Virtua Quest (Playstation 2)

The first skill you get. And it's super shiny!

The Virtua Fighter series is a long-standing well-respected fighting series that focuses less on being wild, and seems to put itself more into serious, realistic fighting. (aside from broken arms still working fine) As with many well-established franchises however, this one got a strange, hyper-crazy spin-off called Virtua Quest. It delved into the world of outrageous enemies and moves, and turned into a beat-em-up rather than a one-on-one classic fighter. Was this for the best? Continue reading. Do it.

Virtua Quest takes place in the not-too-distant future, on the man-made island of Acropolis, where people in this time period have grown tired of their actual lives, and have taken to living inside virtual reality, nowadays called the Nexus. Strangely, the servers they live in just represent normal stuff like shopping malls or cities, although a VR server is a good place to safely explore a jungle. Well... it's not so safe here. (Even more strange is that the people living like this haven't become horrendously fat as a result of technically sitting on their ass all day. Everyone is miraculously skinny.)

You are the young, suprisingly deep-voiced (and spiky-haired enough to rival Dragonball Z) Sei, and you are new to the Nexus. In order to make money for his friend Hayami to finish building an air-bike for a race - this plot point disappears very fast - Sei must take on the role of a Hunter. What Hunters in Nexus do is go to abandoned servers, where only security programs remain, and then find bits of data lying around which they can later sell to make real money, or for the purpose of gameplay, upgrade their own skills.

The aspect of the reality outside of Nexus however will never come into your gameplay. You'll never find yourself leaving the Nexus except in cutscenes (and even then Sei just dicks around his room and computer), and personally I would have liked to done some things to get Sei off his ass. Yknow, like ride that air bike damnit! But you're stuck inside the Nexus. So the way this games level progression works, is that the Hunter site is your hub, where you can talk to people for small missions, buy upgrades and tools, take training, and most importantly choose which server you want to go to. Servers are just levels that you must run through from start to finish, but when you enter a level for the first time you can't leave till the end. The reason for being unable to "logout" the first time you go in, is that every server you log in to is taken over by a nice ol' evil corporation named Judgement Six, and there's a big baddy called a Root User blocking your exit. Sei learns this in about five minutes of joining his first server after he meets up with a blue-haired girl Toka who warns him to leave, and once he finds himself unable to logout she tells him he must defeat the Root User. Then she leaves mysteriously and you're left on your own to fight through the level towards mister big boss man.

Now how you actually fight is a different story. It's a rather simple system, but it is more complicated than most beat-em-ups. To the point where you're able to put variety into your combos, but you won't find yourself having to vigorously memorize commands or forgetting them. You have your basics. Left analog stick to move, circle button to do a basic attack that can turn into a three-hit attack (or more if you buy certain upgrades) square to block and X button to jump, and even double-jump. You can attack in the air or on the ground, but you have special abilities called Virtua Souls.

These are rumored powerful discs in the Hunter world, and Sei is the only one that can see these special bits of data and throughout the game you will find them. Some from cutscenes, some from doing a bit of well-rewarded exploration. Should you find one, you are thrust into a single isolated room with a famous Virtua Fighter. Turns out all those tournaments in the whole series were just to study the fighters' moves and use that data to create super-soldiers. Who knew? Regardless, once you find the data corresponding to a fighter, you will battle this person. Should you defeat them (and sometimes that can be nigh-impossible) they will teach you a powerful move straight from their own roster.

All these moves fall into different categories. Strike, Jump, Dash, Throw, Floater and Charge. You can equip one move in each of these categories at a time, for a total of six powerful Virtua Fighter moves, all of which are mapped to different combinations of the triangle button. For example, pressing Triangle and Circle together will perform whatever throw move you have equipped, and there certainly is a good variety of moves. Yet you must be willing to explore the level thoroughly as well as going back to previous levels for ones you couldn't physically obtain before. Every time you use these moves, it takes up a little bit of your SP (Synapse Power).

When this bar drains, you are unable to perform any Virtua Soul moves until it refills either of it's own accord (slowly over time) or by using your basic attack on enemies and things. (which is much faster) Also linked to your SP is a move called Synapse Break which you can initiate with the R1 button. By doing this, you go into a hyper-mode that causes enemies you send flying to float in the air in slow motion for a long time, allowing you to string vicious combos as well as having the SP bar absorb any damage you take directly. So, that's pretty much how you fight.

The less hostile aspects of your character comes in his ability to climb about the environment. He can grab onto ledges, shimmy, run on walls, and most importantly use his wire. The wire is a long, florescent pink whip that shoots out of Sei's glove and, while it can be used to attach to enemies and fling yourself to them quickly for more combos, it is mainly used to grab onto floating orbs throughout the level. (And it also provides plenty of suggestive humor.) By doing this you can travel in a few different ways. Yellow orbs simply swing you back and forth and you must time the jump properly, green ones will take you straight where you need to go, purple ones will swing you in a vicious circle which requires your most pristine timing, and anything else I may have forgotten. Unfortunately, these orbs are scripted to specific spots, and your wire isn't good for much else making it a rather unexplored aspect of the game.

