Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 309: Assassin's Creed & Virtual On

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

USgamer's Mike Williams joins Jeremy to discuss the early days of Ubisoft's virtual history sim Assassin's Creed, then patron Andrew Oliveira steps in to walk us through the history of Sega's mech-powered brawling cult fave Virtual On. Art by Shaan Khan.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, it's on like, uh, virtual Kong. All right, so for this segment of the show, we've got an old friend of mine who, I don't think has actually been on Retronauts before. No. I feel like I was for one episode, but I don't remember which episode. episode it was. It's possible. It might have been a while back, but maybe you called in to one of Bob's episodes. That might have been something you did. I don't know. It kind of blurs together because

we've podcasted together so many times, but just not in the retronauts brand. But wait, who are you? Introduce yourself. Hello, I am Mike Williams. I'm reviews editor over at US Gamer where I used to work with one Jeremy Parrish. Technically, I used to work there. Yeah, it was a whole thing. thing. And you're still keeping the home fires burning along with Kat and Nadia. So that's great. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a lot of fun, even though as reviews editor, I move from game to game to game. So it's a constant treadmill of fun. Yeah, but you seem like someone who enjoys kind of bouncing around to different games. Like I get the impression that you have kind of like a few games that you sort of return to and kind of commit to for the long term. But you've always struck me as someone

who really enjoys, you know, jumping into what's next and tackling it. Yeah, though that's pretty much true. So my home games tend to be the MMOs, World Warcraft, Final Fantasy, 14, and currently Division 2. But, yeah, I like seeing what's new and seeing how things are changing and how genres are evolving over time. And just it's fun seeing what the new hotness is. But that is not the point of retronauts. The point of retronauts is to talk about old things. But I've pulled you onto this episode so that we can talk about the origins of one of your favorite franchises.

If I'm not mistaken, like I definitely get the impression that you, this series is near and dear to your heart. Is that correct? Yes, it is very much near and dear to my heart. In fact, I have every game in the series actually sitting over on my bookshelf, even if I have, had a digital version of it already. I just like to have the entire collection there. Even from the very first game, I was just like, oh, this is, this is amazing series. And it's, it's probably my favorite series of all time. I don't hate any of them. And that series is Assassin's Creed. Yes. I guess we should have said that up front. But yeah, so when you say you have all the games

on yourself, does that include even the spinoffs and the weird like Vita stuff and things like that? Uh, yes, I actually, uh, the DS game. Yeah, uh, speaking of the weird Vita stuff, I have the, the white, uh, PlayStation Vita is my Vita because I was the one that came with Assassin's Creed liberation. So, uh, yeah, no, I have pretty much all of them. I, I know there's one I'm missing. And I think it might be the second DS game. I actually didn't realize there were two. So there you go. Yeah, there were, there were multiple portable ones. There's the Alteo's Chronicles, and then there was another one after that. But I think I'm missing the second one. Got it.

Well, still, that's a prodigious number of Assassin's Creed games. But we're going to talk specifically about the origin of the species, as it were here. The very first Assassin's Creed, which as we were both kind of agreeing before we started recording, is kind of a singular work. Like, the series really, the sequel, you know, Assassin's Creed 2 and beyond, really, you know, they still feel like they are drawn from the same sort of wellspring of inspiration and mechanics as the first game, but they work a lot differently. And none of the, none of the sequels have really gone back to the distinct kind of qualities of the original Assassin's Creed. Correct. So like what people take as Assassin's Creed, well, up until Syndicate, what people took as Assassin's Creed really started with

two. And Assassin's Creed one is actually a much slower. and more methodical game it's actually more of a game about investigation and planning as opposed to a game about running around a city shankin dudes with a hidden blade

and in fact that's part of the storyline is that your main character Altier is a senior assassin who in his first mission decides to go a little bit rogue and run out

and do the like Assassin's Creed 2 and on thing and try to kill a guy, and it goes horribly wrong. And then the rest of the game is him atoning for that and being more methodical, more slow. Get all of the information. And the assassination is really just sort of a payoff for all of the work that you did before to find out about the targets. Right. So it's probably worth talking a little bit about sort of. of the origins of Assassin's Creed, because if I'm not mistaken, it originally began as like a sequel or something building off of Prince of Persia. The creative director on the original

Assassin's Creed, Patrice Desilay, had originally worked on Prince of Persia Sands of Time, which was a fantastic game, really like a fresh take on the Prince of Persia concept that felt, you know, like you could still see the Prince of Persia DNA in there, but it felt much more limber and had some really interesting ideas, and Ubisoft never quite managed to come up with a satisfying sequel to that, or at least not for another decade or so. But I think that's because Desolet, the kind of visionary behind that game, jumped over and created Assassin's Creed. And especially with Assassin's Creed 2, when you get to like the Assassin Tumes and stuff, you really start to feel like, oh, yes, I see the Prince of Persia here. But even so, you know, there is this kind of, you mentioned

the first Assassin's Creed is a very methodical game. And Prince of Persia, you know, know, when I think back to the classic Prince of Persia games, they are very methodical, very much about kind of precision movements and planning and, you know, like rushing, but also taking your time. Yeah, no, that's very much true. You could not play the very first Prince of Persia very fast. In fact, it's stymied young me for a very long time because I kept trying to like, okay, let's get into a fight.

Oh, I die. or, oh, I jumped too far and landed in a pit of spikes. Yeah, it was interesting because the original Prince of Persia, you had a 60-minute time limit. So you had to play quickly, but it wasn't that you had to play fast. It was that you had to play efficiently. Right. It was very much a game that relied on multiple play-throughs to sort of build a mental map of what was coming and then executing on that in a row. And I really feel like Assassin's Creed, the original especially,

really brings that forward. I mean, so many of the ideas that you see in this game, like the investigation and the kind of like assassin vision and the reactive melee combat, like all that was basically picked up wholesale, you know, just like completely lifted by Rocksteady a couple of years later in Batman Arkham Asylum. And everyone loved it then, whereas this game received much more mixed reviews. And I think that, you know, Batman pulled it off better. But, but you really have to kind of give this game credit for bringing those ideas kind of to the public in the first place, even if they did need a little bit of refinement. I mean, yeah, this pretty much kicked off.

