This is a dark day for me. After an incredible month of playing through all the Soulcalibur games, digging into them and learning how to play them properly after just being a casual fighting game player, I finally decided to return to the series that I remember loving for the Sega Saturn to see what I think about it now, and as I played it and kept getting one-shot by Jeffry's A.I only using the one-hit kill grab moves I realized something that hadn't dawned on me until I played Soulcalibur:

"Virtua Fighter kinda sucks"

Virtua Fighter 2 was almost as much of a technical marvel as its predecessor. Texture mapping and motion capture were added to the take the graphics and animations to an even more impressive level than the first, and easily beat out challengers like Tekken in the visual department.

That gameplay mostly carried over from the first game, but it was also improved with better balancing between the existing characters, smoother collision detection and felt less floaty than the first.

I think the biggest problem with VF2 is that it was simply too clinical. There was no plot, the characters have virtually no personalities. This stuff would get added later via the Saturn port, but it made the entire thing feel so clinical that I never formed any long term attachment to the franchise as a result. It felt like a really detailed tech demo to basically show the Tekken (and later Dead or Alive and SoulCalibur) developers how to do things in their games.