate Showdown with rollback netcode and the game’s first balance updates in nearly 15 years, on top of a competitive tour. Virtua Fighter wasn’t just available again, it was alive again.
*That made sense in this case, as the purpose of the release was to rebuild a long-dormant community, and forcing players to connect with each other was an arguable necessity if this was going to work at all.
That takes us to this release, Virtua Fighter 5 REVO: World Stage. This introduces console versions of REVO (PlayStation owners of Ultimate Showdown can upgrade at a discount) in addition to cross-platform support, and with the introduction of a Switch 2 version in this month, another balance update. World Stage does more than just feed the community with both an influx of players and renewed availability, however; the titular new mode, World Stage, follows up on nothing short of one of the best single-player modes in fighting game history, that being Virtua Fighter 4’s quest mode, which took you on a condensed tour of Japanese arcades with AI opponents based on the real-life tendencies and abilities of players of all levels, all the way up to legends like Homestay Akira and SHU.
With even the Japanese arcade scene in decline (we lost another institution just this week as Namco Sugamo closed its doors after four decades), you won’t be visiting real-life VF meccas like Club Segas or Sega Worlds in this game, such venues giving way to generically-named “booths” like “Shark Pool” and “Shinobi” instead. As a result, something also feels a bit lost with the way the simplified, streamlined menus have replaced the overhead maps and building images from VF4. It’s important to note, though, that the functional experience remains largely unchanged from the PS2, and players of any skill level or ambition should have a good time going from booth to booth taking on their respective resident player pools and unlocking cosmetic items and side tournaments as you progress all the way to the World Stage booth and the VF championship.
Even taking the innate limitations of AI opponents in mind, you will be facing very strong competition as you play through World Stage, and you will run into multiple skill ceilings throughout unless you are already a competitive player a strong knowledge and skill base. This is fine, because another thing Virtua Fighter is known for is its extensive tutorial and training modes to help you develop all the ability you need to both clear the game’s single-player campaign and give a good account of yourself against real competition. Without question, its player development tools have been the class of the genre dating all the way back to Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. If there is any drawback at all, it’s that it is clinical to a fault in its delivery of that information (a common complaint I have with how fighting games teach new players). You’ll have a much better time applying the things you learn in the tutorials than you will actually learning them, so just try to focus in the moment on the mileage you’re going to get out of the skills you’re developing, and the rewards will most certainly come.
Of course, none of this would be worth anything at all if the game it was all built onto wasn’t inherently of an extraordinary quality, but at this point, that’s something you can take for granted with Virtua Fighter. I could go on for pages about its technical, competitive, and cultural accolades, from the way it fostered its own unique culture within the FGC to its very presence in the Smithsonian. VF5 being 20 years old itself arms the developers at RGG Studio with nigh-unprecedented volumes of data to fine-tune an already spectacular fighting game around, and you feel every bit of it with each match you play. That it accomplishes all of this with an extremely simple and easy-to-learn three-button layout – punch, kick, and guard – is even more remarkable now than ever.
The beauty of Virtua Fighter has always been in how quickly it onboards you to spending the rest of your life mastering its nuances. Now, however, all of those tutorials and the powerful CPU opponents you’ll fight on your way through the single-player mode are actually preparing you for something tangible, as the rollback netcode and cross-platform support provide you with immediate access to the whole of Virtua Fighter’s rich and enduring community. That this now includes a Switch 2 version that doesn’t feel even slightly out of place when held up to the PC, PlayStation, and Xbox versions is brilliant, and means that no matter what platform you prefer, you have an inroad to the world of Virtua Fighter.
At a time when 3D fighting games are struggling to reinvent or rediscover themselves, Virtua Fighter 5 REVO: World Stage is steady and refined, never having wandered off-course and continuing to improve and adjust itself over time. It’s hard to even refer to it as VF5’s swan song; an official 2026 tournament season was recently announced, and with, clearly, plenty of time between now and Virtua Fighter 6, whatever shape that may take by the time we actually have it in our hands, Seiji Aoki and his legacy VF team might find plenty of opportunities to improve this legendary title further in the future.
If you feel burned by false promises of long-running franchises going “back to basics,” it’s comforting to know that Virtua Fighter never left its fundamentals behind, and it is all the better for that. The 3D fighting world may finally be healing, and it’s only fitting that the game that started it all is the one to start turning things around.
by Patrick Mifflin
