You Might Not See Taka-Arashi in Virtua Fighter Crossroads

Out of all the ways to drop new info about the roster of upcoming Virtua Fighter Crossroads, a random discord message is a pretty interesting choice.

Nevertheless, that's how Yamada delivered his latest sneak peek. After asking how people feel about the recent Lion reveal, he said that VFC will have a mix of both new and legacy characters.

Ending that with a Discord exclusive bit of news, saying that "Taka-Arashi has already retired in Virtua Fighter Crossroads."

As Akai points out, the game's storyline already had him retired at one point, but this could go in either of two ways.

The first, and most likely option, is that developers don't give any weight to manuals from older entries. After all, we already know that the whole secret laboratory plotline will only be referenced but not treated as canonical.

With that in mind, this announcement likely does mean that Taka-Arashi will not be playable. However, it's a bit odd to announce that a character won't be in the game, as it tends to only upset people. It seems like something you'd only say if you were confident that Taka-Arashi fans would be really happy to hear what you've got coming up.

And this is where it kind of blends with option two. If they do think Taka-Arashi fans will be happy, we're probably looking at either a new generation character to take up his style, or we might see him in a sort of mentor role in spite of his retirement. Realistically, it can even be both.

Though there's also a third option. The character is simply not in the game, and this announcement serves to narrow down the speculations about returning characters. After all, we do have that character select image with the blurred faces, and VF doesn't have that many characters to pick from to begin with.