Virtua Fighter 5 Online is the newest game in a series of well-tuned fighting games. The cast of the game is from all around the world, and diverse in style and appearance, but compared to other fighters like Tekken or Soul Calibur might seem fairly bland. The game's major focus and strong point is on real combat without any tricks or magic, and very deep, realistic fighting styles for each character. The female characters in the game are just as strong as their male counterparts, avoiding the general trend of all females being the weaker, more agile ones. In a game with completely different fighting styles for each character, their appearance and character are secondary to their style; despite that, the game does not tend to treat the female characters much different than the males.
While fighting games have been known to be the type of game with female characters wearing next to nothing, Virtua Fighter has, for the most part, been able to avoid that. One example to the contrary, however, is the character of Vanessa, a military trained fighter. In the previous game, she (here) was introduced as a large, muscular African American woman. In Virtua Fighter 5 (here), she recieved an appearance overhaul, and while keeping some of her muscle, now has lighter skin and is more feminine in appearance. Her costume has also changed, and her camo jacket has been unbuttoned to reveal a bikini top underneath. Compared to the males' costumes, it's not very revealing, but it's odd that in a game where unnecessary sex appeal is avoided that such a change would happen, but ultimately Sega might change things like this to get more money from their core demographic. Ultimately, the quick, twitch gameplay of fighting games, while having a female audience, tends to be more male dominated; in The Hegemony of Play, it states "games that demand a high level of certain types of spatial rotation skills, such as First Person Shooters, are actually more difficult for women and girls to master"(4). If the game is catered towards a certain group of people, why not add something to appease that group, especially if other games that are doing well are going much farther.
It seems that in a genre filled with large amounts of code devoted to things like excessive chest size and physics, Virtua Fighter's females stray from the Hegemony of Play, and have as diverse stories and styles as the males do. While the women are modeled to be beautiful, a few of the males are more effeminate.The development team of the game has done a good job in showing that the ideas of The Hegemony of Play aren't prevalent everywhere.
Here are images of the characters.
Andy Korzik
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