Speaking to Yu

The creator of Shenmue, Virtua Fighter, and other legendary Sega games talks about VF4, the future of AM2, Shenmue, and remakes.

After having run the Nintendo 64, PlayStation and now the PlayStation 2 site for IGN at different times over the last five years, it was quite an honor to interview AM2's Yu Suzuki, one of the greatest videogames designers on the planet.

The creator of classic arcade games and some of the best titles ever to grace Sega home platforms, Yu Suzuki has had his hand in major efforts that have pushed forward the concepts of videogames on a large scale. The first two games in the Virtua Fighter series were amazing breakthroughs for polygonal 3D fighting, while VF3 enabled players to move about in full 3D on changing environments. In the arcades, VF3 was an achievement in its time, pushing 1 million polygons per second on the expensive Model 3 board and characters looked more human than ever.

Earlier games such as Hang-On, Super Hang-On, AfterBurner, Virtua Racer, Daytona USA were also created by the imaginative Suzuki. And then there were Shenmue 1 and 2, which, while people may disagree on the series' importance and place in videogame history, the games certainly can't be ignored as major steps in videogame design.

Recently, IGNPS2's David F. Smith and myself (Douglass C. Perry) were able to sit down with the AM2 executive designer in Sega's San Francisco office and speak to him about his latest work, Virtua Fighter 4, its ins and outs, why it seems to play more like VF2, and the disappearance of Taka Arashi, the sumo wrestler introduced in VF3. Suzuki also hinted at future games, including the fate of the Shenmue series, revisionist collections of Yu Suzuki games, and what his ideal game would be.

IGN: How does Virtua Fighter 4 fit into the original vision of the Virtua Fighter series? And how does VF4 continue the legacy and the ideas from the first game, and how does it differ?

Yu Suzuki: From the start, I wanted to make a real fighter, like a Chinese Kung Fu game, and using 3D technology we were able to do that. Virtua Fighter 1 technology was very primitive, with polygons and simple Gouraud Shading. Virtua Fighter 1 looked like it was made up of robots. So with Virtua Fighter 2, we wanted to change the robots into humans, using texture-mapping technology. With Virtua Fighter 3 we wanted to go outside of the ring. One of the central ideas was to remove the fighting ring. The concept behind Virtua Fighter 4 was to take the good points from 1, 2 and 3, and to try to develop the good points from those. So, rather than being a progression from 1, 2 and 3, Virtua Fighter 4 is compilation of the good things from all three previous games.

IGN: With that in mind, which aspects from the first three Virtua Fighter games did you keep and which did you scrap?

Yu: Based on a lot of market research we did, we found that Virtua Fighter 2 had been the most popular of the three. We analyzed Virtua Fighter 2 and it was the most well liked. The medium user likes Virtua Fighter 2, but the heavy user liked Virtua Fighter 3, and so I wanted to make a game that the light, medium and heavy users all enjoyed. We also had more development time with the arcade version of Virtua Fighter 4 to work on the control and movement and other important aspects.

IGN: This is probably a silly question, but are all of the fighters motion captured?

Yu: It's half and half. It's not just motion capture and not just key frames. It really depends on the moves. Some things were motion captured, some were done by hand and some were blended by the computer. We use an inverse kinematics technology so we can get motion capture data. So for instance, Pai is short, and other fighters are taller, so the first, straight attack is motion captured, but higher or lower hits are done by the computer.

IGN: VF4 does things differently than VF3. The arenas are closed, and they're wider. There is also a little less floating. There is a little more gravity and weight to the fighters. Why did you decide to work on these aspects? Because I have always felt that the gravity and the ring size needed to be changed. Did you decide to change these aspects based on market research, too?

Yu: It wasn't really the result of market research. This time around we have more powerful systems to work with. This time around the CPU of the PlayStation 2 is good and so we've been able to work on the gravity and weight of the players better.

IGN: Virtua Fighter 4 uses closed rings, which is a first for the series. Why did you decide to change the rings?

Yu: We wanted to try and keep the intensity of the match. So, if the arena is wide, then some guys will play like chickens. Chicken people are not so good to fight against. Also, the game isn't as fun if people start concentrating on defense, so we tried to take away that option.

IGN: What were some of the outcomes of the game based on reactions to VF versions A and B in Japan?

Yu: Most of that was very minor tweaking and changing; nothing big came out of those versions.

- Screenshot of Virtua Fighter 3 (DC)Is Taka gone for good?IGN: In VF3 you introduced two new characters, Aoi and Taka Arashi. Why is Taka not in Virtua Fighter 4? Also, Taka was huge, and as I understand it, you had to reduce the size of Taka to fit him into the screen adequately with the other characters in VF3.

Yu: As far as Taka's size is conerned, it was hard to process the skin. When he got punched, his skin would bounce back like rubber or fat. So when you think about it, there should be a difference between whether you hit him in an area with muscle or with fat. Because if you hit him in the muscle area it wouldn't bounce back as much as if you hit him in a fat area. The skin took up a heavy amount of processing. So, if we were going to bring back Taka Arashi, then we would have wanted to find a way to make his fat bounce more realistically, and in order to do that, we would have had to take more time than we were given. So Taka is taking a break this time. He's taking a pass.

IGN: Will we see him again in the future?

Yu: Ah, I have to say that he's taken his last pass. You know how you say sometimes that someone might have three passes (strikes), and then they're out of there? Well, here, he only had one pass, and he's taken it.

But there are people who liked him. Some European people really like the sumo wrestler. French people like the sumo wrestler. You know, they liked the fat naked man...always hanging. (Much laughter.)

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