It wasn't the first open world game, but in my mind, it kicked off this real thrust and push towards what open world could be, because I remember seeing that very first trailer, and I was like, there's no way that's real. And the game is largely what that first trailer was, and walking up, climbing up, which was a much harder action in the original Assassin's Creed to the top of a tower. And looking down was just a sea change, at least in me and why that's one of my favorite series, just being able to look down upon this meticulously created historical city landmark or whatever. and not many games really nail that as well like even Batman you bring up

Arkham Asylum it won sort of that love by being a little bit more action oriented but I couldn't really tell you any of the the main locations within Arkham Asylum and that sort of extends forward to the later Batman games as well whereas I can remember looking down upon like

Damascus for the first time in Assassin's Creed. Yeah, I feel like, okay, so this game, so this game came out at the end of 2007, I really feel like that was kind of a landmark year for sort of open, modern world game design. Because earlier that year, you had Crackdown, which was also a very vertical open world kind of game, but one that was very, very different in tone and style than Assassin's Creed. Like Assassin's Creed, you know, it's very much about kind of solving the problems and sneaking in, assassinating a target, and then sneaking out without being seen. Whereas Crackdown has Basically, you're a disposable grunt with incredible powers, and if you die in combat,

that's okay, because we'll just send another one of you out. But, you know, it did have that verticality, but it wasn't about climbing so much as just impossibly superheroic jumps. So Assassin's Crude was kind of a more grounded, more thoughtful kind of game. I feel like, you know, it did have some flaws that made it a little hard to kind of love. You know, in terms of things to go hunting for outside of the actual. assassin marks. It was pretty much like you can kill some crusaders and you can collect some feathers. And that's about it. Yeah. And even the act, so you had to kill a total of nine

targets. One was like sort of the final boss. But the other eight targets, the lead up to them is largely the same. It's like here's a, an eavesdropping mission where you have to follow a target and listen to them. Here's an interrogation mission. and it was just the same thing from target to target instead of sort of differentiating the gameplay. Where it changed was where the target was in their specific city and what they were doing. But how you played the game up until that assassination was mostly the same beats repeated over and over again. Yeah, so it definitely started to feel kind of grinding and repetitive. but you know you have to admire the the ideas that it innovated things like social camouflage were really different

it was a little contrived the idea that uh you the assassin just happened to be wearing kind of like the same outfit as various other groups in the city like monks and stuff so you could kill someone and then slip into a group of monks and no one would notice you because there were like holy men and also there's this one dude with like you know all this kind of elaborate armor under his white hood but But you have to give them points for trying. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, even like in world, it makes in a sense, like, I feel like the Templars would just be like, yeah, let's just kill all the holy men. Like, if you come by.

But at least it was some sort of pump fake towards realism, whereas sort of the social stealth and some of the later games are just like, I mean, there's the guy in the white hood right there in the middle of that crowd of absolutely normal people. that's probably our guy. At least they tried to be like explaining away how you can hide in those situations. Yeah, I feel like the sequels have kind of the Star Wars prequel Jedi problem where, you know, Obi-Wan Kenobi dressed like he did because he was a hermit living in the desert. But then you get, you know, 50 years in the past where everyone's peaceful and they're like, the Jedi Knight are saving the galaxy and they're really heroic and cool. and they're also wearing hermit monk robes for some reason.

So, yeah, it's kind of the same thing here. Like the future assassins, you know, set in the Revolutionary War or something, you feel like, you know, probably they wouldn't be wearing the same thing as a Muslim assassin during the Crusades. But what do I know? Yeah, yeah, especially since, like, Altierrez design and costume was really sort of aiming back towards that historical motif, like, trying to. to bring forward what the assassins back in the day it would have actually been wearing. There's some flourishes like the red sash, but otherwise that hood and look was supposed to be,

oh, this is what they wore, which is another thing that I've always loved about the entire series, is that Ubisoft really puts a lot of work into talking to historians and asking, like, is this right? Like, is this what it would look like? to the point that when they got to origins and Odyssey, they actually have the discovery mode,

which is fully educational. It's just like, here's stuff about the time period this game takes place in. Yeah, I know I've mentioned this before in different places, but I remember reviewing, I think it was Revelations, whichever one is set in Rome, and the endgame map was very abstract. Like, they were telling me to go someplace,

but the map didn't really clearly demonstrate it. So I pulled up Google Maps and was like, oh, okay, I know where to go because, you know, Rome is still basically the same city as it's always been, so I need to get to like the Acropolis, not the Acropolis, but the, you know, whatever it is, some temple.

And it's right here, and that's where I am relative to this and the game, so I made it over there just fine. And being able to navigate a game set, you know, 600 years ago with Google GPS is interesting, but it does speak highly of the fidelity. And that's another thing I really enjoyed about the original Assassin's Creed was kind of the

audacity of it. You know, 2007, like, there's still a lot of Islamophobia in America, but 2007 was really still kind of the height of it post-9-11, and, you know, the war in the Middle East was much more heated than it is now, as opposed to just this intractable thing we can't get out of. Like, there was still a lot more thought and energy put into it. And for Ubisoft to create a game where you play not only as a Muslim, but a Muslim assassin who goes up and tangles with Christian crusaders and actually assassinations Templars, like, that's a bold thing to do in that time, in that climate. And I really respect that. It made the game much more interesting than, like, you are a cool American military guy. Go kill the brown people. No,

this time you were one of the brown people and you were killing the Christians, but, you know, they were invading your land. So who's to say it's wrong? Like, that was, you know, very audacious of them. And I think, I think that's one of the real strengths of the game. Yeah, not only was an audacious, but they even sort of get into sort of ideas of law and order and faith and how those things work. Like the leap of faith, which is sort of a signature mechanic of Assassin's Creed, is presented in the very first one as what it says it is. It's a leap of faith, sort of indoctrination. Like you have been trained, the order has brought you to this point, now take the leaf to show. show that you believe in everything we believe into. And that was always interesting to me. And even

the Templars like, now they're more comically evil. And there are some comically evil Templars in the game. But a number of them are people who started in one place gained power and then sort of lost their way. And that's sort of brought forth with your spoilers for anyone who hasn't played the first game, the leader of the assassins, Al-Mu-Alim, falls to the same place in that towards the end. He decides to use the Peace of Eden, the Assassin's Creed McGuffin, to take over and establish order, which is not really what the assassins are about. Yeah, and that's, yeah, like you said, there's kind of a bit of ambiguity there. Like, either side can be evil. A lot of the crusading knights that you end up

assassinating kind of like is the extra missions. They're just like dudes who are traveling on the road. You don't see them do anything bad. You don't learn about their backstory. It's just like, well, they're part of this invading army. So they got to go. And you can just like, there might be like a knight in his vigil or something by the side of the road. But again, he's got to go.

Yeah. And the assassins themselves even like their system doesn't necessarily work. Like they kill bad people who would stop freedom. But there's no, like, sort of who's going to replace that. They just cut out the cancer and then leave the hole there, which is really not a system that works. So there's a lot of fun interplay there that sort of in later games, it's just, well, these are the good guys and these are the bad guys. And I think there's only one game, Assassin's Creed Rogue, that really sort of flips that on its head. And it's like, well, maybe this is not the best of ideas.

Yeah, I would say as an assassin, you generally in these games, especially in this first game, play as, I would say, neutral chaotic. You're kind of lawful, but working outside the law, and you're not necessarily good or evil. You're just, you know, taking down the people that you decide are evil without really thinking about how to fill the power vacuum. So I would say neutral chaotic. Yeah, no, they're definitely neutral chaotic. And there are certain games that sort of question is like, is this the right person that we should be killing? And there's also that moment that's introduced in the first Assassin's Creed where you kill a target. And then you get to sort of have them explain their viewpoint.

