Following the 30th anniversary of the first Virtual On, the Virtual On Masterpiece collection is now 70% off on the PlayStation Store.
The Virtual On Masterpiece collection contains all three arcade iterations, from Virtual On to Oratorio Tangram and even Force. Each game also includes online play. Thankfully, the lacklustre PlayStation 2 game Marz is omitted from this collection.
Priced at 1,485 yen (or around $9 at the current exchange rate), the game is available to download from the Japanese PlayStation Store. The collection is technically a PlayStation 4 release, but it works beautifully on the PlayStation 5.
While this is a Japanese release, you can install the game fine on non-Japanese hardware, and almost all the menus are in English as well. Not to mention that the game doesn’t have much in the way of dialogue or story-related text, so there’s not really any kind of meaningful language barrier here.
I can say, as someone who has owned an original Virtual On arcade cabinet, that this collection is absolutely arcade-perfect. In addition, if you buy Tanita’s TwinSticks for the game, which also works great on the PlayStation 5, then you really are getting the full arcade experience.
If you are new to the Virtual On series, it is one of the two main pillars of the mecha gaming genre in Japan, with the other being Armored Core.
However, in recent years, the Armored Core games have taken a more Virtual On-esque approach to their targeting. Something that’s exemplified quite clearly in Armored Core VI, with its new toggled orbit lock-on setup.
Virtual On is also a very influential gaming series in general, as games like Zone of the Enders and Gundam Extreme Versus take very strong functional cues from the original Virtual On games.
So, if you’ve never played a Virtual On game before, you can now get all three arcade iterations for under $10.
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