Virtua Fighter

Akira Yuki has spent years honing his Bajiquan skills under the guidance of his grandfather. He yearns to see the constellation of the eight stars of heaven, which are only revealed to those with real strength. This burning desire urges him to embark on travels, so as to learn more about how to see the stars.

Meanwhile, a nefarious robotics scientist, Eva Durix, desires to create the perfect soldier. Eva's group, Judgment 6, tracks down and kidnaps Sarah Bryant, a college student and close acquaintance of Akira who is investigating a mysterious accident concerning her brother. Akira must now fight his way to Sarah to save her from the clutches of Judgement 6, a perilous path sure to be paved with countless challenges.

Yuki, Akira Main

Miki, Shinichiro Japanese

Chan, Pai Main

Matsui, Naoko Japanese

Bryant, Sarah Main

Okamoto, Maya Japanese

Bryant, Jacky Main

Matsumoto, Yasunori Japanese

Weimin, Yan Supporting

Matsuo, Ginzou Japanese

Hawkfield, Wolf Supporting

Ishizuka, Unshou Japanese

Durix, Eva Supporting

Tanaka, Atsuko Japanese

McWild, Jeffry Supporting

Ootomo, Ryuuzaburou Japanese

Chan, Lau Supporting

Chiba, Shigeru Japanese

Di, Shun Supporting

Kitamura, Kouichi Japanese

Tanaka, Atsuko Episode Director

Otani, Masahito Episode Director

Nishiyama, Akihiko Episode Director

Yoshida, Reiko Script

Reviews

Oct 11, 2008

jmoriarty84

Recommended

Preliminary (25/35 eps)

I feel with a traditional martial arts story in relation to anime, I feel it could go in certain specific ways and I felt it was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation with what your typical martial arts movie or series could be. Allow me to explain, in the games, Akira is portrayed more as a serious old school style martial artist and tends to really have no sense of humor. While in the anime, his behavior is juvenile, sarcastic, and has an appetite like Gokuu from Dragon Ball. Despite that, he still has a deep respect for the martial arts ... and is always willing to defend the weak. So I guess in some ways, this is a good thing just to prevent Akira from having a one-dimensional and too cliché personality for the time. Pai is also portrayed as child like, but has some skill of her own. I enjoyed the portrayal of the other characters since most of their personalities are more faithful to that of how the game portrays them and are expanded in this anime, and each character has their own unique use and development.

But unfortunately, the series does tend to move a bit slow and tends to rely on sci-fi mechanisms at times which isn’t really what I like in traditional martial arts media at times. Even though there are some accurate portrayals from the games, there are some ret-cons such as Dural, who is really Kage’s mother. While in the anime, Dural is a robot soldier project from the Kouen-kan. And even though Lau serves as the primary antagonist, we also have the use of Eva Durax, who is the company’s chief scientist who is hungry with power and to destroy her enemies. So you’re getting something more original in story, but for the most part in characters, tend to be faithful which both have their pros and cons.

Well, the art and resolution is very flat and I feel that the character designs are childish. Despite my criticisms of calling it childish, I still can see how on the other hand, the designs can possibly symbolize the more campy nature this anime may have intended to have. But in most cases, the costumes, hairstyles, and the fighting styles of the characters are dead on perfect. The fights are ok. You know how some people have criticized the fights in Record of Lodoss War of mostly having still shot like paintings for the fights? Well, personally I have to say that this anime also serves that exact same problem showing the budget of this show. But they are dramatic and still have good angles and colors.

But what really makes this anime stand out is when they do show the fights in motion and whenever a character does a trademark move or to introduce some kind of fighting style like Jeffery’s pankration, the anime will re-cap to that move and explain how the move works and what its purpose is, which I found entertaining. Also, what I also can’t stand is the recycle footage of Akira preaching that martial arts shouldn’t be used for evil blah blah blah. It gets older than Jesus after the first episode and it gets somewhat annoying after awhile.