Like it doesn't make any sort of sense in-game that you're like diving into their memories and having this conversation over the in-game world like second. but it's a moment for someone to say, well, this is where I was coming from before you ruined everything and killed me. Yeah, there's definitely a bit of abstraction to this. It reminds me a lot of Metal Gear where, you know, like Solid Snake or Naga Snake or whoever will kill a villain and then there'll be like a long dialogue where either the villain is dying and talks about their life story or, you know, Dennis Rodman calls in and is like, hey, by the way, let me tell you the entire life story of this this lady you just killed, you know, it's, it's definitely that kind of, how would you describe it? It's like, I guess just you kind of have to suspend

your disbelief a little bit. Yeah, because it's like a weird fever dream where you stab them and obviously they do the cut on either side of it so you can see that whatever happened, the conversation took place in a couple seconds and it happens in this weird animus place. But I think it works just because it does sort of explain the bad guys, the Templar Order, to a larger degree than just sort of watching their works, which is always like villains without any sort of explanation or motivation aren't really all that great as villains. Yeah, you mentioned the animus. That's, I think, one of the more interesting but also controversial elements of the game. It's actually very intriguing in the first game. I think they really drop the ball with it in the future.

Is that even something in the current games? it is still a thing in the current game so there's still the framing sequence where there is in the current two origins and odyssey there's a young woman who is diving into sort of a mini animus so she goes to different historical places finds the bodies or whatever tomb of a person and then she jumps into the mini animus to sort of relive that life but it's not really what the game is game is about. They're just sort of like really, really brief bookends on either side of the game. Yeah, is that actually building to anything? Or is it just kind of there because they need the metaphor? I feel like part of it is there to build a metaphor. The Odyssey, they sort of wrap it around to sort of do an interesting reveal at the end, which I won't spoil for some people. but we've sort of like at this point in the story fully stepped into the weird ancient aliens plot line which is the side thing of the entire Assassin's Creed series with immortal ancient civilizations

that left stuff that still works and some of them are coming back or whatever that's the part of the series that I enjoy but I understand a lot of people roll their eyes at because it is a bunch of nonsense. It's very very Final Fantasy-esque almost. Yeah, the very first game, you kind of gradually start to piece these things together because you have these moments when you're outside of

the computer simulation where you play as Altayere and you just play as a dude. And you're in like an office building. And, you know, this was 2007. So it was kind of presented as like, you know, the coming apocalypse in December 2012. Like you're working up

towards something involving that. So it was very intriguing. I don't really think the sequels did a lot with it. But, you know, at the very, it kind of had the JJ Abrams thing where it was like, wow, this is mysterious and cool. I wonder what it's about. And then you kind of get to the reveal and you're like, oh, okay. Yeah, all right.

That just kind of ended, whatever. But it was, it was interesting. And at least it did kind of give you an excuse to have this sort of, you know, this historic simulation where it could be a little, you know, you could suspend your disbelief because it's a simulation. You're not really an assassin running around in Akra and Jerusalem. You're simulating his life. So if you mess up, well, you can do it again because you've got to kind of live the experience,

but you're not really going out and assassinating the way that your ancestor was. Yeah. And the synchronization mechanic also prevents you from GTAing it and just killing random people, which you can do but the games are always like I mean the assassins didn't do that and in the first one like if you kill like I think it's like two or three people

like it desinks you completely because that is not a thing that happened the framing of that very first game is that you are trying to get as close to what actually happened

in Altier's past as possible and a bunch of mechanics were built around this idea of synchronization, getting as close to the real memory, even though Desmond was technically the one controlling Altier during that sequence. Right. So it's a little high concept, I guess, a little over complex, but it's, I guess, a way for them to kind of fudge the video game elements of it. Yes, no. It's very much a way for them to be like, and it's sort of rooted in that same Prince Persia Sands of Time thing, where when you were playing Prince of Persia and why it was so great, if you died, the framing was that the prince was telling the story of his adventure. And so if you died, he'd be like, no, no, no, that's not how that happened. And it would rewind you. And synchronization sort of carries forward that same idea, which is. is no, that's really not how it happened. Altier did not accidentally leap off a tower and not hit the bays of hail and die immediately. So we're going to give you a do-over on that.

One of the other sort of unique things about the first Assassin's Creed compared to its sequels, and I think we'll kind of wrap on this. But one thing that I find really compelling about it is the fact that it is a much more contiguous world, Whereas the later games, at least the ones that I've played, they tend to either put you just in a city or else it's a few different cities, but you fast travel between them and that's it. Whereas in the original Assassin's Creed, you actually have to travel out in the countryside. And, you know, there is kind of this journey between the major cities of the Holy Lands. And it does lend the adventure a different feel. Like when you go to a different city, it really feels like, you know, I'm going to be in Damascus for a while.

I'm actually kind of setting up camp here. I need to kind of get the lay of the land. And it's not so much, like the contemporary games, I think, have a tendency to basically say, here's your place. You see the towers around, now go up to the towers, and you can get the lay of the land from there. And now everything's on your map. Whereas this wasn't really so much like that. It was more like kind of a lived experience.

It did not, it didn't do quite so much handholding for you, I would say. Yeah, no, there's definitely that the idea that it, it feels more like a rooted place. And I know why they got rid of the sort of contiguous areas in between each of the cities because you didn't really do a ton in there. Like there were horses and you could get on a horse and you could ride a horse from one city or the other. But otherwise the horse didn't really matter for the rest of the game that you were playing. But I think that's part of Patrice Dicely's like.

He seems like the kind of person that wants to keep things grounded. And I think he believes that sort of that same, not necessarily tedium, but that same space adds to the experience in the same way that say like Red Dead Redemption 2 sort of prizes those more slower maybe, you know, repeatable mechanics that some people would rather they just scrubbed away from the game. Yeah, see, for me, I feel like the solution was not to just take away those parts. It was to do something more meaningful with those parts, to like find some substance to it. I think, you know, you mentioned Red Dead Red Dead Redemption, too, and that's immediately what came to mind is, you know, finding this sort of like some substance, something to do in your time and to give extra weight to those in-between spaces. I wish they had done that with the sequels as opposed to just like, eh, you know, you've got Rome and you've got some other cities. And that's all you, you know, you don't care about the spaces in between. Yeah.

And then you get to Odyssey and like most of the game is the spaces in between. Odyssey is sort of, like I still love it, but it's probably the one where I said mentally like, yeah, this is too big. This is too much stuff. This is too big a world. Let's pair it down a little bit. So like in preparation for this, I loaded up Assassin's Creed one again on. PC and was just like, oh, okay, this is a nice, nice size chunk of world, believable historical world to explore. So the game needs to be bigger so that you keep playing, but there are

limits. So just to wrap, what was it really about this? Like, at what point did you become a fan of Assassin's Creed? At what point were you like, this is it, this is me, this is what I got to do? In the first one, that first climb, like the first time that you really climb a tower in Assassin's Creed, and now in modern games, you hold the button and this sort of procedurally figures out how you're climbing up of a tower. But back in the day, it was more of a puzzle, and you were sort of slowly looking for handholds and scaling a tower. And as you're doing that in the first Assassin's Creed, it sort of pulls out a little bit so you can see the city. And when you finally make that summit and look out over City, there hadn't been a game that had done that before. Like I said, there were open world games prior to Assassin's Creed, but nothing that sort of sold the scope of what the developers had built. Yeah, I would say climbing the, the agent's tower in Crackdown, the original Crackdown,

that had kind of the same feel because it was kind of puzzleish. And you got way up there and you were like, oh, my God, if I fall, I'm going to die. Yes. And like you were saying, like Crackdown is that same idea of sort of that verticality and scope. It was just from a very almost arcady platformy perspective. Yep. So basically you were there from the start. Is there anything you would like to see brought back from the original Assassin's Creed, things that the series has left behind?

