Whilst AM2 developed both Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers, Last Bronx fell to AM3 with Hisao Oguchi as executive producer, supported by Seiichi Yamagata and Masaki Takahashi as designers.
The pounding, techno-infused music, produced by Tomoyuki Kawamura whose previous work included Virtua Racing‘s spartan soundtrack, dovetailed with these aesthetics and gameplay to create a believable congruent world whose stories felt real in a way unmatched by contemporary titles. The distinctive motion-blur on the weapons accentuated the cruelty and created a title that, for all its realism, was visually highly distinctive.
Indeed, the motion capture was so core to Last Bronx‘s feel that a movie detailing the process was released in Japan. As one of the first motion-captured 3D games, the other being Soul Edge/Blade, Last Bronx‘s characters moved with a vicious fluidity that added a further layer of realism to the underground setting. However, it was not just the setting or the weapon-based game mechanics that differentiated Last Bronx from its stablemates. Indeed, such realism lent itself to trans-media promotion, with the standard manga tie-in being supplemented by radio plays and short films made viable by the closeness of the setting to the real world. Last Bronx was the weapons based, narratively driven title with mechanics as taut and gritty as its alternative Tokyo setting. Fighting Vipers was a breathless, off-beat title with esoteric character design and an overblown play-style. Virtua Fighter was designed to be a highly technical game, light on humour, heavy in depth. However, for all its adoption of Virtua Fighter‘s mores, Last Bronx had a distinctive appeal that formed part of a three pronged assault on the nascent 3D fighting genre. Last Bronx can be seen as trying to ride the 3D zeitgeist that Yu Suzuki’s AM2 defined. The interleaving of Fighting Vipers characters into the Saturn exclusive Fighters Megamix makes this connexion explicit. In this context, it is unsurprising that Sega would try to wring every last drop of creative and fiscal juice from its Virtua Fighter model. With the original Virtua Fighter home conversion enjoying huge popularity with the Saturn’s launch, it was clear that Sega’s arcade games were equally vital to the home market and the company’s increasingly fragile bottom line. The one factor that had not changed was Sega’s arcade dominance, driving the Saturn’s unexpected Japanese success. Sega were enjoying a topsy-turvy period whereby their traditional strongholds in America and Europe had evaporated and been replaced by domestic popularity. Last Bronx‘s 1996 arcade release coincided with the high-water mark of Virtua Fighter 2‘s Japanese popularity.