Dead or Alive a Casual Retrospective Part 5

I did not like Dead or Alive 4. I think I made that perfectly clear in my review of it. It wasn’t a bad game, it looked good, and the fighting system was solid, but it was let down by the overly difficult AI and lacklustre content.

Regardless of what I thought, it was successful, and most people seemed to like it. So why did it take seven years for the next game to come out. I know these days a seven year wait for a fighting game is normal. It can sometimes be an entire console cycle to see the next rendition of Street Fighter, Tekken or Mortal Kombat.

But keep in mind that fighting games now are supported for years with DLC and updates. It makes sense for the wait for the next instalment to be lengthy. That wasn’t the case back in 2005. Fighting game sequels were a relatively frequent thing. Just look at Mortal Kombat which had three games between 2002 and 2006, the 3D era of the franchise. What took Team Ninja so long.

Well, a lot of things. For one the studio was busy working on Ninja Gaiden 2. In fact, the Ninja Gaiden series became something of a priority for Team Ninja during this period. Not only did we get 2 but we also got the Sigma versions of 1 and 2, as well as the DS game Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword.

Then there was the fact that Tecmo would merge with fellow Japanese studio Koei in 2009, becoming Koei Tecmo. This was something a lot of Japanese studios were doing at the time to compete in the global gaming landscape. See also Square Enix.

I don’t know much about company mergers but given what we saw with things like Microsoft buying Activision, there was probably a period of corporate reshuffling while the merger was going on that could have impacted game production.

But a more solid reasoning, and one I can actually prove, would be that Dead or Alive no longer had a steward. Because in 2008, Tomonobu Itagaki, founder of Team Ninja and creator of Dead or Alive, would leave Tecmo.

This should not come as a surprise if you’ve been reading along with this retrospective. Despite being the company’s golden boy, Itagaki and Tecmo’s higher ups were not exactly keen on each other. Tecmo’s demanding schedules clashed with Itagaki’s perfectionist nature, to the point where they tricked him into releasing an unfinished build of Dead or Alive 2 to the PlayStation 2. A betrayal that made Itagaki a temporary depressive alcoholic.

The fractured relationship between the two would only get worse as time went on. And after a dispute with Tecmo regarding unpaid overtime he was owed, Itagaki had finally had enough and would leave Tecmo for good. Taking half of Team Ninja with him in the process.

Mind you that’s not the whole story. Itagaki was also apparently very difficult to work with. Often being extremely demanding in what he wanted which would often cause problems behind the scenes. He acted a bit like a rock star and like most rock stars he was kind of an asshole.

There was also a sexual assault allegation filed against Itagaki at the time. He was found innocent, but Tecmo still used this as an excuse to demote him, and Itagaki accused them of making derogatory statements about him during the whole ordeal.

It was a messy break up to say the least. The specifics aren’t important though. The only thing you need to know is that Itagaki was no longer available to work on Dead or Alive. He went off to do his own thing, which would end in disaster but that’s a different story.

Not that Itagaki would have made another Dead or Alive. He felt like with 4 he had already done all that he could with the series, and 4 itself was made as a finale of sorts for the franchise. If he had stuck around there’s a good chance we may have never seen Dead or Alive again.

But after all the corporate skullduggery and merging nonsense, someone would eventually rise up to take the reins of this series. That would be Yosuke Hayashi. Hayashi already had a history with the series as a planner and tester for 3 and 4 respectively, and he had proven himself as a decent producer and director on other projects like Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword and… Metroid Other M?

Ok no one is perfect, but he had a history with the series and was good at what he did. With Itagaki gone he would become the lead producer for Dead or Alive. He started with Dead or alive Dimensions which we’ve already looked at, but the next proper game in the series he would work on was Dead or Alive 5.

Which finally brings us to the game in question. Dead or Alive 5 would release in September 2012 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Making it the first multiplatform release in the series since Dead or Alive 2. Considering the Xbox’s utter failure in Japan I can’t blame Tecmo for not wanting their games to be exclusive to the platform. That was always more of an Itagaki thing anyway.

This wasn’t the only game Team Ninja would release that month. There was also Ninja Gaiden 3 which was a complete disaster that nearly killed that franchise, so yeah, Dead or Alive 5 was easily the better of the two. It won by default really.

The game did get decent reviews at the time, though they weren’t quite as positive as previous games. The graphics and gameplay were praised, but it was criticised for not being a major evolution of the series and its heavy emphasis on fanservice.

Fan reception is also a bit mixed. For some fans this game is seen as a step down from previous games, while others consider it one of the best games in the series. It seems to lean more towards the positive side of things these days though.

That could be because the game got several revisions and updates. Yeah, we’re back to this shit. First there was the Vita port, Dead or Alive 5 + which added new characters and training modes but was otherwise the same game on a handheld.

Then there was Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate which added new online modes, characters, costumes and stages as well as various gameplay tweaks and new mechanics added to the core fighting system. This version would also see a free to play version called Core Fighters, which only came with four characters and the online but allowed you to purchase the rest of the game as separate DLC.