I'm trying to, a little bit more of the investigation stuff. Like, some of the things that have been lost over time, the investigation stuff in Assassin's Creed 1. Assassin's Creed 2 and some of the others also had the Prince of Persia-style tombs, which they also don't do anymore. and I'd like to see those back. But sort of the more slower methodical moments are not really present in Origins and Odyssey, which are more combat-heavy RPG-centric. And I'd like some of those back,

just like breathing room and to add variety to what you're doing. All right, Mike, thanks for your time. There's only not that much more to say about the original Assassin's Creed, but I do think at some point in the future, it'd be worth doing a full-scale deep dive into the Etzio trilogy, because that is really kind of the definitive works for this series, up until at least Odyssey, I would say. And I think there is a lot there to unpack and talk about. But that is a conversation for another time, as it is

now, I will let you go to enjoy your weekend. So thanks for your time. Where can people find you online. People can find me online at Twitter at Automatic Zen, Z-E-N, or you can find me every day writing at usgamer.net. All right, Mike, thanks again. It was good talking to you and hope to have you again on the show sometime soon. Take care. Indeed. You're going to be able to be. Hi, we're Ellen, Stephen, and Mark. Hosts of Nice Games Club, the show where Nice Game Deves talk gaming and game development. Topics include programming, design, tools, and more.

We also do interviews and one of our game jams. Listen to Nice Games Club, wherever you get to your... Whenever you get to your podcast, you get there. Or at Nicegames.com. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here? Timmy's in a well. Sequelcast 2 and Friends is a podcast looking at movies, a franchise, one film at a time, like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit.

And sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well. And now it's part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. Oh, Lassie, we don't need to rescue Timmy. He likes the well. Well enough, I guess. Darth Vader is Luke's father. Lassie, I told you to play off the spoilers. How does crazy taxi stack up against, say, Papers, please?

And what's the one 3-D-O-FMV game that gives Mario Party a run for? its money. Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's Top Games, where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically ranked the games you nominated for our ever-growing list. HG 101's Top Games, twice a week, every week, right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So for this second segment, we have something that is extremely not Assassin's Creed. And this one is a patron request to tackle a Sega series, kind of a cult classic, cult favorite. It's made a little bit of an entry into the U.S. from time to time. But I don't think it's ever really gotten too big here.

the only person I've ever known who really, really loved the series was James Mielke back at One Up. And, you know, he was always into the, like, hardcore steak of stuff. But it is a series that nevertheless has fans. And one of them is here on the line with me. Please introduce yourself. My name is Andrew Olivera. I'm really just a nobody, just a patron and fan of retronauts. You're not a nobody.

Nobody's a nobody. So clearly you're someone. who is enough of somebody to be very familiar with a pretty esoteric Sega series, one that kind of straddles the line between action game, fighting game. It's kind of hard to pin down exactly what it is. So with that in mind, could you just kind of loosely explain Virtual On for listeners if they are not familiar with it? virtualon is essentially a third person arena mech fighter and that's essentially all it should be

yeah i mean that's that's a very sort of abstract perspective but it's a very different kind of game from what people might expect from a fighting game because it has it's clearly inspired by its creator's love of what they call in japan like hard sci-fi mech anime And it's, you know, hard sci-fi means something different in Japan than it does here. Like when you think of hard sci-fi in the U.S., you think of Heinlein or Asimov. That's not really the case in Japan. When they talk about, you know, manga and anime that are hard sci-fi, they really just mean it's not giant robots. Like, it's not a little kid with a remote-controlled robot that's saving the world.

It's a little kid inside of piloting a mech suit with stakes and basically Gundam. Yeah, I mean, that's ultimately what it gets down to. The series is, I would say, very heavily inspired by Gundam, down to the fact that one of the mech designers had worked on some Gundam projects, hadn't he? Yes. I made notes for this, and they vanished off the face of the earth, which is really frustrating. but I can't remember

what was his name? Is it Hajime Katoki? Yes. I think it's hearing your notes. Okay. How familiar are you with Kotoki's work? I'm not a huge mobile suit Gundam fan.

I mean, like many, I've watched Gundam Wing and whatnot on Tsunami when it was around. So, I mean, those familiar with that should know that he did the design for Tall Geese and the redesigns for the movie for all the guns. Gundams. He's worked on Mobile Suit V Gundam, G Gundam, the Super Robot War series. So he's a huge predigree in that sense.

Yeah. So Gundam Wing is, that was also my introduction to Gundam, and it made me not want to watch Gundam for like 20 years. But I gave it a, I finally gave it a shot again last year and really liked it because I went back to the original Mobile Suit Gundam, the Universal Century stuff. and especially the original Gundam, like the very early, you know, the anime based on the novels by Tomino, like, they really are kind of grounded in this idea that, you know, these mex suits are very powerful and they change the shape of war, but at the same time, they also come with limits. And there are entire episodes based around simple things like reentering the atmosphere of Earth and what it means to take. part in combat maneuvers while reentering the atmosphere and dealing with friction and gravity and acceleration and so forth. And I feel like that's the tradition that Virtual On draws from. Like it's got a little bit of the robots or magic thing that started to show up in later Gundam series. But at the same time, it does still give you the sensation that, hey, you are in this

bulky box of metal that weighs several tons and is kind of hard to control. It can't turn on a dime. And it has its limitations, even though it's also powerful. And, you know, it does play fast and loose, you know, with mecks that basically look like a schoolgirl, like a magical school girl that shoots magic beams. So, you know, it's not letting some idea of realism get in the way of just having a good time and making a fun combat game. But it's not, you know, something like Street Fighter or I guess a better analog might be Power Stone where you're kind of moving around in a 3D space and your characters can basically streak across the screen and do all kinds of stuff. And it's just like energetic and not especially realistic. Whereas I feel like Virtualon

does try to deal with things like inertia and, you know, just the limitations of mass. and the fact that, hey, these are, you know, three-story tall robots that are beating the crap out of each other. So there's some things you have to take into account with that. And it makes for a series that really plays and feels like, I would say, like nothing else. Yeah, I mean, and that's part of the reason why I chose it, because there really isn't anything else like it. And at the time, there definitely wasn't. and it really does try to put the user in the cockpit, you know, and you've seen that in some things like, you know,

after burner where, you know, you can sit and it'll shake you and whatnot. But having the two joysticks in front of you and rotating them and whatnot, you know, it's a real sense that you're in the machine and it's really cool. Yeah, and that's probably the best place to start is talking about how this game played in its arcade debut, which was in, what, 1995, 96? I don't remember exactly when. first came out, but it debuted in arcades and showed up first, you know, as a home port on Saturn. And the home ports had the limitation of, you know, using the controllers that were available for home systems, whereas an arcade machine, the beauty of arcade machines is

that their programmers, their designers, their creators, manufacturers, could basically create a machine designed specifically to play that game. And so virtual on, is built around the idea of, hey, you're piloting a giant robot in combat, and as a result, it has a dual joystick setup so that the meck that you're piloting controls a lot like a tank, where, you know, the way you move the controllers, the sticks, affects, you know, which part of you is moving forward, which part of you is going backward, or, you know, both parts of you can go backwards, so then you reverse, but if one part is forward, one part is back, one side, then you turn in, you know,

the direction opposite. So you've kind of seen that more recently, you know, a few years later in Steel Battalion from Capcom, but that was a shot at real, like absolute realism. Whereas this doesn't get bogged down in that. This is very much, you know, it's a Sega game, which means it's high impact, it's fast-paced, it's colorful, flashy, has really great graphics. Like their arcade machines just always, you know, ran on high-end hardware that looked amazing like nothing else before it or nothing else around it.

