Virtua Fighter has never had much of a story – in-game, that is. The narrative tying the entries together, citing the characters’ motivations, is actually a richly defined arc, involving personal achievement, a sinister conglomerate of companies, and family ties. Martial arts and self-cultivation are at the core of it, but how the practice of martial arts affects the broader world is what spurs the narrative onward.
Hints of the narrative have occasionally broken free from the pages from the instruction manuals and into the game, like the attract video sequence in Virtua Fighter 5, the special CG portrait series released for the SEGA Saturn, and, perhaps most overtly, the ending video from Virtua Fighter 3 – a fully pre-rendered video showing the characters’ lives outside of the ring.
Point is, the characters have always had motivation in the Virtua Fighter games, but not a story overtly shown to the player. That looks like it’s going to change with Team Ryu Ga Gotoku’s upcoming Virtua Fighter Project.
There are two distinct areas where Virtua Fighter builds its story elements – tech and character. I’ll be discussing how the Model engines’ evolution played a role in developing the Virtua Fighter universe in a future article, but first, I’ll examine one of the (non-canon) examples of the Virtua Fighter story, as it was interpreted by Malibu Comics.
Virtua Fighter #1 (no further issues were released, it is a one-shot) is credited to Patrick Rolo for layouts, Scott Reed and Abraham Madison for finishes, Mark Panniccia (and editor Dan Shaheen) for writing, Moose Bauman for colours, Vinton Heuck for pencils, John Miller for inks, and Teresa Davision for letters. The book contains two stories, with one running sixteen pages and one running eight pages. The stories are directly linked, setting up the events for the first game in the series.
The book is set in a fictional place called Virtua City (no relation to Virtua Cop’s Virtua City). Despite still taking place in the game’s then contemporary 1990s, Virtua City is no regular metropolis. Virtua Fighter #1 opens with a full-page vista of the futuristic city, with the vantage slipped in between two of the city’s gigantic skyscrapers. Rain pours down, and the amber hue of the grey and golden architecture illuminates the night. High above the streets, flying cars weave around buildings, with the narration box stating, “But the aloof architecture ignores the presence of the persistent rain. Whatever secrets the city may hold today, it will not share with the falling water that drenches it so thoroughly. No, this city is rich with secrets yet ever so selfish with trust.”
On page 2 all of the game’s main cast are introduced by portraits boarding the two-page scene, with all but Jacky, Kage, and Sarah being present in the open sparring session sandwiched in between these portraits. Bits of the casts’ personality are drip-fed here, with more in-depth exposition revealed over the next two pages.
An emphasis on flexed tendons and exaggerated lines of action (via the copious number of ponytails) make the sparring exciting, but the backdrop of Hunn’s dojo is the most interesting note of these opening pages. In Virtua Fighter 4 and 5, we saw glimpses of impossibly large techno structures in Dural’s stage, while the rest of the game took place at more traditional, and grounded, thematic locations. The cyberpunk element is stressed right out of the gate here, with details like the wall panels arranged in an oblique gridscape that would be more appropriate to a server or mechanical room than a dojo.
Page 6 takes us down to Virtua City’s streets, with Sarah wandering the alleyways before finding a soaked newspaper that reads, “The Biggest Fighting Event in History. The World Fighting Championship Tournament!”
Page 6 is filled with details like brick walls, tipped over trashcans, wooden streetlight poles (and a newspaper) making it feel like something out of the previous century – a far cry from the cyberpunk aesthetic of the previous pages.
However, on page 7, a mysterious man cloaked in shadow appears, with the only facial features visible being glowing red mechanical socket eyes. He stands before one of the city’s crystalline skyscrapers, tying him to Virtua City’s upper eschalon, while Sarah is always framed with the cold blue darkness around her, until the final frame where she smashes a car window in anger, with mysterious man and city hovering over he shoulder. He nudges Sarah on, pushing her to enter the tournament so that she may defeat her brother.
While the sparring session at Hunn’s was lit with bright golden light, and the characters (even Pai and Lau) showed one and another respect, here, in the primitive underbelly of the city, Sarah is motivated by far more rudimentary reasons. As Sarah runs down the street, the mysterious sponsor’s face is revealed: chrome-plated skin with robotic implant eyes. This character has never been featured anywhere in the games, but Sarah’s involvement with the J6 is a key plot point, and having a character act as her handler is a nice touch (Funnily, the cyborg then receives a call from his boss via payphone. I guess Virtua City isn’t that high tech.)
