Virtua Fighter: Costomize Clip

Virtua Fighter: Costomize Clip (yes, “costomize, not “customize”) is an anime music video collection/album that acts as a tie-in to Sega’s Virtua Fighter 2, the 1994 arcade fighting game, and is not related to the other Virtua Fighter anime. The songs were also featured in the Virtua Fighter CG Portrait Series “games” for the Sega Saturn (Jeffry McWild’s song from this series makes an appearance in the Hi Score Girl anime).

I found all of the songs to be very catchy. Several of them are sung by the legendary Takenobu Mitsuyoshi of Sega Sound Team. Mitsuyoshi voices the Virtua Fighter character Kage Maru and was responsible ... for composing many of the Virtua Fighter soundtracks, as well as the soundtrack for Sega’s Daytona USA arcade game (DAYTONAAA!! Let’s go away!). Unfortunately, some of the songs from the original Dancing Shadows album were not included this anime; however, most of the best ones were, so it’s not too big of a loss.

The animation was handled by Production I.G. (of Attack on Titan and Ghost in the Shell fame) and is done well. Some animations (Wolf’s in particular) look a little off in some spots, but the overall quality is mostly consistent. The visual style also emulates the games, so the characters look significantly older and “cooler” than their respective younger counterparts from the other Virtua Fighter anime. The anime also helps flesh out the story for Virtua Fighter, which is notoriously hard to find as it is not included in the games.

This anime serves as a reminder of Sega’s golden age in the 90’s when they could just afford to throw money at basically whatever niche tie-ins they wanted. The overall package provides a nice treat for die-hard Virtua Fighter fans (like myself), but likely won’t do much for people unfamiliar with the series.