So it does kind of follow in the wake of games like virtual racer and virtual fighter where, you know, everything is made of polygons. It's kind of low resolution, but there's a lot of flashiness and just a great sense of speed, high frame rates. Everything moves really smoothly. And if you don't pay attention, then you're going to get trounced because it's basically like zero to 60 the second you put in a quarter. Yeah, and, you know, I think that was their main idea when they were designing it was to ensure that it played better than it looked.

Even when they moved it to the Sega Saturn, you know, the arcade was obviously superior, but they tried to keep the gameplay as steady as they could and made sacrifices where it didn't necessarily matter. Right. And so they did take this dual stick design and try to adapt it. to the idea of a fighting game. So the stick commands are a little different here. I was talking to someone recently and mentioned in an episode, Data East's arcade game karate champ, where you had two joysticks and the combination of directions you pressed, sort of determined which karate maneuvers you were using.

And this kind of builds on that because you do have the dual stick tank controls where you're either going fast or rotating or whatever with the sticks, but also it puts in some extra controls that you wouldn't find in a tank simulator. So if you press the two sticks together, like push them toward each other, that tells your mech, your robot, to basically guard. So it's kind of the equivalent

of putting your arms together. And if you pull the sticks apart from each other, then your mech will jump. So really everything you're doing with the sticks, like everything you're doing in the combat is controlled with the sticks. And then you have triggers on the things. sticks. So you don't have to worry about like pressing buttons or something to jump. It's all right

there in the sticks. So it makes it very fast and very direct. And so there's a great deal of impact. And of course, every every mech controls differently. And I haven't spent enough time with the games to really have a sense of how differently they do control. But that might be a place where you can you can kind of step in and talk about some of the things that differentiate the mecs, especially in the first game. Like, you know, the idea of mech combat, I think when you look at something like Gundam or you know things that have kind of followed in the footsteps of that series the differences tend to be like one mech is faster one is more heavily armored one has maybe like a missile rack one uses beam weapons one only uses short range weapons but i feel like

the the mecks here are more subtly diversified and you know have a lot more variety that you kind of have to spend some time playing them to really get a feel for what makes them distinct yeah i mean the way i see it is there's you know you're kind of basic three tiers of you know you got your balanced kind of like reu of the game with temjin and then you have like your big bulky guys that move slow but hit hard uh which i believe ridden was the first of those created and then you've got your you know weak but speedy ones uh like phaenne uh who was the only female I guess they're called virtual roids. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but, you know, and all of them sort of vary among those sort of avenues. So do you have a preferred fighting style with this particular game? Like, I usually go for the speedy characters who can duck in, land and attack,

and then duck back to safety. But you may have a different approach, especially with such an atypical fighting game. Well, with playing online recently as any, you know, I just, I'm, terrible at the game, apparently, but I do prefer Fayenne being the fastest plus. She's very cliche in a lot of respects, because not only does she look like Sailor Moon, when she drops below half-health, she has like this super sane mode she goes into where she turns gold and does extra damage. So do all the all the mecs have, you know, kind of these specialty modes, low damage or

low health modes, or is that something unique to her? That's just her for whatever reason. So how does that keep her from being overpowered compared to the rest of the mechs? Like are there other features, I guess, is what I'm saying. Like other factors that come into play with the other mechs that kind of keep a balance so they can keep up with a mech that basically becomes super strong when it's taken too much of a beating? Well, I mean, super strong in the sense that, I mean, she isn't invincible still. she's just as weak as she was.

So, I mean, it's a little bit of a boost, but it's nothing that completely breaks the balance of the game. I see. So it's not like going supersonic. No, not that ridiculous. So, yeah, actually looking through the note you compiled, you pulled some great resources together here, and it turns out the Virtual Fighter comparison is actually really spot on

because the lead designer and conceptualist behind the game Jura Wattari said that, you know, the boxiness of Virtua Fighter, the original Virtual Fighter's characters basically turned these people into boxes, which he thought was kind of amusing. So he was like, you know, this would actually make even more sense for robots. And so that's where the series kind of came into play. And if you look at the storyline, you definitely see the Gundam element to it, because everything takes place in the virtual century as opposed to the universal century.

But I think, yeah, I'm looking at the timeline you have here. It looks like everything kind of started in. virtual century 70, and, you know, that's a direct lift from Gundam where everything starts in Universal Century 69 into 70. So they were really sticking kind of close to their source material here, but obviously this is a very different kind of game than the Gundam story, which is about, you know, it's a big space opera, a big kind of like all focused on characters and conflicts and the tides of war, whereas this is a fighting game. So it's about, you know, robots beating down on one other.

So there's, you know, I guess the parallels only go so far. Yeah, I mean, there's no way, you know, especially, you know, in Japan where Gundam is such a big part of the culture that there's not going to be some carryover between, you know, Gundam or Macross or, you know, what have you. But it was interesting in my reading that I found that, you know, Sega was very against doing any kind of robot or mech games. And he had a hard time even pitching the concept. Yeah, I wonder why that is. I mean, if you look back around the same time, you know, the game Sega was making were games that kind of seem like good fits for robots. And yet they weren't like Panzer Dragoon. That's basically a sci-fi shooter like Galaxy Force.

But then it's got, you know, these dragons in this kind of surreal fantasy realm instead of robots. I wonder what their thing against robots was. Yeah. I mean, you could have made anything into a robot. I mean, the virtual cop probably would have been great with robots and would have done better in Germany or something where you can't shoot people. Yeah, I think someone already had the claim to robot cop. I don't know. It strikes a bell. True. So, yeah, with that said, do you have any further thoughts on the first game? Any other things that make it unique? And, you know, I guess the question is, is there anything that's, you know, distinct about the first game compared to its sequels? Because, you know, things do change.

You get things like Mega Man, the original game, had a scoring system, whereas none of the other games had that. So I'm just curious if the sequels dropped elements of the first game that you thought were really essential. Not at this point. I mean, with the following game Oratorio Tane Graham, they just built a point. on what they had, and I think everything, you know, was overwhelmingly better than the original. Not that the original isn't worth playing. It's still amazing. But they found ways to exceed what they did in every way. Well, I do want to give Sega props for the fact that when they brought this game to Saturn, even though Saturn obviously did not have the power to equal the Model 2 board

that this ran on, they did take the time to create a twin stick controller specifically for this game. If you bought this dual stick controller, I don't think you were going to use it for any other game on Saturn. So they basically put together a fairly bulky, fairly expensive controller just for the purpose of playing virtual on and said, here you go, fans. We know you want the proper experience, so you got it. I don't know too much about the stick. I've never seen it before. I don't think it was released in the U.S. But I think it was just a digital stick

as opposed to the PlayStation dual analog joystick, which was analog, an analog controller. But there wasn't a game on PlayStation that was as cool as virtual on. Well, as far as the twin stick goes, I can't speak for the original one, though I do have the Dreamcast one. And it handles very well. and it's extremely sturdy.

