... but there's bloody loads more to do!
So what have we got then?Well, lets’ kick off with the story. J6 captured Vanessa for the next step of the Dural program but she disappeared before they could make her the next Dural, but they managed to transplant her combat data into the production model Dural... hang on, is any of this making any sense to anyone? Look, all you need to know is that you’re fighting in a tournament and you have to kick the other guy’s ass before he kicks yours, ok?
To this end you get a choice of characters to play as, each with a variety of attributes and a bloody immense list of moves. There’s 17 different characters in all and as you progress you can unlock different items for each one, though these are limited to mundane stuff like outfits, jewellery and the like and really have no impact on the gameplay itself. You get two new characters, Eileen, who uses Monkey Kung Fu (sadly there’s a complete lack of raspberry blowing or poo-flinging) and El Blaze, a lucha libre style Mexican wrestler.
Click for larger imageIf you have a quick browse through the instruction manual you’ll see that each fighter has a simply enormous set of moves and the dojo is the ideal place to try these out. You’ve got two modes here, one of free fighting where you can just pound away at the buttons to see what happens or you can opt for the command mode where you’re told what buttons to press to complete a move before moving on to the next one. I’d thoroughly recommend spending some time in the dojo because even though you might get lucky in your first few bouts, knowing some more advanced moves and how to counter attacks will be critical later on.
Besides the two player option for one on one brawling, you’ve got the arcade and quest modes. Arcade is pretty much what you’d expect it to be, you just keep fighting various CPU opponents until you lose. Quest is where the single player will likely spend most of their time though, as this is where you unlock new items and work your way through the opponents in an ordered fashion.
When you first step into the arena is when Virtua Fighter 5 starts to shine... not just graphically, but in the gameplay too..
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