I'm all over them. I could honestly write a book about 3D fighters, but no one would read it, so I'll keep it short(ish).
This is part one: the
Sega Saturn.
The Saturn did quite well in that area, pretty much all thanks to Sega being one of the kings of the genre.
Virtua Fighter 2 is still a great game today because the underlying fighting engine is so solid and balanced, so easy to start with yet so hard to master. Even single-player is fun, because the AI is smart and learns from your tactics, so you can't do the same thing over and over (though that's actually an option you can turn off). That port, handled in-house at AM2, was a huge technical accomplishment at the time; 60 frames per second and high-resolution (704x480 for NTSC). By comparison, Tekken 2 ran at 30fps and while I can't find the exact resolution, it was certainly lower (the most common one for PSX was 320x480). Sure, VF 3 & 4 are great too, but sometimes it's nice to play a more straightforward version, and only VF2 has Akira's low toe kicks, which are amazing for low-damage opponent trolling.
Fighting Vipers was a faster, flashier and simplified take on the VF model that I also liked a lot then, and still find fun. You fight within walled-in urban arenas in this one, and you can knock the opponent through a wall if you finish them with certain power moves. Those same moves can also knock off pieces of the opponents' armor-type gear, reducing their defense. There's also an hyper mode where you can remove your armor yourself to gain hyper speed in exchange for weaker defense. I mostly played with Tokio, who has great kick combinations and some nice tackles, and the fast skateboarder dude, though Bahn is my favorite in terms of character design. The sequel, ported to the Dreamcast, was a misstep, unfortunately, with a weird sheen to everything, two very lame new characters and no major addition worth talking about.
Eventually, the two were brought together into one of the Saturn's biggest titles,
Fighters Megamix. This was Sega's 3D fighter answer to King of Fighters; not only did it feature the full cast from both of those games, but you also had access to various other AM2 characters like Rent-A-Hero, who could actually use SF2-style projectile attacks, but only until his costume's batteries ran out, the Daytona USA car, or Shiba, an arabian dude with a saber who had appeared in early pre-release screenshots of the original Virtua Fighter but ended up being replaced by Akira. It also added a bunch of moves from Virtua Fighter 3, and had modes approximating both VF and FV physics.
Finally, there was the
Last Bronx, the only one of Sega's polygon-based fighter to be developed by AM3 rather than AM2 (unless you count Virtual On). This one is weapon-based, and the most stylish of the lot, with a gritty near-future Tokyo gangland setting inspired by mid-to-late '90s Tokyo street fashion. It's snappy, fluid, and high-tension, with single hits and short combinations doing high amounts of damage (think Samurai Shodown in that respect) and some pretty advanced feinting and faking game. The
HG101 article does a great job of explaining the appeal of the mechanics. And out of all VS fighters, white suit Kurosawa is my dude.
Can't find a good picture of the white suitOf course, except for Fighters Megamix, all of these were originally arcade titles that ran on the Model 2, and while they're all really good ports, the Model 2 versions definitely hold up a lot better visually, as arcade technology was still far in advance of consoles in those days. There's a really good Model 2 emulator out there, too, so if the Saturn versions look too rough for you, I'd advise you to try it. It's literally called "Model 2 Emulator".
Outside of Sega's realm, there's
Goiken Muyou: Anarchy in the Nippon, a game developed by one of the early high-profile Virtua Fighter player, who also happened to be the programmer behind Twinkle Tale and other games (mostly shmups), with support from three other prominent VF players. The game is heavily inspired by VF, with a high-school setting that has its share of delinquents, along with mostly wacky comic-relief adult characters. The differences are mostly advanced stuff implemented to enforce certain styles of play. You can backdash, but if you do it twice in a row, you trip and fall, so there's no running away. A fighter doesn't actually lose as soon as their HP is depleted; you have to also knock them down, meaning something like a basic punch or kick will not work. You can also regain a bit of health by taunting, and some of the characters, like that street boxing dude, have some complex sets of feints and attack chains that can be very hard to predict. The four top VF players are also playable as semi-hidden characters, and there's a special mode where you fight the four of them in a row (they're harder than the main arcade mode's final boss). It definitely has a slightly amateurish, small-company feel to it, but it's still pretty solid. I'm rather fond of this game (and its PSX sequel). I've been meaning to write an HG101 article about those for years.
That's about it for the good ones, I'd say (well, VF Remix is good too, but rendered mostly obsolete by VF2, and VF Kids is a nice novelty game, I guess, but I don't tend to play it anymore).
There's a few mediocre and bad ones from other third parties. There's Toshinden Remix & URA, which are enhanced ports of the first two games; D-XHIRD, a Japan-only Saturn exclusive, also published by Takara, but developed by NexTech rather than Tamsoft, which features a few Toshinden characters, too, and plays rather closely to that series; some robot-based VF clone (
Zero Divide),
Final Fight Revenge (a weird 2.5D VS fighter developed by Capcom's US branch, IIRC - this one's lackluster, but kind of playable, actually), a truly awful cross-platform game called
FIST, also available on PSX, where it takes roughly a full second for the engine to respond to inputs, plus few more super obscure and forgettable releases.
And
Virtual On, one of the first big arena fighters (maybe the first in full 3D?), which was a pretty big deal back in the day. I've never really played it, though.
Part 2 will be about PSX games.