It was a novel idea at the time. Free to play games were not common back then, especially for a fighting game. It was made to entice new players to try the game out, and it seems to have paid off. This free to play version would see twelve million downloads and while DLC sales aren’t known I can imagine Team Ninja must have made bank off of it considering how much DLC it had, but oh, we will get to that in due time.

This release method continued into the final rendition, Dead or Alive 5 Last Round. Which released in 2015 and was the first game in the series to release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It also saw gameplay tweaks and new content, including characters added to Ultimate post launch and it would see several roster updates of its own to make it the complete version.

This is the version I’ll be looking at for this review. You can get the game for cheap these days since it’s frequently on sale. I got it on the Xbox Store during one such sale, and the paid version comes with most of the games content. Well, the important stuff like characters and stages, costumes are a different story but again, in due time.

But let’s just get stuck in already. The first thing I want to say right away is, God this is a good-looking game. Dead or Alive has always been a series that was a bit of a visual showpiece, and 5 continues that trend. This is seriously one of the best-looking 3D fighters I’ve ever played.

The level of detail is remarkable. You can even make out tiny details like sweat on the characters. The animation remains as fluid as ever, although the animations do lean into being a bit more realistic. At least as realistic as they can be in a game with teleporting ninjas.

Dead or Alive always had an element of realism to it, but it also mixed it in with influences from anime. 5 leans more towards realism. There is still some anime in there, especially in the chest area, but it is noticeably toned down here.

It’s mostly in the faces. The older games gave some characters big eyes like you see in a lot of anime, but 5 makes them a bit more proportionate. The one exception being Ayane who does look a bit off in this game. Then again she is a purple haired ninja girl, she was always going to stand out with the more realistic approach.

The game is also a little bit grittier. It’s not as bright or as colourful as the previous games and the characters can even get sweatier and scruffier during a fight, though you can toggle that off if you want. There’s no battle damage or anything. None of the fighters bruised but the added dirt effects do help make the fights feel more visceral.

It has a more muted colour palette and an overall darker look to its predecessors. Considering it was released in the 2010’s that tracks, every game was going down the gritty and realistic path during that time. They all were trying to be darker to appear more mature and grown up, which ironically made everything seem more childish in hindsight. I’m just glad Dead or Alive didn’t fully lose its identity following that trend.

It may not be as colourful, but it hasn’t lost all of its colour and it still has plenty of the series original over the top ridiculousness along with some fun and creative stages and costumes. So it still looks like Dead or Alive. Honestly the grittier nature was probably done to better show off the visual fidelity which, ok mission accomplished there. It really does show how detailed this is.

It’s just a great looking game all around. It’s a big step up from 4 which was already a stunning game for the time, but there is one drawback, no CG cutscenes. Yup, they got rid of the CG which means there’s no intro or endings to comment on. There is a story mode, but it’s done using in game graphics.

This sucks, but I fully expected this. Fighting games by this point had largely stopped having intros. Some kept it going but it was largely a dying art form by that point. They are slowly making a comeback these days, but the 2010’s seemed to be the period where developers stopped caring about them.

I know this might not seem like a big deal, but it is to me. I loved fighting game intros as a kid. Sometimes they were the most memorable part of the game. They got you hyped up to play the game and were really entertaining to watch. They’re an artform that’s slowly being lost and that makes me sad.

I can’t complain about much else visually. The stages look great, and the characters look better than they ever have. Even compared to more recent fighters like Tekken 8 I still think it looks good. In some ways it looks much better.

The music is really damn good too, which is great because there are a lot of tracks in this game. The way the music is set up is you can choose to have either the stage music, or the character themes play. I prefer the character themes in general, not just in this game I just like having character themes in my fighting games, but both sets of music are damned good.

All the music is very high energy which adds to the intensity of the fights, but there’s also a decent amount of variety in the music genres covered. It’s mostly rock, but there’s a healthy mix of other styles in there too like techno, funk and orchestral.

Best part is, if you don’t like the new music, the game gives you the option to switch to the old music. The soundtracks from all previous games are unlockable and you’re free to mix and match music however you want. So if you don’t like a musical piece, you can take it out of rotation and replace it with something else. I love it when games let you do that.

Presentation wise its top shelf stuff, but once you’re done looking and listening to it, what is there to do in it. Well in terms of modes we have a lot of the standard stuff, Arcade, Versus, Survival, Time Attack and Team Fight which I always love to see come back.

You also have Online, which sadly lost the unique lobby system 4 had. Now it’s just a basic online mode. I think, I didn’t play this much because it’s an older game and the player base isn’t very big. It’s going to be hard to find matches and if you do it’s going to be against someone who’s probably played this thing for years.

That said, the game does have a cool feature where it will actively look for online opponents while you play through other modes. So you can have fun playing Arcade and still find someone to fight against. This is a lot more enjoyable than just staring at a lobby screen for hours hoping to find someone.

I was even able to find people this way, though I did not actually fight them. This only happened twice though, so while I can confirm people are still playing this, I can also confirm it isn’t that many. That said DOA 5 doesn’t have cross play so it’s possible the player bases on other platforms are better. I’d say if you want to play this online to go for the PC version since it will likely be the most active and you can at least track when people are online there.

