The Best Female Fighters in The History of Video Games - Virtua Fighter

This was my first and favorite fighting game.
I know Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Street Fighter were (are) way more popular, but in my eyes, Virtua Fighter was the superior fighting game.
It just felt more real.
If you had actually sparred before, it didn’t take you long to get into the game play and start feeling like you were almost there.
Yeah, they had some outlandish moves (personally I think MK and SF's mores were way more unrealistic) but overall, the game play was more like being in a real match.

Virtua Fighter was created by Sega studio AM2 and designer Yu Suzuki, and is considered by some to be the "godfather" of all 3D fighting games.
Even the video game designers of Tekken and Dead or Alive admit they were influenced by Virtua Fighter.
And Virtua Fighter was given the honor of not only being recognized by the Smithsonian Institution for contributions in the field of Art and Entertainment, but it became part of the Smithsonian Institution's Permanent Research Collection on Information Technology Innovation.
Not only that, Guinness World Records awarded Virtua Fighter seven world records in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008, including "First Polygon Based Fighting Game", "First 3D Fighting Game", and "First Fighting Game for a 32-bit Console".

Virtua Fighter was released as an Arcade game, and on the Saturn, 32X, Mega Drive, Game Gear, Master System, Game.com, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, GameCube, PlayStation 3, Virtual Console, Xbox 360 video game consoles AND on Windows....whew!

Of course to rack up this many accolades, the video game character design had to be really good, and yes the game includes some of the best female fighters in video game history.
Starting off with my personal favorite (and the one I used to terrorize opponents with).....

This black/blue catsuit clad blond was my favorite.
She was the sister of another character Jacky Bryant, but she was a character in her own right.
I read that her fighting style was Savate, Taekwondo, Karate and grappling, but I could have sworn I read somewhere that it was classified as Jeet Kune Do.
She appeared in all the Virtua Fighters games plus the Sega Saturn game Fighters Megamix.

Pai Chan is the daughter of another character in the game, Lau Chan.
I remember that she was one of the hardest characters for me to beat when I started learning this game.
That blasted flipping back kick.....
Anyway, Pai is a martial arts action movie star in her hometown, and her fighting style is Ensei-Ken (Mizongquan).
She also appeared in all the Virtua Fighters games and Fighters Megamix.

Aoi Umenokouji made her debut in Virtua Fighter 3.
She was the childhood friend of another Virtua Fighter character, Akira.
Aoi uses Aikijutsu and appeared in Virtua Fighter 3, 4 and 5.

Vanessa Lewis may owe more than a little of her video game character design to Mortal Kombat's Sonya Blade (just my opinion).
Vanessa first appeared in Virtua Fighter 4 as Sarah Bryant's bodyguard.
Her fighting style is Vale Tudo.
Vanessa appeared in Virtua Fighter 4 and 5.

Eileen debuted in Virtua Fighter 5 and is probably the youngest character in the series (no mention of character age was made after VF2).
She lost both her parents at a young age, and was raised (and trained) by her grandfather.
Eileen's fighting style is Monkey Kung Fu.
She appeared in Virtua Fighter 5.

In Virtua Fighter, the big boss is a woman.
Kinda.
Dural was previously a human and her name was Tsukikage.
She was the mother of the Vitrua Fighter ninja character Kage-Maru and she was also a Kunoichi.
When J6 (Judgement6) noticed her fighting skills, they captured her and used her as their prototype for their Dural ultimate fighter project.
She was brainwashed and turned into a cyborg
Tsukikage isn't the only Dural though.
J6 wanted both Sarah Bryant and Vanessa Lewis for potential recruits into the program and in Virtua Fighter 4, you can see thousands of Dural models encased in capsules on her stage.  
Interestingly, "Dural" was one of the code names for the Sega Dreamcast video game console.
Dural showed up in all of the VF titles, plus another video game Beach Spikers, a beach volleyball game developed by Sega-AM2.

Back in 2007, Tekken project director Haruki Suzaki told IGN in an interview that he had spoken to the director of Virtual Fighter, and they had talked about a "Tekken vs. Virtua Fighter" game.

We can only hope....

And if all of this isn’t enough of the lovely (and deadly) ladies of VF...for you, take a look at these....

There was a thirty five episode anime series based on Virtua Fighter that originally aired on Japanese television on TV Tokyo from October 2nd, 1995 to June 27th, 1996.
It was aired not only in Japan but in Argentina, Chile, Italy, Mexico, the Philippines and part of the Middle East.
It was also aired in North America by Media Blasters but they dropped it before airing all thirty five episodes.
They said it was due to falling sales, despite the fact that hanayume.net called the series "one of the best among those anime series that had fighting-game origins", Asian Stuff said that "the fights don't drag on and that it doesn't resort to repetitive tournament crap" and Eugene Cheng at EX.org said that "This has been a decade which has seen many games crossover into the animation domain, but I feel that none have been so well done as the Virtua Fighter series. Yet it has not received the attention or the praise that it deserves."
The anime series was written by Reiko Yoshida who had also wriiten for Angelic Layer, Boys Over Flowers and D.Gray-man Digimon among many others.
In the series, Pai Chan and Sarah Bryant appeared along with a new character Eva Durix, a robotics scientist who created Dural.