It kind of has that clickiness very similar to the NeoGeo Pocket Colors in Lone stick. I'm a fan of that. Yes, it's very gratifying in that sense. For the Saturn version, it did seem you could order it like through Sega if you were in the U.S.

But yeah, there was no huge release here for it. And a lot of people are very much purists in the sense that, you know, they need to play with the twin sticks, no matter what, that's how you play virtual on. And sadly, I'm not a huge fan of the twin stick myself, but I can certainly appreciate the aspect. When you say you're not a fan, you mean you don't like the way the game controls, period? Do you prefer to play it just with like a D-pad or analog stick? Yeah, I prefer the D-pad input personally. So how does that work

differently from, you know, using the dual sticks? I've only played it with, you know, the Dreamcast standard controller, so I don't have the twin stick experience behind me. But I guess my question is, what do you, as a fan of the series, think that the sort of standard control approach offers that the intended approach doesn't? Well, the one thing odd about this game is that the ability to turn isn't really there. It's kind of strange in that sense. I mean, you don't really need the full range of movement because, you don't really need the full range of movement because you're focusing on battling the other person, the other Mac.

So anytime that you jump, you automatically rotate and focus on your target. So the ability to jump and then cancel your jump quickly is at least my preferred method of sort of reorienting myself because turning manually is just for whatever reason really slow. And if you cannot really turn while moving either, Yeah, I think that's, you know, what I was saying earlier about the attempt here to kind of capture the inertia of a large robot. I feel like that's where it kind of came into play. And it seems like a weird design choice because this game is so fast and your mechs are so powerful and responsive.

And yet they turn so slowly. It really seems like kind of kind of a weird choice. And you really kind of end up relying on the lock-on feature to kind of auto-target yourself. back toward the enemy, as opposed to slowly turning and hoping you can keep up. Yeah, and, you know, I'm not entirely sure why they went that route. Maybe it's just a sense that they don't want you wandering around. Your target is the other mech and just to keep the sense of action up. I'm not sure.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of games in this era, 3D action games, created around this time tended to be kind of sluggish on that axis. Like, you know, I was just recently playing through Mega Man Legends and when you rotate in that game, it's really pretty slow. And again, it's kind of like this

where your best bet is to just use the auto-targeting feature which will automatically snap toward an enemy or Virtual On doesn't have this feature, but like when you press reverse from the direction you're facing and the action button at the same time, you'll flip the camera around 180.

But when you're just relying on the kind of built-in turning radius, it's very, very, very slow. So I feel like that was just something that was kind of baked into the design of 3D action games at this point. They hadn't quite figured out, like, what's fun yet? What do people want to do? Yeah, it's a strange limitation that you would think they would address in later versions, but they

don't really. I mean, in the recent release for the PS4, turning actually works fairly well, but you don't really use it, especially because you're not conditioned to use it at that point. Yeah. But, you know,

again, it does kind of pull into that tank style control where you have the twin sticks. And looking around a little, I realize I was mistaken, and the virtual on sticks for Saturn also worked with Gun Griffin 2 and two Gundam games, of course. Of course they worked with Gundam games. So it wasn't a total waste. But yeah, like I feel like that is kind of a play limitation designed around the controller concept more so

than, hey, what's going to be exciting and fun? And I do feel like the later games, you know, from what I've played to them or seen of them, they tended to remedy that a bit and make the turn motion a bit faster. So it feels more responsive as opposed to like, Oh, crap, I'm facing the wrong direction and I'm going to take a beating because I'm facing away from the bad guy for my opponent. And they're just wailing on me while I'm slowly turning to face them. Well, I think that's where you want to try and, like, get out of the way, essentially and sort of, you know, reorient yourself. Right. Yeah. But it puts the game more in some ways, you know, this is, this is very much a fighting style game, like an arena fighter. but it kind of puts it more in line with a mech simulator like mech warrior or something.

And I think those games were coming out around the same time as Virtualon, or armored core or something along those lines. Like those games were kind of trying to capture the mech experience, such as it is. So, you know, kind of, I think something was in the water at this point. But I feel like personally for a fast-paced action game, I probably would have gone a slightly different route. I feel like the sort of tank analog would work better for something like, you know,

if they made a pat labor game based on kind of the virtual on engine, I think that would work really well because those are supposed to be very limited mechs as opposed to here where, again, you're like, you have a huge variety of machines that you can fight, you know, everything from the magical girl mech to, just like a giant drilling machine, basically, like a mining machine. So, yeah, I don't know. I guess it's kind of hard to create consistency that works for all these different kind of

mech concepts while still also being balanced. So I, you know, I can respect the choices they made, even if 25 years later, it's like, well, why'd you do that? But, you know, this was, this was an innovation. This was a game that was pioneering 3D action. you know in that regard i think there's a lot to like about virtual on and and you mentioned that virtual on oratorio tangram which uh was an arcade game but then kind of really i think caught people's attention such as it ever did on dreamcast like that did kind of patch over some of the frustrations of the first virtual on and become something that was much more i guess a bit more

mainstream a bit more palatable to what people kind of expected from action games around this point yeah i mean it you know and like i said oratorio tangram built upon everything that the original did so it included the ability to air dash it added a whole other array of attacks all of which were sort of based on your actually we didn't even talk about how attacking really works so essentially you have three primary attacks you have your left trigger your right trigger and then you push them together for a center special attack and oratorio tangram by adding the turbo to each attack it creates a variant on each one um and also introduces not exactly like hyper combos or super combos like in the street fighter sense um but they do have like essentially like super special moves that are unique to each character and you know obviously they had more to work with as far as hardware goes or the designs got revamped what they called Generation 2 so everyone got a makeover and everyone looks while still cube-like like box-like they still look more

Gundam-like with the roundness I don't know how to explain it yeah it's well there's just more polygons you go from I guess it was a which model board was it it was model two to model three. So yeah, just they were able to push more polygons, which meant they could put more polygons in each character model, which meant everything didn't have to be sort of geometric primitives, but could have that kind of rounded off edge, the beveling, um, and just more detail. Like if you look at the mech designs in the first game, you kind of get the idea of what they were going for, but then you look at like the concept art next to it and you're like, oh, well, yeah, I see what they were aiming for, but this clearly, you know, they didn't have the power or the polygons available to really get there.

But with Oratorio Tangram, you really do get more toward the refinement and more subtle details and just more variations within the max, just as you'd expect, you know, going from like Virtual Fighter 2 to 3. It was kind of the same thing. Yeah, and I think, you know, that's why a lot of people consider Oratorio. Tangeram the best in the series because it doesn't muck it up with any extra features. It just takes, you know, what the core concept of the game was and blows it up to what they were hoping it would be or perhaps even what they remembered it to be if, you know, there was a big time difference between them playing it. So you mentioned that you were playing online recently.

Was that Oratorio Tengram? No, I was playing the original actually. I picked up the compilation. that's available on the Japanese PlayStation Network. Okay. So that plays on PlayStation 4? Yeah. And it's ports of just the first game, or is that all the sequels as well?

