VIRTUAL-ON FORCE

• [AC/DEMUL] Force Terminal Test + Basic Training Mission and VR Unlock
• [360/Xenia] Jaguarandi + Jaguarandi 1CC / Very Hard

The original from 2001, a few years before MARZ took the fight home at the PS2, only for it to take years for Japanese players to get the actual Force port they wanted with the Xbox 360 of all platforms.

SEGA's style around that time was making use of cards in their arcade games to allow saving progress and keeping a custom name and stuff of your own, and generally, most arcade games that relied in cards for saving your stuff [let alone SEGA's] were kind of designed for you to play through them with a card. This is mainly evident with racing games such as the Initial D Arcade Stage series, the Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune series, and even the three Mario Kart Arcade GP games - all three of them allowing you to save stuff you unlock [one or more cars in IDAS/WMMT, karts and items in MKAGP] and keep the progress of what you've completed so far.

Virtual-On Force allows you to play without a card, featuring the usual arcade ladder Virtual-On games have, with a mid-boss five fights in and then a final boss after three more fights. But as you may guess, there's A LOT that's locked to card usage. And funnily enough, it seems that the ROM has an English region hidden that has the menu texts and such translated...but is locked to Ver 7.5 and with cards disabled.

Going back to the card system for Force, by using a VO4 Terminal cabinet to create or check your card, the stuff you can do with it would be:

• Keep track of your playtime stats and even your fastest Arcade completion
• Accept missions to play in a VO4 cabinet: Missions you get are always randomized, so you can't actually choose what mission you want to play, only whether you want to save it on your card [you can choose to play it or not on the game cabinet, and it will stay there if you decide not to play]. The only exception is the Basic Training Mission [featuring Hatter] that's always available.
• Use the VR Viewer to see your VR as a 3D model
• Receive trophies and stuff for certain milestones
• And most important of all, if you achieved the conditions for it, be allowed to either use a new Virtuaroid or assign a new color scheme to your current Virtuaroid. However, you can only have ONE Virtuaroid on your card, and can't go back to the previous one if you choose to take the new one - so you're essentially forced to either ditch your old VR even if you may not prefer the new one, or ditch the new VR without knowing if you'll ever get a chance at it again.

That last part is particularly nefarious when you consider some VRs are rarer than others, and while it's marginally better than the old IDAS + WMMT games simply not giving you any options to change your car [although in that case it's also because you already invest in upgrading it], it's still kind of bonkers that you are forced to commit to one Virtuaroid and not being able to know/test how it plays unless you bite the bullet and choose it as your own.

The funniest case might be when I got Temjin 747H at one point [check the DEMUL section to see how I played this in the first place], at first I thought it was super cool to have a more armored and strong VR...until the CPUs started obilerating me due to its lower ammo capacity for the beam rifle and lower speed. Although it's funny how MARZ kind of redeemed that model for me because of its use in several missions to beat them without healing [and even then, that's technically the 747HII replacing the original 747H].

From what I've read and tested, when you renew a card, you can choose whether to turn it into an AI Card that can be used to make a partner out of your own Virtuaroid, which seems you can use and gradually improve its skills to assist you in matches. I'm not sure how the partner training looks in the Arcade version at the moment though [more on that later].

Oh, and checking the arcade version's website, I find out that the Temjin 707J is actually exclusive to Ver 7.5 in arcade, as in Ver 7.6 where it gets replaced by the 747A as the Temjin starter VR, its made unaccessible. As a result, in Ver 7.6 you CAN get the 707J+ instead as one of those chances to get a new VR, although that has one Infight stat point moved to the Shot (Middle) stat.

For years, the arcade version was unemulated due to the lack of a dump from the arcade ROM, often credited to the Sega Hikaru boards being extremely fragile and thus very difficult to dump games for it without destroying the board by accident. And then one day, apparently the files were found on the 360 version...many years later.

A very funny way for the Arcade version to get preserved, but at least it's finally playable in DEMUL, and surprisingly, SOMEHOW, runs better on my PC with the AMD Radeon HD 6570 than on my brother's PC which can run way more stuff than mine [and even Force 360, which mine can't cause my GPU can't use Vulkan]...yet struggles to run the game smoothly.

Currently, Virtual-On Force in DEMUL is mostly functional but not completely perfect: While it looks way more correct at first glance than Xenia, it still has some visual bugs here and there (layering issues in Martian Sanctuary, the glowing effect in the final stage is incorrect), and even more inconvenient for playing alone, even though there's a way to create an AI Card, you can't actually use it.