And this wire is where I'll start with the games control issues. For me, I do enjoy punching or kicking a guy in the face with an overzealous flashy move but the controls are stiff and often times get in the way, even so far as causing you to lose. The wire and camera being some of the biggest offenders. The wire is controlled with the right analog stick, but flicking said stick in any direction will still cause the wire to shoot out only where Sei is facing (thankfully it locks onto important stuff) and the only way to manually control the camera is by pressing the L2 button which repositions it directly behind Sei. These two functions are hardly mapped well and with the functionality of the wire they could have well been switched. Leaving the wires' mechanics untouched and allowing the right analog stick to freely control the camera. But that isn't how it works, and it's a big offender when you're trying to see what you're doing. Not to mention I've fallen off ledges countless times trying to fumble around the camera.

Other control problems come directly into your fighting. There's no move-canceling function, and combined with the fact that a lot of your moves have a deadly-long cooldown phase, you'll find yourself attacking a giant robot only to see him swinging his arm and you have no way of avoiding it because you're already attacking. There is a dodge-roll move you can buy, but occasionally it's a little unresponsive due to being mapped right onto your block button; Though it can get you quickly out of a jam, often you'll find yourself diving right into an angry fist. None of this prevents me from enjoying the game like the guilty pleasure it is, but I'll admit it's basically a game breaker.

Finally, the enemies you fight are a bit of a downer as well. No doubt the bosses are fun, all the way from the blonde super-Terminator in the first level, right up to the multi-tiered final boss. But the enemies in-between are nothing to fire up about. It's basically the same few types of enemies over, and over again that have been shamefully reskinned and had their health upped. It's a let-down and makes you get bored real quick and easy.

But despite it's flawed execution, the game does at least become innovative with some of it's concepts. While these don't do much at all to redeem it's faulty controls, they can still be appreciated. The upgrade system for one is rather unique in how it works. Instead of just buying upgrades more, and more, you have a 3 by 3 by 3 cube of squares for an upgrade grid. Excluding the very middle block which you can't use, you have a total of 26 blocks to work with, and upgrades come in the form of what look like Tetris pieces I guess. The more powerful the block, the more space it's likely to take up. You can buy these, or find special ones hidden throughout the different worlds. It's a system that works well, and even puts in a bit of puzzle-solving should you reaaally want to squeeze in that extra attack power.

In the middle of all that, you also have a cute little floating companion named Bit. You can find food to feed Bit to change three statistics on him, all relevant to what you feed him. Depending on how his stats raise, or lower, he may transform from bunny-themed, to a dog or octopus or bear or cat or whatever. Each different Bit will help you in a different way. It's small, but it's actually pretty cool. Unfortunately it's likely you'll find yourself sticking with the default as he helps you find important items.

The other good end of the game comes in how the story interacts with levels. Or at least that's how I'll word it. With the whole "virtual reality and servers" theme, the game can feel free to jump straight from a shopping mall, to a construction site, to a medieval japan level with no transition needed, and this prevents the game from repeating its own design throughout the full experience and allows the art direction to be colorful, pretty and at least does the work just fine despite how desolate some levels are. Each level can at least be appreciated for as much as the graphics will allow. My personal favourite level is the final one, and (note, possible incoming spoilers) it doesn't try to represent any Earth structure, it's simply the inside of a computer. Black, blue, grids, floating streams of data, the entire last level is just all too cool. I wish it wasn't one of those levels that you can't actually come back from, because when you finish, it gives you the "The End" screen and you have to reset your PS2. But regardless, as a final level should be, the last one is my absolute favourite.

Graphically wise, you can put this game in at average. The character models are designed well enough, the world is colorful, textures do their job rather well without aliasing, and it's all done with just a little polish. Just a little. There's nothing spectacular here, but nothing that'll cause your eyeballs to hurl either. Not much to say there. Soundwise the game isn't too amazing either, probably worse even. While most of the sounds are okay, some of them come out dull, quiet, or just not right. The acting is on another shelf though, so lets tackle the cutscenes all in one.

In cutscenes, you'll definitely find no blockbuster names or astounding, immersive fluid body animation. It's all cheesy, and quite typical of a lot of Japanese media, with over-extended emotions and whispering being a totally unheard of concept between these people. Watching the characters awkwardly spaz, yell, and go into unneeded deep thought can be humorous to the point of "it's so bad it's good", but there's moments where it's just hard to watch and you'll keep an eye on your bedroom door should anyone burst in and witness what unholy mass of crap you're watching.

FINAL SAY:
Virtua Quest is at least ambitious and there's things in here you can appreciate, but it's best you borrow this and play before deciding if it'll be a guilty pleasure style game for you. Its high points are the concepts, unique upgrade system and the fact it rewards exploration as well as giving good replay value with hidden items. Unfortunately it lacks the finesse in it's controls to hold up on it's own, with unresponsive commands, deadly-long animations and things that need the rust taken off them. Don't get me wrong, I do like the game and will play it, but I'm willing to admit it's just not good. With the concept it put forward, SEGA should have teamed up the thinkers, with some better programmers to make an actual good game. You can pass on this, it won't hurt my feelings. But I'll still be playing it regardless because I find it fun. I just won't heavily recommend it.