Virtua Quest (PS2)
When presented with the concept of an action-adventure game based on the Virtua Fighter series, your first instinct might be to assume it would focus on fleshing out the cast of the fighting game series. Very few fighting games take the time to really develop their characters and story modes are often excuses to string together battles rather than an engaging plot, so a full on adventure could be a chance to get to know these characters better and tell a deeper story. However, it seems Sega’s flagship fighting series went for a much stranger approach with their Virtua Fighter adventure, that being a game that barely features the main characters in any sort of meaningful role.
The plot instead revolves around a virtual reality world called Nexus. Used for many entertainment and business purposes, it is also visited by a contingent of people called treasure hunters who scour parts of the virtual universe that were abandoned by others for lost data, turning these data chips in for cash they can then use in the real world. Virtua Quest’s adventure begins when Sei decides to take up this line of work to help his best friend Hayami. However, as Sei starts to increase his ranking as a treasure hunter and explores new abandoned parts of the Nexus, he soon discovers the Nexus and real world are both in danger thanks to the machinations of an evil organization familiar to Virtua Fighter fans: Judgment Six. While Sei is just a young man of little experience, he proves to be the strongest opposition the group has faced due to his ability to utilize Virtua Souls, the digitized data of characters from Virtua Fighter allowing him to tap into their special moves and abilities and conceptually making him the ultimate fighter.
Many parts of this set-up end up manifesting in weak or uninteresting ways in the actual adventure. Exploring the Nexus involves selecting the appropriate missions from a terminal, and while the premise is these are areas in a virtual world, some seem to entirely forget this. There is somehow a nature preserve in this digital world, and some locations seem to simply exist for no clear reason like a place based around ancient Japan. There are some locations that do play into the idea of the digital world in interesting ways like a place where architects would test their designs, but regardless of whether the game justifies its level set in some ruins or a shipping port well, they are mostly just reproductions of areas you’d see in the real world. It does embrace the digital nature of the world on occasion, and little touches like firewalls blocking access to areas make sure it has some virtual touches to all the levels, but it doesn’t really feel like you’re exploring a computer environment most of the time.
The plot has enough mystery to it and the enemies play their role as villains well enough, but many twists can be seen coming a mile away and there is only really one character with an interesting arc, the mysterious girl named Toka being the main source of info on the events in the Nexus and the actions of other characters routinely relate to her importance in the story. Sadly, the vocal performances for the characters are pretty poor with even our main character Sei having a rather generic voice with no emotional range. His closest friend Hayami is always locked into an excitable tone it seems, and even side characters like a young lady named Fan seem to try and fit all their words in one breath or otherwise come off as rather unnatural because of poor speech pacing.
As for the Virtua Souls, these are integrated into the gameplay in an interesting manner. Whenever you find one of these in the Nexus, you will be teleported to a digital arena where you meet characters from the Virtua Fighter series like Akira, Jacky Bryant, Pai Chan, and Wolf. If you are able to defeat these characters in a one on one battle, they’ll teach you one of their special moves, some even appearing multiple times to give you additional attack options. These martial arts techniques are stronger than the basic attack combos Sei would use otherwise, so these definitely help spice up your combat options. You can only have so many of the Virtua Soul attacks set at one time, the player only able to set one of the learned techniques per attack type such as one special move for attacking while jumping or one for attacking while dashing. There are no other major limitations set on which attacks you choose to set, the player able to customize the moveset how they like from there, but there could be sacrifices made since the moves come with three different star rankings that indicate their strength and ability to break certain objects. However, you sometimes might want to stick with a weaker special attack if it slips into combos better or will more reliably hit enemy targets.
Virtua Souls also give you some other special abilities such as spending some health to call in the fighter for a brief but powerful move that is often good for clearing crowds, but outside of some dedicated areas, you likely will want to hold onto your health since healing up can often be a problem in Virtua Quest. Virtua Souls are often your reward for exploring a level more thoroughly with many optional attacks to be found, but there is one underwhelming part to this system, and that’s how easy the battles are with the famous fighters. Almost all of the Virtua Fighter cameos can be handled with ease since they all fall for your basic aerial attack combo pretty easily, and if they do block it, you can usually grab them to damage them instead or unleash a special move before they can retaliate. This attack method can work on strong enemies as well, but the bosses working for Judgment Six usually ask for a bit more from the player than such basic tactics.
Boss enemies are usually introduced right at the end of a level so they often feel rather shallow in terms of their role in the main plot, but they come with a variety of gimmicks to make them stand out. The first boss is a cake walk, but then you have a trio of fighters you face all at once, a teleporting ninja, a lady who turns invisible and will summon giants to back her up, and a seemingly normal businessman who then begins to roll around wildly in his arena. Some fights like the ninja and businessman can be tedious because of the difficulty in finding safe windows of attack, especially if the last save point was a ways back so a death requires fighting through basic baddies to get to them again. The boss rush near the end of the game is absurd because of how tough it gets without healing chances or save points after an already long gauntlet of strong enemies beforehand. The boss rush seems to pick its three bosses at random too, so you have to hope you luck out with something like the robot whose moves are easy to watch and react to instead of the ninja who can shave off huge amounts of your health bar if he catches you by surprise.
