0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Advanced V.G

  




       
Advanced V.G is an all girl anime inspired action fighting game that was released on the Playstation 1 on the 19th of April 1996, the game was developed and published by TGL there full name is Technical Group Laboratory, the game was released exclusively in Japan, the game would release on the Saturn and the TurboGrafx-CD, as would get later releases on the PSP and PS3.



Like previous games in the series Advanced V.G is a fighting game with basic moves like kick and punch the game also has various special attacks that can be executed by using a combination of buttons, the game has three modes, the story mode (see below), normal mode this is the games arcade mode, you select one of the main nine characters not K-1 Keiichi Sonezaki or K-2 Kei Sonezaki, you face off against nine other opponents in a best of three match, with a face off against Reimi Jyahana the final battle, with the exception of Reimi’s final battle.



The third mode is Vs mode for between 0 and 2 players the mode is made up of three formats, you have 1p vs 2p, 1p vc COM or COM Vs COM, in this mode any of the 11 characters including K1 and K2 can be chosen the fights are best of 3 as well.



The story of Advanced V.G follows a similar template to other games in the Variable Geo series, the strongest young women in the county hold a tournament, which is sponsored by various restaurant chains, with the said restaurant chains asking the girls to pose as waitresses for promotional purposes, the girls of Jahana Group who starred in previous games return, with a new main protagonist, a young martial artists called Yuka Takeuchi, she has been training deep in a secluded forest before joining the tournament.

During the main story mode the protagonist Yuka Takeuchi, must fight her way through each of the other combatants, which are divided into chapters and unlock more about the story, until she faces off against the reigning champion Reimi Jyahana, with the final battle there are ten chapters in total in the story mode.



With this being an early Playstation 1 release and being a Japanese only title reviews are very difficult to find, so we are going to have to rely on user ratings from GameFAQs, with a total of 13 user ratings the game currently sits at an average rating 3.42/5, with ratings spread from as low as a 2.5/5 up to a 4.5/5 the majority settling around a 3.5 to a 4/5.

Difficulty wise the game seems to have a solid difficulty level with 69% of 13 users agreeing the difficulty is just right, with 23% finding the game too easy, with one or two people finding things too tough in this game, playtime wise there is a huge spread of playtimes for this game, ranging from less than an hour. all the way up to 80 hours with the game averaging out at around the 20 hour mark.



This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit five online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com,  eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, I will also be including Ebay.com as well

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, along with Retrogames.co.uk don’t stock this Japanese only title, so we head off to eStarland.com who do not stock the game either they do stock the Saturn and TurboGrafx-CD versions of the game, they are both out of stock at the moment.

Amazon.com surprisingly for a Japanese only title has a plentiful supply of used copies available with the cheapest setting you back $17.95, this converts to £13.93 in the UK, in Euro zone countries it will cost you 15.26, while in Bahrain it will set you back 6.77 Bahraini Dinar, this is shipped from Japan and is a very good quality copy of the game, this is a quite reasonable price for a used copy, however prices can easily get up to and beyond the $40 mark, at the time of writing this there were no new copies of the game on sale.

Heading over to Ebay.com where a used copy of the game will set you back a minimum of $21 with an additional $4 for shipping, the other copies on sale all come with large shipping costs that increase the price to around $40.



Written by

P J Gibbon

Comments

Popular Posts