Probably I have a too rough taste to appreciate Virtua Fighter refined fighting techniques…
Apart from classical modes you can find in every beat’em up (Story, Versus, Time Attack, Survival…), Kumite mode is the only real innovation, and it lets the player to create his virtual fighter: after beating a lot of opponents it’s possible to customize player’s character with some extra features (hats, different colours for costumes, glasses and stuff like that) and, more important, to acquire more fighting experience, more strength, speed and stamina.
But gameplay is the most difficult I’ve ever experienced in this genre games: it’s extremely difficult to learn and to perform attack moves and combos, differently from other series they are not so natural and intuitive; every single character owns a precise fighting style, so it takes less time and efforts to get a degree than to learn all of them; so after many frustrating attempts I found myself pressing buttons on my control pad as an out of control mad guy… and after a while the situation got boring.
To make everything more complicated, you have to press a previously defined button to let your character defend him/herself: wasn’t it easier simply to press the directional pad on the opposite side, like in Tekken or Street Fighter?! No, it would have been too easy!
And if you are so able (and patient…) to complete the game in Story Mode, there isn’t even a short cutscene about the character’s story (at least with a difficulty level set on easy).
Graphics are not bad, but not even the best you can see in a videogame: some characters are actually designed pretty well, but in general I don’t like the way they move because it’s not fluent and natural: have a look at Doa Characters and you’ll understand what I mean.
Environments are some good, some less. I mean, in the first stage the snow is raw, you can see polygons, and in the beach stage the water of the sea looks really flat: so textures are the worst part of graphic point of view.
Characters: as I was saying about environments and stages, some characters are (pretty) well realised (I’d say all the female ones), but some are terrible to see (I’m talking about people like Akira, the main character…).
Music are quite interesting to hear, but only for some levels; sound effects are a fair point.