What’s within my soul? Virtua Fighter.

SoulCalibur IV has been my latest videogame obsession.  The SoulCalibur franchise- in particular, SoulCalibur II – holds a special place in my heart.  SoulCalibur II was the first 3D fighter I’ve played to any amount of depth, and it was probably the title that got me hooked on the entire genre.  My recollection of that time is still clear.  Being an underunitting senior in college, I had just recently begun to delve into the then-current-gen of gaming.  The memories of gaming before then consisted primarily of long and intense Counterstrike sessions on the campus servers.  I had acquired a PS2 not so long ago, so I was itching to buy games that sounded even remotely interesting.  I had read somewhere that SoulCalibur II was a great game, and seeing as I had time to spare, I figured I’d try it out.  Before long, my roommate and I had developed a healthy rivalry, and we even got a friend living down the hall to join in on the competition.  It was my Mitsurugi versus my roommate’s Ivy and our friend’s Astaroth.  We all had no idea what we were doing at first, but we soon became adept at the nuances of the game.  We were too cheap (and too ignorant, I guess) to buy an arcade stick, so we learned to play the game with the PS2 controllers on our laps, our huge fingers crunched together over the tiny square array of face buttons.  Few nights passed that year without the sounds of us screaming at each other echoing through the halls.  SoulCalibur II became our go-to game, and we continued to play it up until the time that we graduated at the end of the year.  My roommate later secured his own PS2, and I bought him his own copy of SoulCalibur II for Christmas as a remembrance of good times.

And there was one particular incident that stands out during my college SoulCalibur excursion.  It turned out that a couple of guys downstairs had also been honing their SoulCalibur II skills.  One night, they heard us howling in the throes of competition and peeked in on our games.  One guy, notable around the dorm for his scrawny physique and brash cockiness, started talking some subtle smack – the passive-agressive kind that made us out to be incompetent while asserting that he could surely do better.  So I played him.  He played a feisty Cassandra, but I promptly put him in his place with my Mitsurugi.  It wasn’t very hard.  He, of course, made some lame excuse about warming up or something.  So I played against him again – the second time with my Yoshimitsu.  My Yoshimitsu was horrible, but I had been working in secret to hone a particularly humiliating tactic – the suicide kill.  It was one of the more satisfying ways of defeating someone.  The setup I had practiced involves doing a rolling kick to launch the opponent.  As the opponent falls from the sky, Yoshimitsu executes his signature suicide move, stabbing his own sword through his stomach in order to hit the falling opponent, whose landing trajectory just happened to be situated right where the penetrating sword would emerge.  Of course, Yoshimitsu takes a significant amount of damage with that move, but it could still be used to inflict an equally significant amount of damage on the opponent.  So you can imagine the looks of horror that resulted when Mr. All-That fatally ate the self-bloodied end of Yoshimitsu’s blade.

Anyway, those are times gone.  I refrained from purchasing SoulCalibur III due to a save game corruption bug I had heard about from another friend that experienced it firsthand.  After college, there were no more intense SoulCalibur sessions – fighting games took a backseat for a couple of years.

Then I finally landed a programming job at a game studio.

There, the talk was all about “Virtua Fighter”.  The name itself sounded too stupid to possibly be any good.  I tried to recall where I had come in contact with it – and then I remembered.  A friend had come over one night to play a marathon session of Guitar Hero 2.  When we were all rocked out, we threw in a couple of fighting games and dueled each other using the PS2 guitar controllers.  One of those games was Virtua Fighter.  I had a vague memory of it being slow and clunky.  It didn’t take us long to pop SoulCalibur back into the PS2.  Rocking out to the flashy weapon effects was much more gratifying.

Anyway, at this new company, all mentions of SoulCalibur were met with distant looks of apathy.  No one actually stepped up to explain what made Virtua Fighter better.  They did, however, invite me to their lunchtime Virtua Fighter 4 league.  They must’ve figured it’d be more effective if I felt the difference for myself.  My coworkers had all selected a main character, and they suggested mine be Jacky, as no one was currently using him as their main.  They also thought he was a good “beginner” character.  A coworker explained the game as having inputs more similar to SoulCalibur than Tekken, except that Virtua Fighter was more “staccato.”  And so I started my journey of learning an entirely different fighting game.  My first months were pretty brutal.  While they took it easy on me for a few games, there were many more games in which they mercilessly pounded me again and again.  It didn’t help that I kept inputting Guard Impacts by instinct.  It would’ve been very easy to just give up then and there, but heck – I had nothing else to do during my lunch break.  Any kind of gaming was better than the boredom I endured at my old enterprise software job.  So I continued to play despite the fierce competition and my rapidly deteriorating win/loss ratio.

The big thing I noticed that set my Virtua Fighter experience apart from my SoulCalibur one was the extreme technicality with which my coworkers described the play.  I’d heard of frame counts in passing, but I had always thought that to be useless information – after all, who can actually measure individual frames during the course of a game, anyway?  But my coworkers diligently familiarized me with the concepts of frame advantage and disadvantage.  They taught me the difference between hits and counter hits.  They showed me which moves were throw-guaranteed.  They demonstrated the indispensable utility of the 2P and 6P.  They explained tech-rolling, sabakis, the rising game, and the nitaku.  It was the world of hardcore fighting that I had never heretofore seen.  It was a whole new level of thinking for me.  Elegance was no longer dicatated to me by the flashiness of the moves or some insanely high combo hit counter – the true spectacles to behold were subtle yet extremely skilled displays of technical mastery and superior yomi.  Even though blades did not gleam with fire and guarding did not flash white hot light, there were yet more magnificent things to behold, as long as you knew what to look for.