I have heard the net code is ok so if you are interested in checking it out you should be in for a good time but be prepared to get your ass kicked. I wasn’t too interested in it, but Online is still an option for those that want it.

Still, there are plenty of other modes like Spectator which… just lets you watch replays or computer matches. Ok, that was a bad example. On a more substantive note is Story Mode. This was in previous games too, but in Dead or Alive 5 the structure has been changed to one more akin to a modern cinematic story mode.

I’ll cover the modes in more depth in a bit. For now, let’s keep skimming and see what the game offers. For the roster we have a big one. Thirty-six playable characters to pick from, and twenty-eight stages to play on. The largest selection in the series so far. Although it’s more like thirty-five characters and twenty-seven stages. I’ll explain why later.

On the surface, Dead or Alive 5 has a lot to offer. Sure, a lot of the modes are standard, but that’s not a bad thing. So long as the game is fun to play, we should be able to get some enjoyment out of this. but first we need to actually learn to play this thing.

I’ve been playing Dead or Alive a lot lately, so I think it’s safe to say I have the basics down. But it always helps to have a refresher. Which brings us to the final mode, Training. This isn’t just a standard practice mode either, there’s quite a few options here.

You have Free Training which is a standard practice mode. Just letting you lab out certain characters and combos. Nothing much to say. What there is more to say on though are the other training modes starting with the Tutorial.

This is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a mode that teaches you how to play the game. Going over the controls and the mechanics to get you started on playing it. This is nothing new, a lot of modern fighting games have tutorials, but this particular tutorial is shockingly robust.

It covers pretty much everything you need. It goes over combo chains, holds, throws, guarding, stages, tag mechanics, movement. If you want to start learning Dead or Alive this has everything you need to get going.

It’s a good tutorial for the time. It’s a little dry in how it presents the information. It isn’t as fun or as inventive as some other tutorials like Guilty Gear Xrd’s, but it gets the job done. The information is at least clear and easy to understand, and it thankfully doesn’t get bogged down with fighting game lingo like a lot of modern tutorials do.

It’s not trying to get you to play competitively, it just wants you to know how to play the game. It’s also not too long and everything is broken up nicely, so if there’s a part of the game you need to brush up on it’s easy to find.

There’s a lot of categories to go through. It will cover a lot of the games deeper systems like the critical hit system, and the hold system in much better detail. I will admit that I have been button bashing my way through these games. I’ve tried to learn them, but it’s hard to do when there’s no in game resource to teach you this stuff and you don’t have the manual to explain anything.

This tutorial gave me a much better understanding of how Dead or Alive works. Like Offensive Holds. I didn’t know what they were I just thought they were a throw, but now I know they’re a type of hold that’s meant to keep offensive pressure up. I know how to use counter throws better; I know how best to use critical hits. I could figure those out before, but I have a greater understanding of those systems now thanks to this tutorial.

I even know what Hi Counter means now. That would always pop up in the other games, and I had no idea what it meant. I always thought it meant it was a counter for high attacks, but no it means a more powerful counter, and it’s meant to indicate how the Triangle System works. Nice knowing what that prompt means now.

This did so much in teaching me how the fighting system works. Now that I do, I can see that it is a lot deeper than I initially gave it credit for. I did say that the system had plenty of depth in past parts, but I didn’t realise just how many sub-systems it actually had. Perhaps though, it has too many systems.

There are so many little mechanics and systems at play that interlock with one another that it can be a bit overwhelming. I actually forgot how complicated 3D fighters were before playing this. You forget how much they force you to keep track of. Maybe that’s why 2D fighters are more common these days. I mean those are complicated too, but not to the same degree as 3D fighters.

Luckily you don’t need to keep all of it in mind if you’re a casual scrub lord like me. So long as you understand the basics you can still have fun with it. The Triangle System is easy enough to learn and when you figure out that the rest of it will come naturally. If you want to get good at the game though, you have a lot to learn.

It’s a solid tutorial. It covers everything you need and even has tests so you can put what you’ve learned into practice. They aren’t great at that though, some tests I beat on accident while not feeling like I fulfilled the requirement, and they feel too close to an actual fight that it makes them hard to get used to the mechanics you’re supposed to learn. These could have been better.

This isn’t the end though. There are two other practice modes in the form of Command Training and Combo Challenge. Command Training is just the Exercise mode from the previous games. It takes you through a character’s Command List so you can learn all their moves.

It would have been nice to have more character centric Tutorials to show which moves are the best to focus on, but this is still fine. It’s a good way of getting to grips with each characters moves, although learning how to put them together in combo’s is another matter. But this is where Combo Challenge comes in.

These take you through a bunch of sample combos for each character. Giving you an idea of the kind of combos you can do. If you’ve played any modern fighter, this should sound familiar because this mode is in pretty much every fighting game nowadays.

The challenges aren’t too difficult, but it depends on the character. Some characters I could do no problem: others I barely made it through half. One thing I appreciate about it is giving you combos for specific situations like hitting enemies into walls. It covers all the bases in how a character can craft combos.

