I have many fond Virtua Tennis related memories. It’s actually one of my dorkier admissions that the Dreamcast game from way back when inspired me to try the real thing. It was definitely the doubles game that galvanised it as one of the greatest sports games I can remember. Virtua Tennis 2009 follows Segas fine tradition of not knowing whether to number their franchise iterations by year of release or sequence (with optional random letters.)
Now, I don’t want to get all “old timer” on you, but in my day, we played with characters (and by characters, I mean professional tennis players in videogame form) like Cedric Pioline, Patrick Rafter, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, and Tim Henman (who we nicknamed “King Of Chickens”.) Cedric Pioline was a nobody to me, his biggest achievements in his career seems to consist of being crushed by Sampras in the finals of two grand slams, but he was my favourite. His drop shot helped me destroy worlds. The ladies included the Williams sisters and Lindsay Davenport, who are still in VT 2009. Lindsay Davenport is still terrifying, possibly more terrifying, thanks to the power of HD. So enough reminiscing, lets talk VT2009.
The single player modes are thin on the ground, really there’s only one of them, as they seem to have forgotten their arcade roots. World Tour and exhibition are your only options, so you’re either playing World Tour or playing the multiplayer mode with AI bots. I’ll talk about the World Tour for a bit now because in all honesty it’s made me feel uneasy about the overall package since the moment I started it. You may scoff at the idea of a “tennis RPG”, but it’s best two-word term to describe the World Tour mode. You start off at a level lower than dirt, a level whereby your every swing is one bereft of competence, and over the course of the campaign you build your stats so that you gain the power to rain down tennis balls of death, like meteorites from a dying fuzzy green moon. The problem is, and always has been in every tennis game of this type, it’s not any damn fun to play the goofy peasant version of tennis; you start off against the weakest link in the evolutionary tennis chain, and you can dominate them fairly easily even without any boosted abilities, but this merely elevates it from what might have been frustrating nonsense to a boring mundane chore. Of course, you don’t have to play matches to build your stats, which is thankful, but you still have to play against a bunch of mooks to progress your ranking, no wildcard draw for Wimbledon, so it’s a chore that must be done.
The stat building, as it’s been in previous VT games is done through minigames, like avoiding the tennis balls being fired at you and picking up the items that appear on your side of the court, a weird block busting game, and a pirate ship battle (why not?) to name the first three available to you. The problem here is they mildly messed it up on a couple of fronts to make it no fun. Firstly, There are only three stats visible to you: Footwork, ground strokes, and serve and volley. In previous games, there were four categories with three sub skills that seemed to grow with your own playing style, so now there’s a lot less feedback as to what’s going on progress wise. The other thing is that a success will increase your stat in the associated skill bar by a marginal amount, and failure nets you nothing. I know the “suck less” argument is valid here, but it’s just frustrating to miss your goal by 50 points and get nothing out of it. Succeeding in a minigame also appears to unlock the next difficulty for that game, which given the marginal return on the one you just passed, is very tempting, but at the same time, it’s genuinely far more difficult and probably borderline impossible if your stats aren’t already built enough to aid you. What I’m saying in a round about way is that I didn’t find the World Tour mode to be a lot of fun. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot changed over previous titles (especially the weirdly long loading times,) and what has changed, I don’t like. Maybe you can just never go home again, but I was really disappointed with this.
Visually, VT2009 looks pretty good, the standard “I thought you guys were watching a tennis match, not playing a videogame” comments get made that I note I’d heard over the last two generations somehow. There’s a bit of an uncanny valley thing with the custom created character I made though, while Federer looks like he’s had every care taken to make him look realistic, John Johnson (I lacked creativity when I made him, okay?) has a thousand mile stare thing going on, like he has no soul, a being that only belongs in the tennis dimension.
As far as the gameplay goes, it’s similar to previous iterations, but with the focus on the popular idea that the player should be in position early and pressing the button as early as possible for the best shot, which basically means that it’s not the “pick up and play” style that I loved VT2 for. The recovery for a poorly planned shot, or worse, a missed shot, is particularly brutal. The players don’t dive for the ball at the drop of a hat like VT3 which is a welcome change, but the game isn’t exactly forthcoming with the techniques on how to produce the best shots.
It’s upsetting to see a beloved franchise take all the wrong turns, but that’s exactly what Virtua Tennis has done, as all the appreciable similarities and differences amount to keeping the things you don’t like, such as the weirdly long load times, creepy looking custom characters, and and somewhat obtuse mechanics, and changing the things you loved, like the skill system, and the arcade friendly control feel. Maybe you simply can’t go home again, but I won’t extinguish the flame that maybe the next VT will be the tennis game I’ve been waiting for.
I had to review the game as well some time ago. I acknowledge completely to what you’ve written down here.