Yu Suzuki was on top of the world for a decade of his life. Fresh on the heels of Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter made the same 3D graphics breakthroughs for fighting games as its racing counterpart did for that genre. The visuals here were incomparable because there literally wasn't anything to compare them to in the fighting game space and they must have been mind-blowing in 1993. When you add in how well designed the camera system was for this for a first attempt, the game just truly shines from so many visual aspects.

The combat system uses a simplified kick, punch and block scheme rather than having high and low or weak and strong versions, but it combines these with joystick inputs that result in bigger move lists than Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. For the most part it feels pretty good and there's a decent variety to the character's fighting styles that are predominantly pulled from real life martial arts disciplines. If I had a complaint, it would be that the animations and especially the jumping can feel floaty at times which never felt as good as the faster animations of the best 2D fighters of the period, but it's a small niggle.

While I never quite enjoyed playing this as much as I did Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, its quality and influence on later juggernauts like Tekken and Dead or Alive is undeniable. Honestly, pretty much every 3D fighter can trace part of its roots and feel back to this, which is just an astonishing accomplishment for one game.