В общем, цитирую.
What really shocked me is finding out how good awful VF's hitboxes are.
When you kick someone and they punch your feet, it'll register as a hit against the attack, but the faggot who punched your foot gets a free pass.
I really fucking hate how there doesn't seem to be any recovery time in VF2. You either hit & connect, or hit & miss. When you miss you can't block or evade at all, you have to take the hit or get thrown.
The throws are hilarious, because most of the throws are one hit kills. The throws don't even look that devastating. VF really shows how I take Tekken for granted. In Tekken you get guaranteed hits depending on the frame advantage. It doesn't matter how fast you hit. If you have hit priority, you have the advantage. I pefer this system, because it allows slower characters to be just as deadly as speedy characters, because it turns Tekken into a game of knowing when to attack and where rather than simply a game where you race to see who can press the most move inputs.
In Virtua Fighter, it's all about speed. Frame advantage doesn't play much of a factor at all. Moves follow a rock paper scissors style of hit priority (Throws beat jab, jab beats everything except throws, etc.) If you can hit your opponent in VF2 with a faster sequence of punches & kicks & if they're not blocking, that will usually leave them vulnerable until you end the combo. In Tekken, there's always a way to break out of a combo so long as they don't launch you. I really hate how VF2's hit priority makes no fucking sense. You can just jab your way through everything. Oh what Sarah is lunging at you with a flying knee? Jab her. Lau is stepping towards you with a punch kick combo? Jab him. Only thing Jabs don't work against are throws.
Fucking lame, considering how well jabs do in real life against grapplers, lol. It really fucking annoys me how when you try to kick or jab someone in VF2 who is running toward you, if they go for a grapple the kick or punch you inputed does not register and automatically gives the grappler the throw, which usually means the end of the match.
Now sure mothafuckas can claim that it's an old game, it's supposed to be terrible. Problem is, I can still play Tekken 2 (which isn't as good as Virtua Fighter 2 from a casual fighting fan perspective.)
and I won't have a problem with the hit boxes at all. If someone punches & kicks each other at the same time, it registers as both fighters getting hit. That's why double k.o.s are so common in Tekken, lol.
In Tekken 2, you can only throw someone if you approach them away from their guard or have staggered them before hand. You can't simply run up to them and throw them like you can in VF2.
As with every Tekken, combos aren't really combos (as the terms is usually understood, in most fighting games combos are unblockable.) In Tekken 2, you can break out of a combo so long as you know when to react and so long as they haven't launched you in the air yet. Sure you could attribute VF2's retarded hitboxes & seemingly nonsensical hit priority to old ass game design, but other 3d fighters that came around that time (like Tekken) don't have the same nonsensical hitboxes that VF does.
Kinda makes me wonder why Virtua Fighter is often labeled as realistic. The hit priority sure isn't. In real life, kicks tend to hurt more when they actually connect. In VF2, jabs hurt more and even have hit priority. Throws are devastatingly deadly in VF, and you don't even get any recovery time to defend against them. In real life, most people would punch & kick the shit out of you when you try to throw them. In VF, once they grab you, you just stand there waiting to be thrown. I also don't understand why it's considered more hardcore. If anything Virtua Fighter is a whole lot easier to play then Tekken. VF even has a much simpler ruleset, because hit boxes are so generalized. It doesn't matter where & what you hit, so long as you simply hit them. There isn't even much of a difference between the playing styles of each character, save for the grapplers & Akira Yuki, everybody else is mostly aggressive mid to high attack melee.
The styles got more varied with VF5 & 4 due to the new characters who play nothing like the VF1 & VF2 cast, but most of the original cast still are nothing but pure offense.
What the fuck is so hardcore about Vf when it practically plays like Dead or Alive? LOL! Both games play more like beat em ups than they do fighting games. DoA is at least fun. I never even noticed how similar Yakuza games play to Virtua Fighter games until they finally released a yakuza game that comes with Virtua Fighter. At least VF is better than most 2d fighters. I can't even get into 2d fighters anymore, because they're so simple minded. VF was good, it's just that Tekken kept getting better and better.
Virtua Fighter games are often recognized as the hardest fighting games however the community doesn't reflect that, because barely anyone plays it. Barely anyone plays it because Virtua Fighter is so damn boring to learn. It takes you months before you finally become passable with one character in VF. Tekken in contrast is much easier to get into but it also has much harder competition than VF due to the easier noob barrier, and simpler ruleset to master. Tekken is all about frame advantages, & knowing which move's hitboxes connect with the target while maintaining an optimal safe distance.
I'm still not sure what Virtua Fighter's ruleset is. A lot of it makes no sense to me, like how throws seem to instantly throw you without giving you a chance to break out of it. (Although Tekken has the opposite problem. Throws are useless in Tekken because expert players know the inputs for breaking out of throws by heart.) I also hate how simple jabs over power everything in Virtua fighter whereas in Tekken, if you jab too much you get parried or countered.
Dead or Alive is the easiest of the three but it's easily way funner than both Virtua Fighter & Tekken. I main Tekken and like it the best but I think it's more due to how I've been playing Tekken since Tekken 2 and even own all of the Tekken's since 2. If I were a noob to fighters Dead or Alive would be my game of choice because 3d movement isn't some weird jerky motion like it is in Tekken nor is the combat some boring obtuse mess like it is in Virtua Fighter. Try being a noob in VF who picks Akira Yuki first, lol. I know how to use him, most people don't. Akira is the classic example of what fake difficulty looks like. Half of his moveset involves you pressing & holding three different buttons at a time while moving your joystick in a certain motion. The pay off is huge because Akira's moves do ton of damage and easily break through guards. The end result to me is an unbalanced game, because what usually happens is that most tourneys typically have plenty of Akira mains, lol. Yeah best fighter ever, nope. That's why VF is dead. The game is too hard to get into. I played VF since the original (Although I never played Vf 5) and I still have no idea what the fuck the rule set is. It seems to be some rock paper scissors shit where Jabs beat everything except throws, LOL. Fuck that game.