It even shows you things that Command Training doesn’t. So the best thing to do is play Command Training to learn the move sets, then play Combo Challenge to get a better feel of how to put more moves together, and head to free training to lab everything out.

Of course, if you’re like me you’ll forget everything immediately and just button mash in Arcade, but these training modes do a great job of getting you into its systems. It isn’t perfect. Tutorial is a little too dense in its information at times and the dry way of delivering it can make it hard to fully memorise everything, but it does get you started, and once you do it’s not hard to feel everything out.

But now that I’ve talked about how the game teaches you how to play, how is the actual gameplay itself. Pretty damn good. Dead or Alive 5 keeps the smooth fighting gameplay of its predecessors and tightens everything up. It’s easily the smoothest game in the series to play so far.

For the most part a lot of it is the same as before. Same combo system, the Triangle System is still here with strikes, throws and holds countering each other, it’s still got the same level of stage interactivity, if you’ve played Dead or Alive before you’ll slip into this like a hand to a glove.

But Dead or Alive 5 does something wild. Something I didn’t expect that shocked me. That being, actually building on the gameplay with new ideas. I know, I’m as shocked as you are, but after two games, well two and a half if you count Dimensions which I do not, DOA 5 tries to introduce some new ideas into the mix.

The first is a side-step. Wait, wasn’t side-stepping already in this game? I guess not, what I’ve been referring to as side-stepping was actually a free step. See, Dead or Alive has a much more open movement compared to Tekken where side-stepping is required to move up and down. In Dead or alive you can do that freely, but since I’m used to Tekken’s method I got a bit mixed up. I always call moving into the foreground and background side stepping because that’s what I’m used to.

My bad, but yes, side-stepping was introduced properly in Dead or Alive 5. Although frankly I don’t know why. It’s mostly used to avoid linear attacks, or basically attacks that hit forward, but free stepping does that just as well. You can attack out of a side-step to counter and open for a combo, but since side-steps only work on linear attacks, and a lot of the moves and throws track, there’s not many opportunities to use it.

It's not a bad addition, just a pointless one. I think the devs knew that too because it was removed in Dead or Alive 6. I guess they couldn’t figure out how to make it interesting.

What is more interesting is the changes to the Critical Hits. The basic system is still the same, certain attacks will cause a Critical Hit that will cause the opponent to stagger and letting you combo them much more easily. That hasn’t changed, but they’ve now added different levels to the Critical Hits.

If you land a Critical on an opponent and then do another Critical on them it will go up a level, up to three levels in total. The higher the level is, the higher you can launch the opponent for a juggle combo.

This technically isn’t new. The idea of increasing the juggle height through this was introduced in Dead or Alive 4, making it another gameplay improvement you barely noticed in that game, and I’m not sure when this idea was introduced, it could have always been here and I’m only just now noticing it.

This has been a bit of an issue with this retrospective, there’s been a few things in this series I neglected to mention because I was unaware of them. You probably already know my complaints about the shifting controls of the Hold system and my ongoing confusion of when the changes to it were made, but did you know this series had a weight system where heavier characters can’t be juggled as easily as light ones.

Well I didn’t. I only found out about it in 5, but it’s been a feature that’s been here since the very first game. Granted I did get most of the main mechanics right and did go over the most important parts of the combat, but these are still elements that I did not cover, and I can only apologize for that.

In my defence however, there was nothing in the previous games that went over this. Keep in mind that I am playing this series digitally and don’t have access to manuals where this information likely was.

I did do some research into this series to learn how they were made and to get a better idea of its mechanics, but Dead or Alive is a far more niche series compared to something like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, so there aren’t many sources covering it in greater detail at least none that I could find.

The only site I could find that covered it was Free-Step-Dodge, which has information on every game in the series regarding, and even that is limited in what it has. There’s just not as many sources covering this stuff when compared to its fighting game contemporaries.

In short, I missed things because I lacked the resources to know they even existed. While I could have gone looking through old forum posts to get this information, that would be going against this being a “casual retrospective”. The whole point of which is to look at it from a casual point of view, or rather a person who picks up a game plays it without going too deep into the mechanics.

My whole conceit with these is to let the gameplay speak for itself. If I miss anything then that means it was never made clear within the game. I do at least try to uncover everything I can, but sometimes things slip through the cracks.

To get back on track though, I do like the way Critical Hits are handled here. It not only gives a better incentive to go for big combo’s and learn Critical moves, but it also forces variety in attacks. Since using the same attack in a row will cause a Critical Finish that will knock the opponent down.

If you want the big combo’s you want to vary up your offence. Except you might actually want those Critical Finishes since they cause a bounce that you can also combo off from. Not in a big way mind you, but this is a good way of get some quick damage in.

The big reason for these different Critical levels, at least in this game, is to facilitate the use of one of the major new mechanic, Critical Burst. So, if you land a Critical Hit the opponent will be put into a Critical Stun state, but the opponent can still break out of that with a Stagger Escape or by using a Hold to counter.

This is where Critical Burst comes in. While the opponent is in the Critical Stun state their health bar will start flashing white, which indicates how much damage they can take before your combo can end.