It's the first oratory Tanegram and Force. Okay. So the PlayStation 4 collection, which is only released in Japan but can be played on U.S. systems, right? that includes net play through PlayStation Network? Yes. I did not realize that. So would you say that's the best way to get a hold of these games today to play through them? Probably the easiest way.

I mean, you don't need to necessarily know Japanese, but it helps. Right. You can make it through. I mean, it's not rocket science. Yeah, you're going to miss out of the story, but that's not really kind of the point here. So on PlayStation 4, does that? the dual analog stick design. Does that kind of replace the classic dual stick design, like function basically the same? I would assume there's options to do that. By default,

it was just the sort of normal layout, and that's what I prefer anyway. So, okay, I guess that makes sense. Yeah, so that's not the only time these games have been compiled, though. You know, in addition to the Saturn release of the original game and the dreamcast conversion of Oratorio Tangram, let's see, you put it in your notes, there have been PC versions. There was a Sega Ages version. Was that on PlayStation 2? Yeah. Yeah, only released in Japan, of course. Yeah, so that would have been, I'm going to look that up.

That would have been volume 31. So that would have been after M2 started working on the Sega Ages series. So that was probably a good port, a good conversion. I bet it had a lot of extras and bonuses and documentation and stuff. So, yeah, not necessarily the optimal way to play it, but it does kind of hail from the point where Sega was like, hey, maybe we should respect our history instead of just crapping it out. And that's good.

Yeah, and actually I did play the PC port, and it actually wasn't too bad for what. it was. In what sense do you say it wasn't too bad? I mean, at the time I had only seen Virtualon in the store kiosk back in 96, 97, whatever, but a friend of mine had it for PC, and it played pretty well. We had one-on-one battles, and it ran as good as I remember the demo being, so. So not really too much more you would have wanted from it? It would have been nice to have different controls set up. I mean, I was sharing a keyboard, and bumping elbows with my buddy, but other than that, it was a good experience.

So, again, you mentioned there's Virtual On, Virtual On Oratorio Tangram for arcades and then Dreamcast. And then the third game in the series was Virtual on Force from 2001, which was released for the Hikaru arcade board, which came out to the Naomi board. So it was like Dreamcast Power Plus Plus. And then that wasn't brought to home systems until 2010 on Xbox 360 of all things. That's one of those weird things Like it didn't make PlayStation But this is a series It's mostly geared toward Japanese players

But Japanese players didn't buy an Xbox 360 It's a conundrum Yeah, it's extremely strange Especially since a lot of their promotional work had the number four in it For whatever reason They were combining four and force Maybe because they sound the same

Right But yeah, it's extremely odd Because the next game after it, Mars Which we got, came out in 2003 for the PS2, but this one only got a home port, you know, all the way in 2010. But even though they were using fourth in their branding, this wasn't the fourth virtual on, was it? Or was there like a variant or like a semi-sequel or something, like a reissue? I don't know. You know how they do like incremental changes? Was there one that we're missing?

No. I mean, this is really the third one. All the incremental changes are within like the version that's canonically like storybound in the virtual on universe hmm well chalk it up to language barrier I guess

I can understand why they would kind of mix up foreign force because fourth in Japanese would be pronounced the exact same way

as force so maybe it wasn't meant to be literally like virtual on four just like hey here's a thing we can do

with a foreign language isn't that fun so what did force and Mars bring to the series over Oratorio Tangram. Why and why do people not consider these as good as virtual on Oratorio Tangram? Well, yeah, forces the start of the decline.

Wow, decline. So that's not just saying like, that's not quite as good. It's actually saying like literally this is the degradation of the series. So, yeah, I'd like to hear about this. I mean, from what I was able to interpret, it seems like they were. lost a lot of their programming team. Yeah. And this changes a lot of things.

It adds, you know, 2 v2 battles, which is interesting. It does it in such a way where you have one person as a leader and the other person as sort of an extra partner. And if the leader dies, then that's it.

Like, that's round over. Oh, it's like persona. Oh? Well, some of the Shin-Magame Tensei games, like if your main character dies, then the whole party gets wiped out. There's a few games like that. But yeah, yeah. So I can see where that's frustrating, where everything, you have like the load-bearing party

member, basically. Yeah, and being able to retarget so that two people can attack one unit is, I don't know, it's just not for me. I mean, it also was a lot slower overall. Oratorio, Tame Graham, especially, was extremely fast-paced. And force just feels very sluggish in comparison. And also the VRs, the virtual roids, have become less personified. So they're more like just workmex as opposed to interesting kind of characters in and of themselves?

I wouldn't say workmex per se. And it's strange because their designs are so full of personality that with force, they really doubled down on the concept that these are. are just manufactured robots and they're being turned out at a factory. And so now they have all these different variants and numbers attached to them. It's like a square-inx spinoff of like, you know, you're going to have 10 Gen 358 over two days or something. And, you know, you're laughing, but it's really disheartening because you can't even differentiate the different models unless you like, because it really is like they're, model numbers, basically.

And some of the designs are really unique, and some of them are just really ugly. But, you know, it doesn't give me any incentive to want to learn any of them. If they all sound the same and they're just, you know, there's no character behind them. Right. So it sounds like they made the gameplay more complex in a bad way. They made the controls more cumbersome, and they stripped away a lot of the game. the kind of the personality that made virtualon so appealing in the first place. Yeah, I mean, with Street Fighter, you know, I'm a big Street Fighter fan too.

And, you know, we can joke all we want. Yeah, Ryu, Ken, Akuma, Dan, Sakura, they're all rip-offs of each other, whatever. But they all have their own personality, their own unique name, their own backstory, appearance, everything. Virtualon doesn't do that. It's just, you know, slap another coat of paint on, add a model. number, and that's a new unit, and it just really takes away from the experience. So if every character in Street Fighter 5 or like some variant on evil Ryu, that would be kind of what we're seeing here. Or sorry, Ryu with the killing intent awakened.

That's the way I'm taking. I mean, it's not like they're all evil, but they're all, you know. No, no, no, just like a palette swap, basically. Yeah. I mean, there are some unique components to them. But, again, that's more of like a, oh, well, instead of having a big hammer, this guy has a drill. Or Tim Jen, instead of having, like, a beam rifle, he has a beam shotgun. So. Okay, so it actually sounds less like Street Fighter more like Mortal Kombat with all the ninjas. Like, well, this one shoots freezy stuff.

This one has a spear. This one is smoke, apparently. Okay. I got you. All right. in your reckoning and apparently that of many people force was a step backward what do you think of mars that's the kind of the final statement in the the classic virtual on series in terms of new games and you know you mentioned that a lot of the original developers kind of they disappeared and i think

that has everything to do with just the big shakeup that happened at Sega around this time around the the time the dream cast died and they went third party they changed up the their internal structuring and these kind of individual studios were dissolved and then groups were pushed into like individuals were pushed into larger groups than they had been in before. And it looks like virtual on went to hitmaker, which is, you know, they're fine. They do good stuff. But yeah, like before that they were AM3. That's, that's who worked on virtual on. So you do lose a lot of that kind of personality when you have these internal reorganizations. Sometimes it's for the better, but a lot of times it's like that special something that that particular team brought to their creation.