Most fights with regular enemies will go without issue, and so long as there’s chances to heal up or opportunities to avoid being overwhelmed, the regular parts of levels provide serviceable combat and a decent amount of challenge. However, platforming also gets involved, and it is very fortunate there are only three moments in the game that really get demanding with it since it is incredibly finicky and hard to control. To upgrade your hunter license at three different points in the game you do platforming gauntlets that expose all the issues the related mechanics have. Wall runs don’t always trigger properly, areas that require double jumps often require you to execute them perfectly for maximum height, and the electric whip Sei can use to swing around has camera issues, momentum troubles, and often needs to be done just right so you land on a small platform or are in range swing point that has a small window of time where you can successfully latch onto it. The hunter license tests put all these problematic elements above bottomless pits so you have to retry them after the inevitable failures, but at least real levels often put actual surfaces to land on below or something like water that just takes away a bit of health and sets you back on the ground. It still doesn’t work well, the swinging especially, but these gauntlets and a few rare moments like trying to perfectly land on canoes after wall running and swinging about are the only huge examples of bad platforming in the main experience. There are, however, some puzzle systems to be found in certain levels, and while these do diversify how you tackle the mostly linear stages, some have annoying touches like obnoxiously tight timers to deal with.
There are a few other small systems in play such as the nearly negligible digital companion Bit. You can feed it to change its form and get extra perks like it seeking out treasure or attacking enemies weakly, but the equipment system is far more interesting. Items found in levels or bought with data chips are equipped by being placed inside a cube. The items all are made up of small cubes themselves, so you need to arrange them so they can fit properly inside the bigger box. These can be things like simple stat upgrades, extra options like the ability to attack enemies while their down (although this rarely executes properly and thus isn’t worth it), or even a one time use revival option. Like the Virtua Soul techniques it is an interesting degree of customization, but it doesn’t help alleviate some of the problems with the combat that swings from repetitive to frustrating no matter how you try to approach it. Usually when the enemy groups are small or mix together a good batch of abundant weak enemies with a few strong ones it can be a good place to use your special skills, but later levels start to toss together frustrating foes with no regard for how you’re meant to manage them, and since save points and healing start becoming rarer, it gives Virtua Quest a really bad back half.
THE VERDICT: The potential of the Virtua Fighter brand to be explored in greater depth is squandered in Virtua Quest, a game that could almost pass for something entirely unrelated. The plot is basic but the weak voice acting makes a little worse than it should be, the platforming has abysmal controls but thankfully doesn’t dominate the experience, and the combat struggles to properly engage the player. Customizing Sei gives you a surprising layer of depth to how you fight thanks to the different Virtua Souls and cube-based inventory, and some areas can throw together interesting fights or decent puzzles or challenges, but it’s not enough to sweep away the many failures elsewhere. Besides some moments like the excruciating hunter license challenges and the ridiculously punishing final level, Virtua Quest is mostly a game that feels like its floundering to implement decent ideas and doesn’t quite hit the mark often enough to make playing it engaging.
And so, I give Virtua Quest for PlayStation 2…
A BAD rating. Certainly teetering on the line to being terrible just on the awful design featured in its platforming gauntlets and brutal finale, Virtua Quest is mostly just rather boring. Some new boss or environmental challenge might make you perk up for a bit, and some enemy groups are put together smartly to be tough without being frustrating, but the game lacks consistency save for how easy beating the Virtua Fighter characters turns out to be. Trimming away a lot of the poorly controlled platforming and designing more enemies or bosses that better test your customizable set of techniques would go a long way to redeeming Virtua Quest, but the concept behind the game is perhaps better off completely erased and replaced with something original and better fitting. The Virtua Fighter connection is rather tenuous and feels more like you’re being fooled into playing this almost unrelated action game, and the Nexus hardly feels like the digital world it’s meant to be because the idea is embraced in half measures.
Either embracing the story and setting fully or taking the more interesting gameplay systems into a different type of game would benefit Virtua Quest more than throwing them together into the muddled game we did end up with. Putting more time into helping them gel would of course be an option as well, but Virtua Quest seems a little aimless in its design, hitting its better moments by chance and mostly settling into mediocrity or outright awful play when its weaknesses are forced into the spotlight. While there are plenty of tolerable or even mildly good moments to point out during this virtual quest, it’s hard to really say a player will find themselves pleased with the overall experience due to how blatant its flaws turn out to be.