Retro Review: Dead Or Alive

I used to LOVE fighting games. I’d play them all the time. From time to time, I’ll play now, but not as much as when I was growing up. Like many fighting game enthusiasts growing up in the 90s, my first loves were Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Around the time I was getting into video games, the Mortal Kombat films came out… and I was obsessed. Sonya Blade was my favorite in Mortal Kombat, and Cammy was my favorite in Street Fighter. (As you read on, you’ll learn my favorite in a fighting game will typically be the blonde bombshell) I don’t remember my introduction to the Tekken series, but I recall fond memories of playing Tekken 2, and I’ve owned every game, at least every game available on Playstation consoles, since then. In the second game, Michelle Chang was my favorite, but between the second and third games she died or disappeared, and her daughter, Julia, replaced her. I didn’t like Julia as much, so I switched to Nina Williams… another blonde bombshell, in fact, that is the. name of one of her moves. In hindsight, I enjoyed fighting games up until Tekken, but I LOVED the Tekken series. I believe my introduction to the Dead Or Alive series was through GameInformer. I want to say that I had a subscription from my preteen years up through my mid to late twenties. Back then, there wasn’t social media or YouTube showing me new games, I either saw them in stores, read about them in magazines, or heard about them through friends. At the time, I was also very much into reading strategy guides. I don’t know if people buy strategy guides anymore, but I’ll still buy a collector’s edition here and there. I like to collect them more than anything else, you can use an online guide or YouTube these days. Anyway, I remember going to the mall on weekends and spending my time at arcades (another story) and/or reading strategy guides. The look of Dead Or Alive is what pulled me in. It looked so different from the other fighting games I had played. At the time, I had a PS2, and the fighting game I was playing all the time was Tekken Tag Tournament. I was OBSESSED with that game, partly because it was my first PS2 game and partly because it brought back characters from previous games, such as Michelle Chang, and introduced characters like Unknown. There were so many theories that Unknown was actually Jun, who also disappeared/died between the second and third games. It wouldn’t be until years later that said theory was confirmed with Tekken Tag Tournament 2. I believe that game was on PS5. Anyway, the first DOA game to come to PS2 was Dead Or Alive 2: Hardcore, and I purchased it around Christmas time. The first thing I noticed was how fast the game was, not that the other fighting games were slow, but they weren’t as fast as this. This also started my love of costumes in games. Mind you, on this PS2 game, each character had 20 costumes… free, no DLC, already in the game costumes (that’s important for later). You had to do different tasks to unlock different costumes, like play story mode on different difficulties, defeat a certain number of enemies in Survivor mode. It was a lot of fun. Now, DOA has a reputation of being a series catered towards young men. To be fair, most video games, then and now, were catered towards teen boys. With this game, the higher you set the age of the player, the more the boobs bounced. The costumes were a bit risqué at times, and it was not uncommon to get a panty shot when the characters were wearing skirts or other skimpy outfits. I didn’t care about any of that, I loved seeing the different costume designs. There was also an art gallery. It played this song called “Deadly Silence Beach” and there were different 3D renderings of the girls of DOA. A lot of them were in bikinis and other skimpy outfits, very much how I imagine a men’s magazine to be. No nudity though, which was fine by me. I’d spend hours listening to that song and drawing while looking at the renderings. It really helped me create an artistic style… I would later have to edit that style because DOA was about big boobs, so my drawings all had big boobs too. When DOA3 was announced as an Xbox exclusive, I, the Playstation fanboy, was devastated… but I went ahead and bought an Xbox (more accurately, I had my mom buy one for me) and I got DOA3 and DOA: Extreme Beach Volleyball. The volleyball series is going to need its own post, as will my days as an Xbox fanboy while I owned my Xbox and Xbox 360. I don’t believe DOA3 or DOA4 had as many costumes as DOA2 did, but they were faster, and the graphics looked better. In between the third and fourth games was my first experience of a remastered/remade game, which was Dead or Alive: Ultimate. It was the first two games, but now on Xbox. I think each character may have still had 20 outfits. I do remember all the girls had a black and green Xbox outfit, which I thought was cool. Dead or Alive: Ultimate came out the same day as Halo 2. I remember my friends thinking I was crazy to buy it instead of Halo. While I enjoyed Halo, and would eventually get the second game, I LOVED DOA. DOA4 was on Xbox 360. By then, I was 18 and in Phoenix. Eventually, probably around 19 or 20, I bought an Xbox 360. I still loved Playstation 3, but Xbox 360 had achievements and I was obsessed with them, so I played it more than my PS3 at the time. Playstation eventually developed their equivalent of achievements, called trophies, and DOA5 was the triumphant return of the series of the Playstation console, which was perfect, because in the age of the PS4, I had yet to purchase the Xbox One. DOA6 was also available on both Playstation and Xbox, but was not well received, and we haven’t heard of a new DOA since, and there may never be one. DOA 2: Hardcore and DOA: Ultimate are my favorite games in the series, and honestly, they are both the same game, one is just a remastered version of the other. They were fun and I could literally spend hours in Practice mode. I enjoyed DOA5, but it had its problems. For starters, the series introduced DLC. The DLC came in the form of characters, but mostly costumes, and each pack, for lack of a better term, was called a season, and each season was $92. I bought almost all the seasons. As I said before, this game developed my love of in-game costumes, and I wanted them all. I also had a lot of disposable income at the time, so I was fine with it. Not to mention, this came out to maybe $2 – $3 per outfit, whereas I play games today where a single outfit is $10… looking at you Dead By Daylight and Marvel’s Avengers. I believe there were 3 releases of DOA5. DOA5, DOA5: Ultimate, both on PS3/Xbox 360, and finally DOA 5: Last Round, which released on PS3/Xbox 360, as well as PS4 and Xbox One. With the different versions, I bought them all, and the DLC, I’m sure I spent at least $1k on the game during its lifetime, but as with the other games in the series, I played it pretty regularly. DOA6 I barely spent time playing, and I only bought the deluxe edition when it was recently on sale for $20 something. It still has DLC, but it took a shift towards more in-game purchases, and fans were immediately turned off by it. Also, you couldn’t unlock costumes like normal. I don’t remember exactly how it works, because I didn’t play it, but completely tasks would unlock pieces of costumes, but the pieces may not even be for the character you were playing as. It was a big mess, and that’s probably why we haven’t seen a new DOA since, which makes me sad. I’d love for them to go the remaster/remake route and remake DOA2 again. The series meant so much to me and I’d had to never see it revived.