More than two and a half decades after the release of this game in Japanese arcades, SEGA continues to take care of this episode of the franchise.

The Japanese publisher has announced that a new version of Virtua Fighter 3, christened Virtua Fighter 3tb Online, will be released in Japan on November 28th.The original Virtua Fighter 3tb was released in September 1997, and the tb in the game’s title refers to the 3-on-3 team battle format. New skills and balancing are also added, giving arcade players a slightly different experience from the original game.

The online in the game’s title is no coincidence either, as online fighting has been borrowed from Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown’s technology, allowing Japanese players to fight other players over the Internet. There will also be support for Aime cards, so players’ names and scores will also appear.These can be viewed and edited on the game’s dedicated website, so that the older but still fair experience of the franchise is not forgotten.

The SEGA fighting game franchise hasn’t had a new main episode since 2010. That was the year Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown was released, and in 2012 it was ported to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.In 2016, it was added as a mini-game in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life. Then, in 2021, a new version of the game was released, known as Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown. It had more advanced graphics, new online features, and the developers were made up of people from SEGA AM2 and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio (and the technology was packaged on the Dragon Engine, so it had “Yakuza basics”).

After a decade and a half, we wonder if SEGA will start working on Virtua Fighter 6? It’s about time, because there will be more VF5 versions than The Last of Us or (to use a genre-appropriate example) Street Fighter II…

Source: Gematsu