I had read that Virtua Fighter 5 would be shown at E3 before arriving in LA, so I searched for it as soon as I found Sega's booth. Unlike Namco's Time Crisis 4, though, it was rather easy to find. Sega had billboards close to its kiosk advertising its presence.
There are a total of 17 playable characters. Two of them are new: El Blaze and Eileen. El Blaze is a Mexican fighter who uses the Lucha Libre fighting style, while Eileen uses Monkey Kung Fu.
Virtua Fighter is as smooth as ever; it's easy to jump into and easy to play. If you have ever played Virtua Fighter 4 then you have a good idea of how the play mechanics work for this sequel.
What stands out - aside from the speed and polish - is the graphics. Cell shading was one of the most abused new techniques on the current systems, and now sweat on game characters is gearing up to be the most abused technique of the next gen consoles. Virtua Fighter 5 is guilty of abusing it, too. Nevertheless, the characters look amazing and are near-CG level quality during real time gameplay.
Despite how happy I was with the graphics, I have to admit that I am slightly disappointed in them. While the game is graphically more polished and stylish than previous iterations, Sega has chosen to continue down the same route it did since Virtua Fighter 4 and make the characters look like game characters instead of real people. Virtua Fighter 3 was the last time I saw the VF series really seem to make a push towards life-like graphics (remember the famous screen capture of Pai's face - she looked human). I can't help but wonder what VF5 would look like if they had decided to continue down that path to accompany the series' superb animations and play mechanics.
Nevertheless, I'm game for VF5. It will be released for the PS3 next year. At this moment, no additional features have been announced for the console version, but Sega has time.