VF eSports/Ultimate Showdown was just a PS4 port of Final Showdown. The new eSports 2.0 update/Revo are actually new updates, but since they’re updates to the console ports those don’t have arcade versions.
Virtua Fighter Relationship (VFR) is awesome though. They hold this VFR tournament series that culminates in the Beat-Tribe Cup, a 5v5 team tournament. Next year, VF5 eSports 2.0/Revo is an official tournament for Evo Japan but it’s also, in collaboration with VFR, going to be the 19th (!!!) Beat-Tribe Cup. Beat-Tribe Cup is always a fun watch. VFR also holds other kinds of team tournaments too, like ones where everyone on a team has to be playing the same character. So you can cheer for your favorites.
Ah yeah that’s interesting, I wonder if the arcade players will take to R.E.V.O. or will stick to 5FS.
When VF esports came out I seem to recall there was at least one fairly big JP tournament using it, but that and one well-known Akira player streaming online play was about it as far as I could see at the time on YouTube.
…but I miss a lot. ; ) For instance here’s a Japanese channel still cranking out footage of VF esports (aka “VFes”) online matches:
One nice thing I notice now in the New Virtua Fighter Project teaser gameplay is it doesn’t have any flashes on block and only dull dust flashes on hit, unlike the bright hit flashes (and dust flashes on block) that got added in VFes/VF5US and are still in R.E.V.O.
VF Beat Tribe and Railway Series tournaments were reminding me of something, finally worked out what it was: the Cooperation Cup 3rd Strike tournaments, specifically Yoshihara Motoki’s illustration for the 2019 “17th Cooperation Cup” (5-on-5 format):
In the VF Direct, Sega President and COO Shuji Utsumi said, in English
“This is the first time since 2006 that the original team will be back on it.”
Timestamped embed:
2006 was the release of the original VF5. 5R was 2008 and FS was 2010–so one implication is that the original team wasn’t involved in those updates to 5.
Later in the VF Direct, “SEGA Director of RGG Studio / Executive Producer” Masayoshi Yokoyama said, in translation,
“For a number of years now, we have been working on this project together with the Virtua Fighter developers as a united team.”
Yeah, there are lots of nice team tournament series in Japan. I’d imagine a lot of the VF scene lives in the arcades, so they’re naturally just going to play the arcade version since it was the same as the console version. Now that Revo is actually a different game it will be interesting to see how they adjust.
I noticed this too, but I actually really liked the flashes of light from Final Showdown as an un-obtrusive variation on hitsparks (aside from a little bit of a sweat-like particles flying on counterhits). The colors communicate what kind of hit it was: normal hits are white, side turned hits are blue, and counter hits are yellow.
You can see the Final Showdown hit lights here:
Compared to eSports/Ultimate Showdown/Revo, which added more traditional fighting game hit sparks (with a different color scheme from the previous hit lights).
I like the clean look of the hit lights, but I imagine hit sparks can be seen as a more interesting visual element for casual spectators. I wonder how true or important that actually ended up being. VF6 looks like it toned back the colored hit sparks but still has a strong hit effect of some sort for big attacks.
Yeah the old heads at vf dot com were hating big-time on the VF5US hit sparks (I was, too ^ _^) and certainly in retrospect it’s easy to see them as part of producer Seiji Aoki’s Tekkenification of VF5; after 5US was released, with its big hit sparks, Aoki started palling around with Tekken producer Harada in Harada’s “Harada’s Bar” videos ( https://www.youtube.com/@HaradasBar )–perhaps this started as a way to try to get more players over to VFes, but it culminated in the horror of Tekken costume DLC being put into that game. ; D So it ended up being a masterclass in manipulation and marketing by Harada, seemingly, over a perhaps slightly inexperienced Sega producer: Aoki’s only previous Producer credit was 2018’s “Border Break”; prior to that he had been an CG artist on various games. (Aoki also promised, before the Tekken DLC, that es/US would get all the costume customization pieces VF5FS had–it shipped with just a fraction of them–and it did NOT end up getting them, booooooo.)
I may be way off coming from Tekken but don’t hitsparks allow you to visually read the move state without having to rely on character animations which can be inconsistent in some scenarios. I always thought of it as a way to give a universal visual language to collisions. They definitely go overboard in some games (Tekken lol).
That’s why VF started using them, I suppose–but not as sprites, rather just as flashes of colored lighting on the character models, color-coded to correspond to various types of hits as @Drem described above. That started in VF4, I think, although in the PS2 version you could turn them off in the game’s options–by VF4 Evolution for PS2 you could no longer turn them off, which I found rather annoying, as I’m not really 1337 enough to profit from them.
They’re pretty mellow in VF5FS though and I suppose I’ve come to sort of enjoy them there, like, when the AI gets a yellow or blue flash character model lighting flash hitting me it’s like oh DANG I just got owned.
I suppose flashes of color didn’t fit the NVFP teaser aesthetic; I wonder if they’ll be in the final game, or if it’ll stick to just grey dust bursts on hit.
I’d imagine originally they were added just to look cool, to add impact to attacks, and to mask any wonky looking overlapping/collisions of character models. Like I believe the hit sparks in Tekken were originally supposed to be blood (they were green in Tekken 1, then red in Tekken 2). I’m sure that philosophy has evolved a lot cross companies, across years, across games, as people thought about how to integrate that stuff into the game design.
I’m not one hundred percent sure I completely understand what you mean by “reading character states”, but I think the most common usage of hitsparks in terms of gameplay is helping communicate attack types, for sure. Stronger or heavier attacks often get stronger effects. Blocking effects are different from hit effects, so that’s part of what communicates whether an attack hit or not.
But then there are also games with variations, like in games where you have both character that fight with their limbs and characters that fight with weapons. Each weapon type could have different hit sparks (sharp, bladed weapons might get long streaks in their hit sparks while punches, kicks, and blunt weapons might get more rounded effects). In that case it’s just a visual personality difference rather than something meaningful to playing the game.
I think you’re probably reading too much into it. I’m sure game devs hang around with each other all the time, especially smaller genres like fighting games (during Covid a lot of those fighting game industry devs held a yearly stream together to talk about their projects and game development in general). And I don’t think Tekken really needs Virtua Fighter for advertisement at this point (if anything it would have been the other way around). I think it’s just an amicable collaboration for fun and to cross-promote both franchises.
I guess I was using it broadly to indicate block effects as well but also counters or key moves. I remember in the past thinking it was kinda arbitrary when character-specific sparks in Tekken were or were not attached to a move. I think it usually just means a certain amount of damage or to differentiate similar-looking attacks from one another.
The flashes that particularly got to my eyeballs in previous Tekken games–I think they’re probably still in this latest one–are the pinpoint bright purple flashes on throws, of all things. ; )
VF esports did get an arcade release simultaneously with the PS4 release, and the 2.0 patch was released same day in the arcades according to the website.
Oh, huh! Whenever I’ve checked out JP VF5 streams in the past few years, I feel like I always saw VF5FS. I wonder if eSports is distributed on a separate digital platform from FS so people can’t just switch over on the same machines. I’d like to think accounts and character customizations carry over, even if they don’t have all customzation items on consoles.
it runs on a different generation of Sega’s arcade PC platform so it is not directly upgradable/uses a different cab and the only data you could carry over was your win/loss count (for 5 months and then they shut that service down)
my guess is if you’re playing in an established VF5FS location already, they might not even have one of the compatible cabs on site or only have one or two of them tops
apparently my gamescope settings have been wrong on the Ally since day 1 and games have been underperforming significantly when connected to a monitor. it’s now fixed! yay PC gaming!
