Akira Yuki is the mascot/face of SEGA's iconic video game series Virtua Fighter, which originally debuted on arcades in 1993. His fighting style is Bājíquán, a Chinese martial art (pronounced "Hakkyoku-ken" in Japanese). He serves as the assistant instructor at Yuki Budokan, striving for perfection and will drive himself relentlessly to master his techniques despite being known for his hot-blooded and impulsive nature. He seeks worthy opponents to fight in order to find flaws in his skills to further attain mastery, thus going on a quest to test his abilities by entering tournaments in order to achieve his grandfather's wish to see what "true strength" means, canonicallly winning the Second World Tournament (from Virtua Fighter 2). He was a childhood friend of Aoi Umenokoji.
The original Virtua Fighter, created by the legendary SEGA developer
Yu Suzuki himself, is
noteworthy for being a pioneer of the 3D fighting sub-genre to the point it inspired many fighting game series such as Tekken, Dead or Alive (in which
he,
Jacky, Sarah and
Pai Chan made guest appearances), etc. and even worked as a influence for the original PlayStation console, Tomb Raider (especially Lara Croft's model) and John Romero's Quake (known for DOOM) thanks to it's polygonal graphics. It's success also spawned multiple revisions and sequels (with VF5: Ultimate Showdown released this year and
became a candidate in The Game Awards), a few spin-offs and an
anime series. Shenmue was originally planned to be a
Virtua Fighter RPG with Akira as the protagonist (sharing some
connections), as well. Akira even made multiple appearances in crossovers such as Project X Zone (alongside Pai and Kage-Maru),
Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing (alongside Jacky) and the Super Smash Bros. series (as a Mii Costume and Assist Trophy in his 3D polygon model from the first game).
While Akira may look like he's an amalgamation of Ryu and Kazuya Mishima themselves, he would be a bit beginner-friendly, yet hard-to-master character who focuses on strong, close-ranged melee attacks from his
Bajiquan style with follow-ups such as his signature Tetsuzankou (body check/shoulder tackle), Renkantai (anti-aerial double kick), etc. and excels at throws, combos and mid-range brawls. As a final note, take
these random concepts and two
Virtua Fighter movesets (especially a latter format with former's moves) made by a fellow friend
@osby for
Speed Weed
's
Battle of AGES (join in if you want!) as examples.