If you land a Critical Burst just before or after this white bar is depleted, which the game hints at by flashing the Critical Stun indicator red, then the opponent is left completely defenceless. They can’t break out, they can’t Hold, they are completely at your mercy.

You can’t actually get much out of this. Once a Critical Burst happens one good hit will send the opponent away and you can’t throw from this either. So you either go for the big damaging attacks or go for a juggle. This is why it’s best to chain different Critical Hits together before this to get a nice big juggle combo, and you’ll want to mix up your attacks so the opponent can’t just Hold out of it.

It took me a little while to fully grasp this. It’s not hard to learn, I just didn’t recognise the white bar at first and got a bit confused on how it worked. Once I did though, this was a fun system to mess around with. It really makes you pay attention to how combos are structured so you can get the most out of the system.

I’ll admit it’s not easy even once you figure it out. With how big the move sets are it will take time and practice to figure out the most optimal combo routes for this, but even if you just focus on doing basic combos you can still get some cool shit out of it.

While juggles are the most optimal cash out from a Critical Burst, it isn’t the only one. You can also use this to get a Power Move or Power Launcher. The other big new additions to the combat.

Both of these can only be done when your health bar is halfway depleted; being this game’s comeback mechanic like Ultra Combo’s in Street Fighter 4. Power Launchers are exactly what they sound like, big powerful launchers that send the opponent high into the air for longer juggle combos.

Power Moves are a very powerful combo attack that not only does heavy damage but can also knock the opponent into stage hazards. In fact, not only does this make stage hazards do more damage, but there are certain stage hazards that can only be activated by Power Moves. The game will even slow down time so you can aim where to send the opponent with this.

Now can use these without Critical Burst, but doing so requires a lengthy charge time that leaves you wide open. Critical Burst not only provides an opening for them but also shortens the charge time considerably. So it feels like they were made to be used for the Critical Burst.

Both are good additions to the combat. Though I will admit I prefer Power Moves over Launchers. Power Launchers send the opponent so high up that it can be difficult to start the juggle. It requires more precise timing than a regular juggle, and while it does more damage, I still wound up not really using it.

Power Moves are way more fun in my opinion. Not only do they look cool, but they feel really good too. This game has the great sound design of the previous games, and Power Moves have a big oomph in how they sound to make you feel the impact. It’s not easy to get them off, but when you do, and if you land a stage hazard with it, fuck me does it feel good.

Tag Team also got some updates. There are now new tag techniques like Burst Tag where you can swap a character in with an attack that also causes Critical Burst, Force Out which does the same thing while also forcing the opponent to swap characters, Ground Attack Tags which tags out with an OTG attack, and Tag Power Blows which tags out during a Power Blow.

Ok so they just gave you more ways to tag out, but it does help give the Tag Team mode a greater level of depth. It’s nice to see the Tag Team mode continued to be treated as a neat extra but as an actual part of the series with just as much effort put into it as the main game.

Then there are the stages. These remain a big highlight and keep a lot of what made them so good with stage transitions and interactable elements. In fact, they’ve increased the amount of interactivity. Not only do Power Holds interact with stages, including having some things only it can activate, but there’s also the new Cliffhangers.

Three of the stages have transition points that can you can halt it by holding on to the side. Afterwards the opponent will come in to force you down. This creates an exchange where the attacking side will either attack or throw to knock the defender down, both of which do a bit more damage.

However, the defender has the opportunity to block these. If they successfully block the attack then the transition happens but no damage is dealt, if they block a throw then they turn it around and the attacker takes the damage from the transition instead.

It creates some interesting mind games during the stage transition. Do you go for the throw which is stronger but runs the risk of backfiring or go for the attack and risk not doing any damage but not take any in return, or just say fuck it and do anything at all to not risk anything at all.

It’s a shame only three stages have this because it’s a good idea. It adds something new while building on stage transitions in a natural way. I remember the initial reveal trailer showed this off, almost like it was supposed to be a big feature, and I’m surprised to see it’s not as prevalent as I thought it would be.

Mind you the reason could be because they’re rare. I very rarely got these things to activate because trying to set up them up in the middle of a fight is difficult. Even with normal stage transitions you won’t always see them given how fights go in this game, and Cliffhangers are not only on three of the stages, they also require additional conditions like activating certain hazards beforehand.

Cliffhangers are great spectacle, and mechanically they are interesting, but the infrequency of which they appear makes them not have the impact they should. I get that they don’t want them to happen so often because the brief pause in the action they cause can mess with the pace of a fight but having them require as much set-up as they do feels like they’re burying the mechanic instead of letting become a natural part of the design.

I guess Team Ninja weren’t as confidant in this idea. They would end up scrapping this for DOA 6 and I find that a shame because there is potential in this idea. Just feels like such a waste.

That’s not all they added to the stages however. The stages will even change as you fight depending on which interactable elements get used. Making the stages far more dynamic. There’s even a new camera system that moves around to show the carnage going on.

Again only a few stages have this, but I’m ok with that in this instance. The camera movements can be a bit disorienting and makes it harder to focus on the action. Fortunately, there is a more traditional camera option you can swap to, so it’s not a huge problem.