You know, they're not there to bring that combination of talent again. And so you get different influences. That's not always bad, but, you know, it's people who don't have that connection to the series, don't have that intimate understanding of having worked on a series and actually published games and taken all the fan feedback and said, oh, well, you know, here's what they like, Here's what they didn't. Here's what works. Here's what this should be about. So, yeah, I guess it's all kind of a sidebar to say this is, you know, the fall of virtual on, I guess, kind of results just from the general malaise that hits Sega around this time. Yeah, it was very tricky following, you know, the developers and, you know, who Hit Maker was. And, oh, they were pretty much spun off from AM to, sorry, three.

and then merged back in later and it's very odd and confusing corporate talk around all that but I think a lot of it too is where would you go from oratorio attain Graham to further enhance this concept? I mean two-on-two battles

in the way that they designed it are not ideal. Are we talking about Mars now as opposed to force? I was just speaking kind of in generally. Oh, okay. Mars does even worse and tries to make it an action game. And it's just ridiculous. I mean, I have a whole section in my notes just for problems with the game

because the engine was built for one-on-one combat, and it tries to push you into this third-person action game, and it's just a disaster because, you know, like we've talked about previously, you can't really turn well. And you have no control over the camera. And it's sending you into these open areas where you have to fight multiple mechs, sending you into these canyons that are mazes and you're trying to navigate around. There's later in the game, there's platforming elements while you're under attack. There's traps with, like, you know, lasers and stuff. stuff, and it's just not what the engine was built to do.

Okay, so it sounds like they really did lose the plot with this. I didn't really know anything about Mars. Like, I barely ever even heard of it. So clearly it didn't make a big impression. But yeah, like, it kind of makes me think of that free-roaming rogue-like adventure mode in the Toeball games, where it's like, hey, use this fighting engine to have an adventure, except, you know, that was kind of like the sort of side diversion, a thing you could do when you didn't want to just do one-on-one combat, as opposed to being the premise of this entire game.

So that's, yeah, like, if you were after one thing with Virtual On, it probably wasn't this. So I can see where this game would just completely miss the mark. Yeah, I mean, when I originally bought this, you know, way back when, you know, I popped it in, I was all excited to play Virtual On. and I made it through like a handful of rounds and then I had never touched it again until last week in preparing for this podcast I actually went through

and painstakingly played through the entire what they call dramatic mode which is the story mode and it was just one of the worst things I've played in a long time. Wow. So yeah, you mentioned the dramatic mode and your notes talk about how terrible the story is So that's, that seems like a tough thing to pin an entire game around.

Yeah, I mean, especially when, you know, there hasn't really been much story up until this point anyway. I'm sure in Japan, it's probably a lot better because with the model kits they put out and they have like all these other like novelizations and short stories that actually flesh out the story, just giving it the way it is with no context, really, is very confusing. and they try to make it very dramatic and deep in some spots, but it just turns into not cheesy, but just kind of sad, you know? You can't even take it as being cheesy. It's that bad. Right. All right.

So it sounds like they really did lose the plot here. So, you know, with that said, it's been 17 years. It looks like since the last new version. on game, it's pretty safe to assume that virtual on as we knew it is a thing of the past. But Sega has been, they've seemed interested in reviving some of their old properties, even if it means farming them out to other developers, like they've done with, you know, Wonderboy and Streets of Rage. So let's say you were the developer that Sega went to and said, you know what, we need a new

virtual on and we need you to make it. So if you were tapped to create the sequel, the revival of Virtual On, what would you do? Where does the series need to go to be relevant in 2020 and beyond? That's a tough one. You kind of have to question if it can be. I mean, they did put out a game in 2018 that was sort of a tie-in with an anime manga franchise. and I thought it was an interesting concept, being able to sort of take an anime character, tie it in with a corresponding virtual ward, and sort of have some gameplay aspects around that. And, you know, yeah, I think something like that would be an interesting way to go.

I just don't think they chose the right property for it. So what is the name of this virtual-on game from 2018? It's called a certain magical virtual on. Oh, right. I saw that when I was doing research and thought, is this a joke? And I guess it's not. So it's tied to a certain magical index or a rail gun or some damn thing. I don't know.

I've never even touched that series, but I see it mentioned in passing a lot. So basically it is virtual on, but with a skin from that other show. or from that anime, or is it actually something different entirely? It's a complete spinoff. So a certain magical index and a certain scientific railgun exist in the same universe and have overlapping characters. And essentially those, I'm not sure, because it's all in Japanese, I had no idea really about the story,

but essentially they start competing in like virtual-on competitions and do battle. And it's actually an extremely good virtual-on game. They fixed all the problems that were glaring from force as far as two-on-two battles. They've done much better with the hit detection for physical attacks. It really is probably the, I want to say the best because oratory attaingram is really that good. But it's the best one of this millennium. Okay. So how come, you know, just as a final question, why don't you think that game brought back the series?

I mean, it's hard to say. I think a lot of it is just hesitation on both the fan basis parts to accept the other. I mean, it is kind of an odd combination. I mean, it's not like that anime series was a mech series in any sense. and all their previous games were mostly, you know, visual novels and whatnot. But I think it's also really telling that they went back to the oratorio Tandgram designs because they knew that's kind of where they hit their peak. Okay, so maybe Virtual On isn't due for a comeback. Maybe there is, maybe you're right, there is no way to make it relevant to the 2020 audience. But, you know, for those who are listening to this who have never played Virtual On before,

what would you recommend to them to just, you know, get a taste of the series? Would it be the PS4 collection, even though it's Japan only? I would say probably the easiest and best way is get Oratorio Tane Graham on Xbox Live. It's available on Xbox Live. It's probably cheap and you can't go wrong. All right. So with that said, I think that's about it for Virtual On. but thank you very much for your time

and for kind of bringing this onto the show because I don't know that we would have been able to cover it otherwise where can people find you on the internet Andrew or do you have a web presence that you want to share with people I have pretty much zero presence I'm not really social media person at all do you have a website or anything no I mean like I said earlier I'm literally a nobody so All right. Well, I disagree with that assessment, but understandable that you don't have much going on in terms of like a public presence on the internet. And that's okay because retronauts more than makes up for it. And you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, at my usual haunts, such as limited run games and on Twitter as GameSpite. And Retronauts, of course, is supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts.

where subscribing to the show get your early access to every episode and a higher quality and bit rate. And, you know, if you jump on and manage to find an opening with the one with the life stream tier for supporters like Andrew did, you can also suggest a topic and be on the show to talk about it and inform me why it's amazing. And also by proxy inform all the other listeners who are out there listening to Retronauts. So Andrew, thanks again for coming on the show. And I guess, you know, thanks for bringing virtual on to my attention because I had never really spent much time with it before I started researching for this podcast. And it's not really my thing, but it's cool.

And I can definitely see where it has fans, especially, you know, 20 years ago where people could really kind of say, hey, this is fresh and groundbreaking and exciting. Like, this is cool. So, you know, another one of those great Sega projects. that kind of went by the wayside, but still has a lot of value as more than just a historic curiosity. Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks again. And that's it. We'll be back again in a week with another podcast. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.