Virtua Fighter being "Boring" as a competivie game.

VF is basically rock, scissors, paper. In competitive play, it mainly boils down to whether you can predict what move your opponent will be doing. There isn't some super complex air juggle combo system, or ultra move bar or a parry system with frame timing or so. Although most other fighting game elements are there (like low/high moves, baiting, counters), the reason it is good is its simplicity. You don't have to learn 200-hit chains to be good, you just have to learn when to use that one good move.

This is also what makes the game so difficult to master, since you have to practice each move a thousand times until you can do it on instinct at any time, and then you have to practice fighting until you know when to use which move.

(except if you are playing with Akira, which is a can of worms I don't want to open)

What you are missing is playing the fucking game, instead of judging it based on how many entertaining youtube matches you can find online. Preferably with a friend who is equally skilled at it as you are. If the level of excitement that watching competitive play brings you is your benchmark for how good a fighting game is, then you might as well argue that American Idol is a better fighting game.

I don't think you understand what it means to relate to a character.

 

Speaking of how "unrelatable" the Virtua Fighter cast is to players outside of Japan, wasn't this the very reason Fighting Vipers came to exist in the first place? Despite being Sega's way of trying to appeal to more global players, I found most of the characters in that particular series too overly stereotypical, and how was Sanman any more relatable to western gamers than your average member of the VF roster? Besides, rather than being generic Asian representations of American style wrestlers, weren't the designs for Wolf Hawkfield and Jeffry McWild based on real figures? In addition to its more stylised line-up and '80s-influenced soundtrack, I seem to recall someone from AM2 once mentioning that FV included weapons and walls around the ring because these elements tested well in a prototype of VF2, yet were deemed too much of a change from its predecessor for these to feature in an immediate sequel. I don't remember ever finding any international sales numbers for the VF games, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if the Japanese version of Saturn VF2 managed to perform better than every other installment overseas - it's one of the few titles on that system to have broken the million barrier, while over here fans of the franchise in general were always considered very much part of a rapidly shrinking minority.

 

Fighting Vipers does have a far more interesting cast.

 

VF is one of my favorite fighting series'... Never really found it boring at all.

 

I done handcuffed Lightening.