We’ve known that a new Virtua Fighter game is on its way for some time now, and we even got our first proper glimpse at it during the 2024 Game Awards. However, even calling what we saw a “glimpse” might be generous and, at the time, it was simply called “New Virtua Fighter Project.” A newly leaked snippet of a seemingly much longer trailer has just found its way online, though, and it looks like developers Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio are cooking up something special.
The leaked trailer somehow found its way onto Bilibili in the very early hours of May 21, and while I understand why people are hesitant to assume otherwise, it looks very legitimate. This is obviously a fragment of a much longer trailer, but there’s a lot we can pull from what’s on offer, including the game’s full title: Virtua Fighter Crossroads.
The actual gameplay footage could conceivably be faked, but the thing that’s making me think this is the real deal is the interspersed footage of the RGG Studio devs talking about the game. Won’t be much use to you if you don’t speak Japanese, but thankfully, Gematsu has translated the video.
There are a few interesting tidbits, but I thought these comments from an RGG dev were the most interesting part: “People tend to think of Virtua Fighter as a unique and complex game, but my first impression was completely different. There weren’t any difficult commands—it was a game you could enjoy with simple controls using just three buttons: punch, kick, and guard…We wanted to preserve that ability to play through intuitive controls alone, so while keeping that intact, this time we’re brushing everything up and reexamining the game from the ground up.”
I kinda get what he means. Inputs in Virtua Fighter have always been less complicated than those in its contemporaries, so I’m interested to see how RGG is “reexamining” the combo system in this context.
Based on the gameplay in the leak, it also seems like Virtua Fighter Crossroads is taking some inspiration from the latest entries in Street Fighter and Tekken as well, at least where the visuals are concerned, which makes me suddenly way more excited for this than I was beforehand. Here’s hoping that Sega releases the full trailer in the near future, so we won’t have to wait until EVO in June to watch the whole thing.