The Japanese voice cast has some very good names such as Miki Shin’ichiro as Akira, who still continues to play the role in the Virtua Fighter games to this day. He does an excellent job of being childish when it comes to food, and mature when he has to explain that he can’t stand the unjustness of what he sees sometimes. Pai Chan is played by Gundam veteran Matsui Nanako, and Matsumoto Yasunori, the voice of Niijima in History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi and Takagi Wataru in Initial D does a great job of being the all out no nonsense Jackie Bryant. The English dub on the other hand, I find to be very terrible. Especially when Leon’s voice in the games is not at all represented. Yes, Leon does sound cheesy, but it’s what defines him and I just felt that lack of presence alone in the English version was what ruined it for me. I know that some people may not like that, but as a fan, it did upset me.

Before giving the final score, I have to talk about the music. This was the anime that made me a fan of Vivian Hsu, who is Taiwanese, but yet is singing Japanese music. Vivian Hsu also sings Moment, one of the songs from Gundam SEED and plays the frail girl in the Jackie Chan movie, The Accidental Spy. She sings the ending songs to this anime Kuchibiru no Shinwa, and Kyouhansha. I just love how multi-talented she is with these songs. With Kuchibiru no Shinwa, the song is very innocent and carefree, but with Kyouhansha, it’s very seductive and much darker and I felt both songs really represented some of the female characters such as Pai and Sarah. The opening theme Hot Wild Vision is also a pretty sweet song itself. It’s very calm and energetic. But I do have to give the English staff credit for making these songs into English. Granted the singing is not the best, I have to tip my proverbial hat off for their efforts.

Well, unfortunately, Media Blasters cut this anime series 11 or 12 episodes short and I can’t find the rest. If you do, PM THEM TO ME!!! It may not be the best game to anime adaptation, but I do like how in some ways it does try to stand on its own. I felt of this anime came out to America in the mid-90s after the series was over, I felt it could have had better success with the market at the time and people could have caught on. But the style of fighting and the fact that Virtua Fighter in general isn’t really that popular outside of Japan and Korea would prevent this anime from getting any popularity. Still, I don’t think you need any familiarity with the game series to give this a try because it does a great job of explaining things to you, though as I said before, it does detract from the games to some extent, but for all the right reasons and done pretty well. Granted I still don’t think it’s something special, or top 10, I felt it did expose me to new things such as Vivian Hsu, and it had some concepts which I would say later influence Naruto in explaining stuff to see it paved way for other things for myself in the long run. Then again, I could be wrong. But I feel confident on how I overall feel about this anime, nothing really outstanding but still descent.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Aug 22, 2023

jkoutcast

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (24/35 eps)

Quick Review:

Story: 5
Sound: 7.5
Art: 6.5
Characters: 4
Enjoyment: 5
Annoyance: 9
Overall: 4

... Virtua Fighter is pretty much the epitome of all the tropes I hate in anime. I started watching this show to give my brother (this is his FAVORITE anime, and he's watched quite a few) the benefit of the doubt. I thought that perhaps it was truly a hidden gem and had some merit. The show made me quite upset with it by the end, but I will say that some people will definitely like it much better than others.

First, let me start with what was good about this show. Given that it is a 90s era show, the animation isn't superb, but it isn't atrocious either, and the fight scenes are fairly well animated. The animation is fairly consistent throughout the show. The voice acting (original Japanese) is fair, and features the talents of several fairly well-known seiyuu, including a few of the original voice actors from the games. The soundtrack was one of the more enjoyable parts, and I found the main theme song/preview theme to be quite catchy. The main characters were mostly DECENT (not good, or great, or anything of that sort), albeit rather shallow, but this most likely won't bother anyone who loves shonen or that type of genre, since the main demographic is a younger audience and viewers who are watching mostly for action scenes. The comedy was simple, but definitely made me laugh. It wasn't especially clever or fall out of your seat funny, but it makes for a great addition to a mostly action-adventure based show. I also really loved the character Wolf Hawkfield, as he seemed quite human as opposed to some of the other characters.