It took a while, but after enough time (about a year’s worth of daily training), I rose to an average level within our little company league.  There were still the three or so coworkers (all of which were very active in the online Virtua Fighter community) that could regularly decimate me, but even against them, I’d eek out the occasional victory on those days when they were a bit off of their game.  We eventually migrated from Virtua Fighter 4 Evo to Virtua Fighter 5, expensing the purchase of a PS3 to the company just so we could all play that one game.  We imported the Japanese version of the game and two PS3 Hori sticks and began the slow process of learning the new movelists and familiarizing ourselves with the new OM, clash mechanics, and zero-frame throws.  It was especially difficult for me, as I decided to move on from Jacky to El Blaze, whose playstyle was very different (and for whom no one could really give me pointers).  But soon enough, I was holding my own again.  Eventually, I had the honor of playing a game in person against notable Virtua Fighter community moderator Srider – my El Blaze against his Wolf.  He promptly beat me, of course, but I like to think it was a respectable match – maybe even a close one.  Maybe.

Eventually, the company league died down as competitive frustration finally took its toll and people moved on to other pursuits, but the skills I learned from the game and from my coworkers stayed with me.  It’s easy to see now how David Sirlin drew a lot of inspiration and life lessons from his tournament fighting game experiences.

It’s been months since I last played Virtua Fighter to any competitive degree, so my fighting game itch has been in dire need of scratching. And as you all know, the next SoulCalibur iteration has finally arrived.  It’s shiny and it’s packed with lots of new features.  But is it really the fighting game I’ve been looking for?  Yes and no.  Undoubtedly, its wealth of activities and unlockables can keep me occupied for hours on end.  The skill point system is amazing.  Mixing and matching skills is reminiscent of creating Guild Wars character builds.  The custom character creator is an endless source of entertainment, as I’ve recently become enamored with recreating famous characters/people.  (Yes, famous re-creations have been covered extensively on several blogs, but it doesn’t make it any less intriguing.)  Yoshimitsu’s suicide combo is still fully functional, and it feels even easier to execute than what I remember. (1K, 2A+K, if you’re wondering… though I’m not sure if air control can prevent it.)  And of course, the same old SoulCalibur gameplay is still intact (albeit with the questionable additions of Critical Finishers and equipment destruction).  But after playing it intensely for a week now, I can’t help but notice the vast gulf between it and its slightly less mainstream sibling.

The self-professed hardcore could argue endlessly about the depth and balance of their respective fighting game.  Sure, there’s a lot of complex terminology among the Virtua Fighter community, but every community develops its own esoteric vocabulary.  Every fighting game’s mechanics have been dissected to the n’th degree by its loyalists, so it’s hard to really say that one fighting system is superior to the others.  Even Smash Brothers Brawl has its hardcore elements.  So I’m not even going to attempt to prove that Virtua Fighter is more “hardcore” or more balanced than the rest of its peers.  But I think I’ve finally found how to explain what my coworkers could not – I can point out the one thing that puts Virtua Fighter a league ahead of its competition: the wealth and accuracy of publically available information.  I’ve checked caliburforum.com multiple times.  There are no comprehensive move lists that even come close to the kind of organized information that is readily available on VFDC.  The Virtua Fighter community has done an absolutely superb job of disseminating information.  The Virtua Fighter move lists include frame counts, frame advantages/disadvantages on hit and counter hit, damage values, special attack properties, knockdown/stagger/crumple effects, escape/evade inputs, and even sobering effects against Shun.  It also doesn’t hurt that the Virtua Fighter community has compiled a huge, comprehensive wiki detailing every one of the game’s mechanics, and that I can easily browse a centralized collection of the known and proven combos for a character, as opposed to searching through an endless number of forum posts and filtering out the facts from the speculation.

The sheer volume of information ensures that no player is forced into guesswork regarding the effectiveness of any particular move.  This kind of knowledge base is critical to high-level play and is absolutely indispensable when training and learning proper reactions.  There’s a good reason that a pile of printed move lists always sat next to the television in the company game room.  It takes a few seconds to look at the move list and find out that Akira’s high punch keeps beating mine because his last move had advantage on block, whereas with SoulCalibur, I’m still left guessing as to whether Mitsurugi’s 3A is too slow to beat the opponent’s move or if I just buffered it incorrectly.  With Virtua Fighter, I can actually glance at the data and determine definitively that, for instance, El Blaze’s 3P+K is fast enough to be safe after blocking a low punch, and I can easily confirm without a doubt that his shutdown knee is, in fact, throw-guaranteed.

Furthermore, as an engineer, I revel in having that kind of detailed information on hand because it exposes the guts of the system in a way that allows a player to plan optimal reactions to a lot of the possible situations.  “If he guards the string, I can terminate it midway and throw him; if he anticipates the throw and tries to attack, I’ll finish the string with a delayed knee and stagger him; from there, I can try to crumple him if I don’t think he’ll recover from the stagger in time; otherwise, I can stick with a small combo; if he crumples, I can do one of two low throws; if his yomi is good today, I can opt for a safe combo instead.”  It’s exactly like coding branching control paths.  Perhaps it was no coincidence that all but a couple of our company’s Virtua Fighter players were programmers.

So as much as I’ve derived a lot of entertainment from SoulCalibur, I can’t help but see myself returning to Virtua Fighter in the long haul.  That’s what’s within my soul.