For those of you who have never played this game or gone to an arcade, the difference between Virtua Fighter and DOA is that Virtua Fighter puts more emphasis on fighting style and strategy. Does this mean the fighting is slower than DOA? Yes. There's no need to combo your opponent to death. It's all about finding the perfect counter or executing each individual move instead of figuring how to knock your opponent in the air for massive combo damage.

The plot is right out of a fighting game, which means it stinks. World competition funded by an evil corporation to create the ultimate soldier. Sound familiar? There's 18 characters to pick. Unfortunately, none of the characters stand out in terms of looks like DOA or any other popular 3D fighters. The characters have different fighting styles that greatly affect gameplay. Unfortunately, weight is not present in Virtua Fighter so anyone can be thrown by anyone else. Speed and height still play a major part in character gameplay.

There's a quest mode where you travel to different "arcades" and fight to gain rank so you can buy stuff for your characters. This makes even less sense than the fighting story mode, but we guess you can't expect much from a fighting game. We give the developers credit for making the quest mode AI different from the story mode AI. The quest mode AI is more realistic and much less predictable.

The graphics aren't that great for a 360 title. They keep the clean arcade look, but the textures look like plastic. Although the characters are detailed. However, compared to DOA4, there's not enough sexappeal or interest to the characters. It's all very generic. The environments are dull and unimaginative. Even worse, the versus and selection screnes look so generic that you think they came from the Sega Saturn version a decade ago. The sound is generic arcade fighting music.

The online mode is solid fighting. It helps that Virtua Fighter is not as fast as DOA in gameplay. There's tournaments and versus fights. But let it be known that the online mode is real tough on new players because Virtua Fighter is a cult game with very loyal and skilled followers. We still recommend it for it's strategic gameplay and excellent, but slow gameplay.