Speaking of which, the main problem with this show is... the characters, and the unbelievably stale character tropes. If you were to make a list of all the cringiest tropes from shows prior to the nineties, I would guess that a good 60% would appear in this show. Although I found this problem to be mainly with the villains, that doesn't mean I didn't see any of them in the rest of the cast. All the villains are evil for the sake of being evil; none of them have backstories other than Lau, whose backstory is the typical, "but he had no choice, it was the best thing to do in that moment" backstory, as well as "Oh yeah, I totally screwed all my relationships up and everyone thinks I'm evil, but you know, I'm not gonna try to defend myself or anything, I'll just be the badguy for no reason". We also have the totally evil woman, who wears purple lipstick and makes your skin crawl because her lines are so contrived, saying things like, "No one will be able to stop me in my quest for world domination! Hahaha!" (she doesn't actually say this, but she may as well have). You'll see tropes like the rebellious son whose rich dad wants to make him do something that he is rather adamant on not doing (you actually get 2 of these, yippee), and the kid who gets bullied for absolutely no reason. There's also a "strongest woman alive" as well as a "I just can't understand why people would be good to each other; why aren't they evil and self-seeking like me?" and topping it off, we've got your typical tsundere female protagonist who accidentally kisses the main character in the first episode. Oh, how could I forget the MAIN CHARACTER, the altruistic and OP dude who's dumb, super strong, can tackle any problem or beat any baddie, and loves food (so basically he's Goku). Not to mention that he has a whole power-up sequence/speech that happens every episode.

Aside from these points, the show does have an adventurous vibe and lots of traveling, meeting new characters, and funny scenarios, so if you like those kind of shows, than you'll probably like this show. I will bear in mind that the intended audience was probably 8-14 or so, so it makes sense that the show would be rather shallow. However, for anyone who is watching this for the story, character development, or general writing will most likely be as disappointed as I am. I rated it average for most of the categories, but the reason that it gets such a low overall rating is because the characters bother me so much.

You may notice that I haven't watched all 35 episodes. This is because the first 24 are the first season, and it's quite difficult to find the second season anywhere. You can find it on archive.org, but it does not have subtitles. I have also heard from my brother who watched the second season that it was not as good as the first season, and I have seen first-hand that the animation quality suffered massively (It's bad).

To summarize, I won't condemn anyone for liking this show, but it's not the kind of show that you should watch if you like philosophical, complex, emotional, well-written, or clever shows. It doesn't do anything new or particularly well, but it is a simple show that would be a good deal of fun to watch if you can stomach the (to me) absolutely egregious tropes. If you want to watch a fighting game anime, then you're probably better off checking out the Street Fighter II movie, The King of Fighters: Destiny, or even the Fatal Fury 2 OVA.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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May 1, 2024

ShinyVegeta

Mixed Feelings

Spoiler

I grew up watching this show and i loved it as a kid , but now as 29 year old watching , it definetly doesn't hold up , while i did enjoy aspects of it , such is the action , and the character , i found my self bored most of the time because of its slow pacing , and rolling my eyes because of inconsistent the show is , the least i would expect from an a fighting anime is for there to be consistency in terms of strenght , but thats almost non existent in this anime , Akira for example the ... protaganist , defeats dural a machine that beat both Lao and Kagemaru, yet somehow he looses to a wrestling lady and to onimaru, another things that annoyed about this show is how nonsensical it is , the character's do things that makes no sense , for example eva kisses ryu after killing him , or characters decided not straight up use guns , characters surviving things they shouldn't survive , like 2 people survived dropping from a very high place into a pool , which is made even more absurd when you later they mention the fact that at a certain speed hitting water becomes like hitting cement, not to mention cheesy moments that are just too much , there is 2 arcs in this show , if you want to even call them that , in the first one , the artstyle and the animation is good for its time , but in the 2nd arc it drops immensely , the character designs get ugly , they stop explaining martial arts moves like they did before, so why after all these cons am I giving it a 7/10 , well as i said its nostalgic for me , and i do like the action and the overall stoy a little bit , although more i think about it the more i concider giving it a 6 , anyway if you are into martial art, and don't mind anime shananingans , you might enjoy this show.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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