Virtua Fighter Kids

I hate Virtua Fighter Kids. There, I've finally admitted it. It has taken four years to come to grips with my pure emotions, but I think now I can live life like a new man.

To be completely fair, I love the idea of Virtua Fighter Kids. I'm completely for cute versions of hard lined characters. SNK has done this trick time and time again with their Neo Geo Pocket Color game line. Capcom, too, brought us the extremely unique Pocket Fighters. However, Sega fumbles with the concept.

Growing up on super deformed characters from Japan, I am ready for big headed characters ... but when it gets in the way of actually fighting a fight, that's when I draw the line. What we have here, is just as difficult and frustrating as Virtua Fighter 3, while still managing to be cute and appealing at the same time.

The graphics here are fine, in fact, they work so well that for the first several fights you don't even notice the awkward play mechanics. Especially cute are the stages, which are all small versions of pre existing stages. For old school players of the Virtua Fighter series, this game is worth having simply for the nostalgia. The joke may be lost on newbies.

The main problem that can be said is the play control. It's just too loose. Your reach is too limited, and yet the heads are extremely large, and so getting much other than a head shot is a rarity. The game gets chalked up as nothing more than novelty. Purchase only if cheap, or need to own every single AM2 games.