The stages are still excellently designed. While some of its new ideas aren’t implemented as well as they could be, they are still fun ideas and do help increase the interactivity of the stages. Which was always the best thing about them.

Despite the increased interactivity however, I did notice there were far more stages that were simple square arenas. Different kinds of square arenas granted, but still very basic designs compared to the more elaborate stages the series is known for.

I’m guessing this was done to allow for more competitive fight arenas. Ones where you don’t have to worry about the interactive elements at all. DOA 5 did come out around the time where fighting games were trying to lean more into the competitive scene, and I’m guessing they wanted more stages for that to allow for more visual variety.

There are still interactive elements in the simpler stages, they just aren’t as extreme. There’s a healthy balance between the more elaborate stages and the simpler competitive stages though, so it never feels like it’s leaning too hard one way or the other.

They even brought back classic stages from past games like Azuchi, the Crimson and Lorelei, and even added areas from the Ninja Gaiden series. Unfortunately, they’re based on Ninja Gaiden 3 which was the worst one to pull from, but it was the most recent game at the time and they probably wanted more brand synergy.

Now, if I’m being perfectly honest, all this new stuff doesn’t change that much about the gameplay. They are fun, but they don’t change the fundamentals that much. This is still Dead or Alive at its core and none of the new addition’s changes that. I can see where some critics were coming from when they said this game didn’t evolve the series.

That being said, after two games, three if you count Dimensions, that played the same as what came before it, Dead or Alive 5 felt like a breath of fresh air. It might not be the big evolution it needed, but the new stuff did give it something 3 and 4 didn’t have, a unique identity of its own.

The new systems give Dead or Alive 5 a different feel, its own distinct flavour that makes it stand out from the rest. 3 and 4 were both fine enough games but didn’t have much of their own identity. 5 does and that makes it a more memorable experience.

It has all the elements I liked from previous games, the fast-paced combat, the interactive stages, the easy to learn controls, but it adds fun new things of its own while refining what came before it. They even seem to have finally settled on how Holds should work since it uses the same system from 4 though they are much easier to pull off now. Glad they’re sticking to a control scheme for that.

Even the AI is much, MUCH better than last time. Not only does it have more difficulty levels to pick from, but it is also far easier to deal with. It can still put up a decent fight, but it’s nowhere near as relentless or as oppressive as it was in 4. I can actually enjoy the game now since I’m not struggling as much.

As far as the combat goes, dare I say this might be my favourite game so far. Don’t know if that’s a hot take but I don’t care. I just enjoyed playing this more, and I really liked 2 and 3 so I don’t say that lightly.

But what about the content. Great gameplay means jack if there isn’t much to do. I went over it previously but let’s go more in depth on what is on offer. Which won’t take long because there isn’t much to say.

Arcade is a simple ladder against eight random opponents, Time Attack is the same thing but with a timer, Versus and Team Attack are both multiplayer modes, and Survival is a gauntlet where you try to beat as many opponents as you can.

What else can I say about them that I haven’t already. I mean Survival does still have the item collecting, that’s nice to see, but I’ve seen these modes before, I’ve talked about them before, and I don’t have much more to add.

I had fun with them. I can’t say I didn’t have a good time with any of the modes, but they’re very, very standard at this point. I will say that they do offer some replay value. They all have different difficulties to tackle, and beating Arcade or Time Attack will unlock new music and costumes. It’s still only one costume at a time so it’s still tedious, but at least it’s not too hard to get everything, and it gives you a better incentive to keep playing the game.

Or it would in my case, because I unlocked everything by complete fucking accident. I am not kidding. I was just setting the game up one morning ready to play for the review and found out that everything had been unlocked, and I have no idea how I did it. it’s DOA 3 all over again.

There is a cheat code in the game that unlocks everything in the game, but I didn’t learn about it until after I unlocked everything. I don’t know if I activated a glitch or what, but I have everything, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

On the one hand, it means I get to see everything the game has so that’s great. On the other hand, it means I don’t need to play the game. I’ve lost all reason to keep replaying the Arcade mode. I would have probably used the cheat code later, but I wanted to unlock some things on my own. I feel robbed.

My only theory on how this happened is that I got the catalogues for the DLC costumes and that may have inadvertently unlocked the non-DLC outfits, but I’m not entirely sure on that. Why would the DLC costumes affect the base game costumes. It makes no sense. If anyone out there can make sense of this, please do.

And, since I’m on the subject of DLC, I guess I might as well rip the band aid off. It’s time to talk about the giant goose egg that damaged this games reputation and the series as a whole. Let’s talk about the DLC.

Or rather, the fan service. Yes, I am going there again, I can’t help it when it comes to this series. It’s especially important here because 5 is the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to this stuff for a lot of people.

I have made it very clear that I do not really care about fan service in anything. If you want to have sexy characters in your games, then that’s perfectly fine with me. So long as it isn’t predatory or harmful, like depicting sexual assault or sexualising underage characters, then I’m genuinely ok with fan service.