See, when you renew a card, DEMUL will first save internally the AI Card, tell the game it's done, and then the game will save internally your Pilot Card freshly renewed But since DEMUL currently only saves to a file when you stop the emulation, that means you'll always get the Pilot Card saved on von4.card - unless you stop the emulation after the AI Card is generated...but even then, DEMUL only reads a single card file when starting emulation, so you can't hotswap the files to load the AI Card and then the Pilot Card.

And no, you can't actually use an AI Card without using a Pilot Card, as the game will ask you to insert it afterwards...and since you can't do that at the moment, you end up unable to use that partner card.

That aside, it seems to work well: I can sometimes end up getting a random Temjin variant if I complete the Basic Training Mission for the first time and then return to the Terminal, and the game is playable from start to end with what I've played. Obviously, there isn't support for linking-up instances yet, so you can't try it in co-op or versus.

The VO4 Terminal is actually accessible if:

• 1. The game region us set to Japan. The Game/Vendor option will be missing if it's set to USA. Game will actually load as USA on first boot, so the only way to do this is to either get a NVRAM file that's already set to Japan, or refer to the text file included in DEMUL to input the password in the Test Menu for changing the region.
• 2. Head to the game options in the Test Menu and change Game to Vendor. You can change it back to Game as well.
• 3. Let the game load - if it was set to Vendor, then it should load the VO4 Terminal screen instead of the normal game. Here you either insert a coin to create a card, or press the card button to insert an existing card to check it on the Terminal.

NVRAM files and translation for the Terminal menus to be added.

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The first port of Virtual-On Force, and the only one until Virtual-On Masterpiece dropped for the PS4...exclusively in Japan. Although the 360 port was also Japan exclusive, but was a region free disc.

This one kind of aimed to be similar to the original arcade with some bells and whistles: Widescreen support, splitscreen for 2P Co-op and 2P/4P Versus [no 3P though], and being able to switch your VR freely at any time, as well as being able to create an AI partner from the Terminal menu option and increase its performance stats with points you get from playing Arcade or Missions.

The Mission mode happens to be the main focus in this port, for better or for worse, as you only get new VRs and color schemes when you complete these. Missions are split in three categories: 1st Operation, 2nd Operation and Arcade Operation - the last one could be guessed to be the missions in the arcade version. And there also was DLC for 3rd and 4th Operation.

Unfortunately, some of the missions are quite picky yet have to be done in one go to complete them - so if for example, you have to fight in 6 matches with some handicap and lose in the fifth or sixth match, you have to do it all over again. And in the 2nd Operation, there's an absurd mission where you have to beat TWO Jaguarandi at once - something that is excruciating even with a partner.

The two ways you can cheese missions [which are unfortunately what you'd want to play to get more VRs, as Arcade mode gives you NOTHING but AI and EX Points] would be to either unlock JAGUARANDI [a standalone version of Guarayakha's transformation] and plow through missions because it is a monster without a timer [unlike Guarayakha's transformation being locked to 10 seconds]...or use EX points.

EX Points is basically the game's way to tell you that, yes, if you are suffering with the CPU input reading you at all times and want to win [because they WILL input read you like crazy in Normal or higher], you can use these to become overpowered. You can use them on life and power, and while it can take a while to get all 20 points, well...

Let's just say that you can make yourself ABSURDLY resistent and EXTREMELY powerful with your attacks, to the point that even if you play in Very Hard with a Virtuaroid you aren't familiar with, the few hits you can land [along with the little damage you'll receive] can potentially guarantee that you'll plow through the arcade mode anyways.

It sound as theoretically awesome as it sounds kind of VERY lame though, as it is a step above the White Knight in MARZ and Jaguarandi in Virtual-On PS2 in being absurdly broken, although the game does not allow you to get S or SS Ranks in any missions if you use EX points...but if you can use them to unlock Jaguarandi, then you can just do the missions again with Jaguarandi and get SS Ranks anyways because using Jag doesn't have that same effect.

At least it a functional version for local multiplayer because FOR SOME UNEXPLAINABLE REASON- *inhale* for SOME reason, they got rid of splitscreen entirely in the PS4 port. And it also has some nice features like saving replays and the VR Viewer feature where you can see the model of any unlocked VRs, complete with multiple colored screen options.