Virtua Fighter 5: Hot New Hands-On!

We've played a new build of VF5, and bring you the very first lowdown on new gameplay changes and playing as the new female fighter, Eileen. Also: PS3 NOT confirmed.

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On Tuesday, Sega's arcade division started the second phase of testing for the upcoming Virtua Fighter 5. While the first location test was held in Shinjuku, Japan for a mere two days, this time, the location test spans three different locations -- Shinjuku, Akihabara and Ikebukuro -- and will end this Sunday.

Luckily, we were able to head out to the Shinjuku location during the beginning hours of the test to check out the game and avoid lines that would inevitably be there during the evening.

For those who haven't read up on our initial hands-on of the game, you'd be wise to check it out now, as many of the core elements of the game have stayed the same. There were a few changes made to the previous build, the most important coming in the sway system. In the first location test, sways were performed by pressing down-forward and P+K+G at the same time, but now all you need to do is to double tap up or down.

This system is much more intuitive since the original sidestep is still intact, using a single tap. Essentially, if you want to do a quick avoid, a single tap will do it, but if you want to commit yourself in the hopes of scoring more damage, you can do a double tap to get completely behind an opponent.

Another gameplay change comes with the wall system. In Virtua Fighter 4, wall stuns lasted relatively the same length, no matter how you hit the wall, but this has changed in the second location test. Now, if you hit a wall off-center, then it'll result in a regular stun, but if you hit it directly, the stun will last much longer than before. This opens up the possibility to more damaging combos.

Aside from these changes, the main point of this location test was to give players the chance to try out the other new character to the series, Eileen, a small girl who uses Monkey style Kung-Fu. While obviously incomplete, Eileen does bear a striking resemblance to many fighters who use the same style, which you've probably seen in the movies. Her moves are quick and she literally hops all over the place, and many of her moves look less like punching and more like flailing.

Being that she's a small, little girl, she's also extremely nimble. Like El Blaze, her main strength is her ability to move around the arena in record time. By using P+K+G and various combinations of the joystick, you can make her backflip, hop and spin forwards, backwards and to each side. In our playing time with her, she didn't have too much in the way of combos, but that's understandable given that her moveset is extremely limited as of now. We expect that she'll become more fleshed out during later tests.

New character Eileen is playable in latest build

Eileen's appearance was also paired with the introduction of several new stages, many of which will please old-school VF fans, as some of them are remixed versions of older stages. For example, Shun's stage is once again the raft (sans bridge, however), while Jeffry and Wolf's stages look eerily similar to their VF2 stages.

Other stages that we were able to see were a snowy mountain, a night time city -- complete with Northern Lights in the background, a jungle setting with beautiful waterfalls surrounding the forest, and an excavation site filled with muddy water that ripples according to character movement.

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