Some series can go a bit overboard with it, but so long as fan service isn’t all they offer, I can deal with it. Dead or Alive so far has been that. There is a very heavy emphasis on the fan service sure, but it also had a strong fighting engine to back it up.

The sex appeal was just the added spice, the thing they added to draw all the eyeballs. It was the fighting engine that kept people coming back.

But at some point, the series started to lean into its fanservice a bit too much. I went over this in 4 where the fanservice went from being only in the outfits of its female cast and started leaking into other aspects of the game.

What really started this was the Dead or Alive Xtreme series. A spin off that was part minigame collection, and part perv simulator. I went over all this last time, but as for how this ties back into DOA 5, I mentioned that 4 was the start of the Xtremeification of DOA. Where the fanservice heavy nature of Xtreme started to bleed into the main series.

Granted you could argue that Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate was the start of this given some of the questionable outfits that had, but 4 was where it started to really take hold. But if 2U was where it began, and 4 is where it gained momentum, then 5 is where it went into overdrive and flew off into fucking oblivion.

Dead or Alive 5 has a lot of costumes. To give you an idea of how many, Kasumi alone has fifty-nine costumes. Fifty-nine outfits for just a just a single playable character, and the rest of the female characters aren’t that far off either. Most of the have near or over fifty costumes each. The male characters don’t have nearly as many, but that’s standard for this series and even they have well over twenty costumes a piece.

And if you think they don’t take full advantage of this, you are sorely mistaken. I’ve said before that the philosophy for this series was always to make the characters stylish over sexy. To make them look cool rather than sexualising them. That wasn’t always the case, but it was a character-by-character basis. Tina and Christie were often given the more provocative outfits, but that made sense for those characters.

Dead or Alive though is where this philosophy got tossed out the goddamn window. Because while there are outfits that are very stylish, in fact there’s quite a few that I like in this game, they are completely overshadowed by the smorgasbord of overly sexualised costumes.

To give you an idea of what it’s like, I’m going to give you a list of the kinds of outfits this game has to offer. Just to give you a taste of what to expect from it.

·        Maid outfits

·        Nurse outfits

·        Police uniforms

·        School girl uniforms, of course

·        Bunny girl costumes

·        Bunny girl lingerie

·        Sexy Santa costumes

·        Sexy reindeer costumes

·        Sexy snow man costumes

·        Cheerleader costumes

·        Sexy superhero costume

·        Sexy racing uniforms

·        Towels, like just regular towels they wear like they just got out of the shower

·        Japanese style school gym clothes

·        Overalls with nothing underneath them

·        Animal costumes

·        Tropical outfits that have the breasts covered by floral garlands and nothing else

·        And swimsuits of every kind you can imagine

Look how long that go and just think that the actual game is worse.

Now, to be fair, Dead or Alive 5 does have sexy outfits for the male characters too. So aqt least it gives the girls something to ogle at, but the amount of sexy male costumes is outnumbered by the sexy female costumes by a pretty sizable degree, and honestly this is giving them too much credit.

There is a stark difference between the male fan service and the female fanservice. The male fanservice is usually just the guys in their underwear. The fanservice comes from how muscular and handsome the male characters look in general. The actual outfits aren’t that provocative.

The female fanservice is far, FAR more provocative. A lot of the female outfits in this game are ridiculous. They are so skimpy at times that they might as well be naked. You see everything but their bare nips, like every angle of boob is shown except the front and I’m pretty sure they would show that if they could.

There’s so little room for the imagination with these it can barely wiggle its toe. Not that I mind. As I said I don’t give a rat’s ass if you put sexy outfits in your game or not. I love sexy women as much as anyone else, but these outfits cross the line from being sexy into just being lewd.

I went over the difference between being sexy and being seedy in a previous part, but it warrants repeating here. Being sexy is something like an elegant cocktail dress or a lightly worn robe, something that shows off how attractive the person is without giving too much away. It’s classy.

Seedy is something like a daisy duke bikini and short shorts or swim wear that’s little more than string. To put it more succinctly, a sexy outfit shows beauty while a seedy outfit basically makes them look like they want to fuck at any given opportunity.

Dead or Alive always had a lewd nature, but it never went too far in that direction. 5 is where it spun the wheel so hard in that direction it snapped off. Some of these are so bad I’m afraid of using them in case someone walks in. That’s an awkward conversation I don’t want.

Even some of the classic returning outfits feel way lewder than before. I don’t know if it’s the more realistic graphics or if they were made sexier, I would believe it either way, but they just seem far more overt now.

All that said, you don’t have to use them if you don’t like them. If you find a costume too much just ignore it. This is why the fanservice never bothered me in previous games because it was easy enough to roll your eyes at it and pretend it didn’t exist. Who cares if some Xtreme outfits made it in and basically make everyone look like strippers, I’ll just use something else. There’s plenty of less provocative outfits to pick from.

This is all harmless. It’s all optional and easy to avoid. It’s all perfectly fine even if it goes a bit too far. At least on the surface. Because there’s an aspect of this, I haven’t mentioned yet that turns this from harmless fan service into something far more disgusting. The vast majority of the costumes are paid DLC.