What follows is another short exposition dump as Jeffery and Wolf decide to unwind at a bar after sparring, only to be held back by the bouncers. The pair make quick work of the guards, using several signature moves from the game for good measure. The action is peppered with details from the game (like Jeffery’s fighting style, Pancratirum), bringing the focus back from the city to the game itself, and this sequence feels like an advertisement that could’ve been fit into a gaming magazine.
After the boys get into the club, the scene switches back to Hunn’s where Pai and Akira are getting acquainted with one another. An awkward placement of balloons on the penultimate frame of page 13, and an equally awkward closeup of a grapple on the preceding page, detract from this segment slightly, but it still gets an instruction manual-quality introduction done.
On page 15 Sarah registers for the tournament. The registrar’s clipboard notes several non-canon names, including Mare Harrington, Mark Rollings, Walter Fisher, and a Charlie and Mare. These characters never made it into the game propper, meaning Malibu obviously had some creative authority over how they told the story.
The scene then cuts to Jacky Bryant, whom we had only seen a portrait of in the opening pages, before moving to a second story titled A Painful Past. A Painful Past is dedicated solely to Jacky and his plight with Sarah and the J6. Though Akira is undoubtedly the face of the franchise, in terms of storyline, the overarching plot of Sarah, Jacky, and Kage are really the core characters pushing the narrative forward. Whereas liberties were taken with the setting and description of the rest of the cast, Jacky’s story almost perfectly aligns with the canon of the game’s events.
A Painful Past opens with Jacky’s head, in profile, bordering the right side of the page, looking down over an image of his sister, Sarah, practicing martial arts. Above her, Indy racing cars tour the page, all set against a deep blue gradient backdrop. The thick hatching and heavy shadows over Jacky’s eyes add to the sense of drama, but even without the narrative boxes overtly explaining Jacky’s distress, the page is perfectly readable thanks to a smart line of action, connecting the cars in action via an ‘S’ like placement, linking to Sarah in her twisting martial arts pose, before landing at the base of the page with the title, A Painful Past.
Turning the page, we see Jacky is sitting in a diner late at night drinking a cup of coffee. Hueck and Miller team up for pencilling and inking on this story, and while the backdrops and car renderings look great, the characters are far less consistent. Flashbacks occur over the next several pages, outlining the sabotage that caused Jacky’s crash at the 1990 Indianapolis 500, with Sarah investigating the perpetrators, which ultimately led to her capture by the J6. Sarah’s tall, angular stature is captured well, and Bauman’s expert colouring gives her costume on page 4 a brilliant neon aura, framed against the radical purple gradient backdrop. Jacky and Kage, who have a brief fight on pages 6 and 7, are also modelled faithfully to their in-game counterparts, but the transition from Sarah’s green sweater and black skirt outfit to her signature, menacing navy jumpsuit is certainly the highlight in terms of illustration.
Jacky and Kage go separate ways after the police are called to break up their fight. The alleyway Jacky runs down is closer to Sarah’s domain as opposed to the gilded skyscrapers and high technology of Hunn’s dojo, separating Kage, Jacky, and Sarah into their own narrative arc outside of the rest of the game.
The final narrative box states, “The battle has only begun for the champions of Virtua Fighter. See you in the game!” Even though the dynamics and narrative threads between the rest of the cast are interesting, it’s smart to separate these two groups, with one pushing for personal development via the tournament, and the other tackling the very tournament itself. The addition of the cyborg agent is great, as it gives the J6 a face (which, aside from Dural, we never see in game). Likely, the agent is just an addition from the creative team for the comic, as is Virtua City, but it’s telling that Dural, the game’s final boss, is absent entirely. They certainly could have alluded to her presence in some manner, as she is revealed to be Kage’s mother later on in the game’ storyline. Perhaps this was due to page count, or perhaps it wasn’t deemed necessary, and would make for a nice surprise in game when the players encountered a cyborg after eight rounds of combat with regular human beings. Or, perhaps this part of the story simply wasn’t written yet. After all, with no in-game story of any kind, it follows that there probably wasn’t an overarching plot planned for several games out. We know at some point Shenmue was planned as Virtua Fighter RPG, but think how drastically different that game would have been if it had incorporated cyborgs and cyberpunk aesthetics.
The note that Jacky crashed in the 1990 Indianapolis 500 is an important point too as it grounds Virtua Fighter in the real world. Virtua City is the equivalent to players loading Virtua Fighter in their SEGA Saturn or 32X – entering a new realm that is partly fantastical, but only insofar as technology allows it to transport players.
As mentioned, Dural is the one character missing from Virtua Fighter #1. Dural is a product of the game’s development not on paper, but in the virtual world. In the next part, we’ll look at the Virtua Fighter story as it has, briefly, been explored in the games themselves, making for a contrast of the characters and fiction written on paper versus the one existing on the virtual plane.