With Virtua Fighter 5 getting a rerelease, and VF6 being actively worked on while long time fans collectively lose their shit over this being for real, I've decided to check up on the series through random tournaments and character specific move videos.
One thing I always loved about Virtua Fighter is the different Professional wrestling moves Wolf and a few others are given over the series's many installments. One of the more surprising in the recent game would have to be Matt Morgan's Hellavator.
As a guy who wanted an alternative to WWE, I'm more familiar with Morgan's TNA run than his stuttering gimmick at the house of Vince Mcmahon's weirdo booking habits. Unless your name was Hogan or Andre, Vince would never just allow you to go out and do cool big-man wrestling stuff.
Nah, that had hated the wrestling part of rasslin' with an absolute passion(if that wasn't the case, he could have have made the Invasion angle great, with out using even trying).If you looked like an impressive specimen(and even when you didnt), he felt the need to humble you by attaching some embarrassing tick or making you do goofy antics for a quick laugh.
Examples:
- Jorge González in furry body suit.
- Dusty Rhodes in the polkadot gear.
- Any tall or fat wrestler who was once a threat in the main event scene(Lord Tensai or The Great Khali) winds up with a dancing gimmick, and hangs with the joke characters in the lower midcard.
Virtua Figher has only one character who makes the Vertical Suplex Sideslam look good, and it is of course Wolf fuckin' Hawkfield!!
Wolf is so cool, that not only did All Japan Pro Wrestling have Jim Steele take on the gimmick for actual matches that included the likes of Kenta Kobashi, and Steve Williams, but Virtua Wolf appears alongside his real life representation in All Japan's 1999 arcade/Dreamcast wrestling game, Giant Gram: All Japan ProWrestling 2.
The Hellavator is one of those Create-a-finish looking moves that always make me wanna pull out the sketch pad, and draw some overly complex diagrams on what would be a cool finisher for my masked wrestling persona.
I'm forever a kid at heart, but I've woken up feeling like i've been dropping legdrops my entire life, brother...These squared circle dreams are only meant to be played out via video game, because father time is clearly winning this ironman match we're having right now. 😆
Cool to see The Blueprint get his move in a game that also features Wolf doing the F5 and the Jackhammer.