To increase your rank you must defeat AI players in tournament matches. Every match you win will raise your rank a bit. At first it will jump 10-20 slots a match but will eventually slow down to 1-4 once you cross 100. To increase your actual stats, of which there are many, you can do practice sessions, mini-games, or see how good you really are in the training area. Your base stats are extremely important and really determine how hard you hit, how well you handle the ball, and even how hard you can slice the ball.
The mini-games are back and there's more of them...
After a few sessions in any of these modes youll get tired and require rest. You can head to your very own house to rest for a week, go on vacation for 3 weeks, or just drink an energy drink and power on. You can also change your clothes from within your house quite easily. Everything you can wear is purely for looks. That is except for the racket. Whenever you get a new racket youll want to immediately check it out to see if its stats are any better.
As for how you go about obtaining clothing and items theres really no rhyme or reason. Sometimes youll get something for winning a tournament and other times youll get something for getting a gold medal in one of the training challenges. Heck I got a random shirt after playing for 10 hours. And while accessories add to the fun, the real stars of VF3 are the player models.
Every single one of the pro player models looks insanely lifelike. The faces are molded so well youd swear you were seeing a newscast when you see them up close. Well, that is until the facial animation starts. When they start to talk it looks like the second coming of Frankenstein. Add on the fact that they almost always say really idiotic things like Wow you are good and youve got a recipe for mediocrity. What also doesnt help is that you hardly ever see these faces up close except for when they approach you before and after matches to tell you retarded things. So most of the time the high polygon count and high definition rendering is completely unnecessary due to how far away the camera is.
It's so pretty...
The players and environments also cast some of the best shadows youll see in a game. Add in great looking courts and 3D animated bystanders and youve got quite a pretty picture, especially at 720P and up. That being said, the picture is somewhat scarred by the audio portion of the game. The crowd cheers are abrupt and badly timed and the female player grunts sound like princess peach getting kicked in the gut. The background music is also lacking in many ways in both quality and variety. It really feels like they used the same assets from Virtua Tennis 2K2. Heres hoping they get actual sound clips of the Pros next time around.
So in the end Virtua Tennis 3 is a pretty mixed bag. It takes 2K2, remixes the world tour, adds in some new forgettable mini-games, and upgrades the graphics to next-gen levels. If you want a taste of the same old Virtua Tennis or have yet to experience the best Tennis game mechanics ever created, then youll be fine with VT3. Although if youre a veteran of the series this is a rental at best.
Import Friendly?
It plays on all Playstation 3's and it features full English support. AKA it's 99.9% import friendly.
