Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage review — Keep striving

We may be in the year 2025, but that won’t stop 2006 classic Virtua Fighter 5 from releasing again and again. As far as I’m concerned, Virtua Fighter 5 can be released as many times as it needs to. A game like Virtua Fighter inherently pushes you to strive for more, so it makes sense that the game itself would too. 

In the case of Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. World Stage, it kind of needed to keep striving. This pseudo-remake of the game has a strange legacy all to its own, and it’s just now with this latest iteration that the game finally feels like it’s where it should be. With its step onto the world stage, R.E.V.O. not only makes for a nice entry point to one of the best fighting game series of all time, but it also makes the case that you should always keep striving for more. 

For the unfamiliar, the bones of this game actually originated in the misleadingly named Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown, released in 2021. That version remade the game in the Yakuza team’s engine with entirely new graphics. In retrospect, it was clearly a testbed for the team to eventually transition into making the brand new Virtua Fighter game coming down the line. As a result, it was pretty barebones: it didn’t have all the characters from 2012’s misleadingly named Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown, it lacked any real single player mode, and the online netcode was poorly done. The R.E.V.O. version released at the beginning of this year took that framework, rebalanced the game, and greatly improved the online experience with rollback netcode. World Stage, released about 2 months ago, updates R.E.V.O. to essentially finish the job that Ultimate Showdown started 4 years ago.

Dural, the boss character of the franchise, has been reintroduced to the playable roster with several caveats. For starters, you have to pay $8 for the unlock in addition to the price of the game. Not ideal. Even less ideal, however, is that you can’t use the character in the single player modes like Arcade or (as I’ll get to) the World Tour. Talk about half-baked to the point of absurdity. It’s cool to regain the novelty of playing as the boss character, but it’s not like anyone will be maining Dural in a serious competitive match online. She’s even banned from official tournaments entirely! An offline environment is the only real environment to enjoy a broken character, but not only did they fail to deliver on that, they’re charging a premium for that failure.

The other big, far less disappointing inclusion for World Stage mode comes in the form of expanded single player content. The Arcade Mode that this game shipped with is extremely barebones and a big step down from what prior iterations of both the series and Virtua Fighter 5 itself has offered for single player modes in the past. World Stage corrects by introducing, well, the World Stage mode. 

World Stage sets up various venues full of opponents who vary in difficulty. Whereas the Arcade Mode AI remains pretty consistent between runs, the World Stage opponents try to reflect a wider variety of playstyles to make you feel like you’re fighting actual people. 

It’s not a revolutionary concept, but importantly, it is something to do. Every victory brings you closer to unlocking hundreds of different items to customize your fighters with, and the game doles them out regularly to keep you going. Depending on your skill level, the mode can occasionally feel like a mindless grind, but at the very least, some of the stronger opponents can still keep you on your toes. 

I’m always a little mixed on the importance of single player modes in fighting games. Fighting an AI differs from fighting a human in that the AI is far more limited in how it can evolve. Humans have the capacity to change on the fly or develop habits that you can intuitively understand. A game like Virtua Fighter arguably relies entirely on the concept of human-to-human intuition to be fun. If you spend all your time fighting AI, you’re arguably not playing the real game at all. 

However, I’ve come around to the importance of single player in fighting games. They tend to work best as a middle ground between the real human-to-human fighting and practicing combos on a practice dummy in training mode. A good single player mode gets you thinking about how to play the game for real, even if it can’t perfectly replicate that. World Stage accomplishes just that.  I wouldn’t buy the game just for the World Stage mode, but it fills a void that this iteration of the game severely lacked. The inclusion of World Stage rounds out the package nicely.

If you are buying Virtua Fighter 5, it should be for fighting other humans over the interweb. That’s what the game was made for and excels at. And arguably, no game really does it better than Virtua Fighter 5. 

Don’t let that reality scare you away from trying the game, though.  The reason that Virtua Fighter 5 excels so much as a fighter is because, despite its reputation, it’s actually quite intuitive. Virtua Fighter 5 doesn’t rely on having to juggle tertiary mechanics, long combos, or understanding metagames to be fun. You can develop those things as you go, but as long as you know what moves you’ll do when you hit buttons, you’ll already be well on your way to understanding how to win.  

Matches move quickly - a few good hits will end a round. The animations convey the utility of the moves clearly, so you can logically intuit how they all interact. It’s obvious what moves will beat others, so the more you play, the more you will naturally develop a sense of when to hit what buttons. And the more you develop your own fighting sense, the more your opponent will adapt and counter your strategy. All of my favorite moments in this game come from playing long sets with the same person as we trade wins, constantly pushing each other further and further. In those moments, you feel like you’re not only learning more about your opponent, but also about yourself.

As someone who has played thousands of matches over different iterations of this game, I can confidently say that I’m not particularly good at it. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t win against stronger players or that I don’t enjoy my time when I lose. The quick pace of the game always keeps me striving to understand my opponent a little better, to hone my fighting skills a little more, and to perhaps even understand myself a little more. That’s the magic of Virtua Fighter – it’s both easy to understand and endlessly deep at the same time. 

World Stage is by far the easiest way to experience that magic today. This game is where the people are. The online works well, the matchmaking has crossplay between consoles and PC, and it’s the newest Virtua Fighter release. I’ve been able to consistently find matches on a random weekday ever since I started playing this game back in 2021, and that has continued to be the case to this day. While I wish this version of the game could have been more complete when it launched back then, I’m glad that the developers have kept striving to improve it. Their work has consistently given me a venue to keep striving, and I’ll keep doing so until Virtua Fighter 6 is finally ready.