The rankings should be on
www.virtuafighter.com somewhere, I think. I remember reading on the ranks.
Any way, went to the regional qualifying tournament for the national VF5 tourney (Kakutou Shinseki IV). There was one of these in December and this is the second one. During qualifers I was actually moving and I didn't have a lot of time or money to enter the tournament, but two of my friends from Fukui and Kanazawa got to the regionals so I decided to go and hang out with them, and cheer them on. There were some really good players there, including UraOshu, who's considered one of the top players in the country.
This is the set up for the tournament. The big screen in the middle is usually used for House of the Dead 4, but it was retrofitted to broadcast the matches being played on the left-hand machine. Almost everyone at the arcade that day was in the tournament.
Some of the peeps at the tourney. There was actually one junior high school kid there :lol Sad thing is that he actually whooped me pretty good in the game. His defense wasn't all that hot, but he uses Jacky and he has a good, aggressive style of play.
This is the screen that pops up when a match is finished. Basically shows who won and whatnot.
This is the match up screen in the arcade. You can see the little tags at the top, which basically denote if that player had been owning up people recently. As you can see the Lau player has an insane number of tags. Most of them were from last month, where he was ranked in the top three in the entire damn country. Also, make note of his match count. That's why he's so damn good.
This is a match-up screen when the players insert their cards. The Eileen on the right was the eventual winner of the tournament, and was god damn lucky that he got as far as he did. In the first round of the tournament, he faced off against a strong Lau player, and it went down to the wire. During the last round, the Lau player hit a P+G throw and both players stood up, and the Lau player didn't bother using the ground stomp, which is guaranteed after his P+G throw because they both assumed the match was finished. It wasn't finished. The Eileen player realized this and quickly sat down, did a quick low kick while recovering, and won the match. God damn lucky!
The really cool thing about VF5 in Japan is that the VF Terminal (which some people bitched about being TOO EXPENSIVE
) is used to set up all of the tournaments in the arcades as well. This was a new feature that was added during version B. Basically, the arcade operators have to switch the terminal to tournament mode, and then each player has to insert their IC card into the terminal. The terminal then reads the card and registers it. Once that's finished, everything else is automated; the brackets are madely fairly cleanly, and the game will prompt the players to play when their turn is up. While the players are having their matches, previously played matches in the tournament are played on VF.tv. Pretty cool stuff! I hope I have enough time to enter the next national tourney! I'm going to try to qualify for Super Battle Opera in Tekken 5 DR, Soulcalibur 3 and VF5. I doubt I'll have much of a chance but I'll give it a go.