Meaning if you want to see the spicier outfits you need to poke out more real-world money for the. This is wrong on so many levels. Not the least of which for how exploitative it is. Not to women, I don’t buy into that idea anyway because none of these characters are real, but exploitative to its own fucking fanbase.

I am not one to judge why people enjoy something, or at least I try to be, and let’s be honest the fan service is a big reason why people like Dead or Alive. No shame from me, you like the sexy women you go right ahead and enjoy it. as long as it isn’t hurting anyone, you do you.

But I mention this to make this point, Team Ninja are well aware of this. They have to be since not only do they have a spin-off series entirely dedicated to the fan services, but also because of the reaction they got from their initial plans.

Believe it or not, they started out Dead or Alive 5 wanting to tone down the fan service. No, I am being dead serious. Originally Team Ninja wanted to tone the sex appeal down to try and regain some cred as a legit fighter back. This is why the series had a grittier art style because they were trying to take the series in a more serious direction.

This, naturally, received a massive backlash from fans. Keep in mind too that this was before the whole culture war nonsense really started to kick off, so this backlash actually meant something. It wasn’t just a bunch of grifters fanning slight flames into raging infernos for clicks, it was a legitimate backlash by fans who really didn’t like what Team Ninja were planning.

 So they course corrected, overcorrected even. This backlash showed them that the fans want the sex appeal. They know what the fans want, but they got to pay for it. Thus we got the insane amount of DLC costumes, each one lewder than the last.

It’s a big reason the game went free to play to begin with. Why earn money from full releases when you can exploit thirsty gamer bros instead and make bank. This is the kind of shit I expect from crappy mobile games, not from a mainline fighting game.

And just when you think it can’t get worse, they find new ways to piss you off. Because outside from costumes, you can also purchase this.

You had to pay for that. You had to pay for that multiple times for every female character. This makes horse armour look like the deal of the century. Why would they make this? Why would they charge money for it? Just make it unlockable. If you bought this, I feel pity for you. Go outside, touch some grass, talk to a real woman for God’s sake. Or just watch porn, it has more dignity than this.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. This just went off the deep end when it came to the fan service. Making the costumes sexier is one thing, but to charge money for them on top of needing to pay for the game is disrespectful to the player base.

And before any of you ask, no, I did not buy any of the outfits. The only ones I got were ones that came with the full game I purchased. I did not spend a single cent on any of the DLC, except for one but that was a character I had to get separately. I did not get any of the outfits, I have too much dignity for that.

But the worst part about it was what it did to public perception of the series. I remember when this game was still getting support. I would go on the PSN store to browse some new games and every week there was a new costume for this game. Some new swimsuit was released for it on a nearly daily basis.

At the time the only Dead or Alive I had played was 3 and Dimensions, and I already knew about the series reputation for sexualising the female cast. So seeing these DLC costumes only further cemented it as the pervy fighting game, and a lot of other players saw it that way too.

Dead or Alive always had a tentative relationship with the wider fighting game scene. People knew it was a good fighting game, but the fan service caused some to raise their eyebrows at it. It was always that awkward conversation you had to have when you said it was your preferred fighter, “yes, I like DOA but it’s not just for the women. I like the fighting system. The boobs are a bonus I swear.”

5 is where that conversation never happened. If you said you played 5 then everyone involved either slowly moved away or asked “so, who’s your favourite waifu then”. It didn’t matter if you liked the game for the gameplay, the DLC was so widely known and mocked that you were considered a gooner just for playing the damn thing.

You may be thinking that’s too harsh. I mean it is just DLC it couldn’t have impacted its reputation that much. To that I say, Street Fighter 5. That may seem random but hear me out. See Street Fighter 5 was also very heavy when it came to DLC costumes, and like Dead or Alive many of them were of the sexy variety. They put Chun-Li in so many sexy outfits you’d think she was their personal whore.

This gave Street Fighter 5 a bit of a reputation. I mean, it already wasn’t that popular thanks to its abysmal launch, but the costumes did not help. The costumes were so sexualised that it made people view Street Fighter 5 as the pervy Street Fighter game.

I mention this to ask a question, if Street Fighter, the grandfather of fighting games as we know them today and the most respected fighter on earth, could gain a reputation as a pervy game for its DLC practices, then what chance in hell did Dead or Alive have? Street Fighter 5’s DLC wasn’t even half as bad as DOA 5 was and it still made people raise their eyebrows Dwayne Johnson style. Dead or Alive was fucked by this point.

Dead or Alive already had made a name for itself as a fighting game for the extremely thirsty. A horny Virtua Fighter that had a bigger preoccupation with bouncing boobage than making a good fighting game. That is not a fair analysis, as we’ve been over in this series the games have been quite good, but 5 was where that position became much harder to dispel.

This was the point of no return for the series. The point where the fanservice firmly took over and became the only thing people talked about. I mean for God’s sake look at how long I’ve been talking about it. it’s completely derailed the review, but that’s what it did for conversations about Dead or Alive.

It didn’t matter if the game was good anymore, the only thing people could talk about was how many skimpy outfits they could fit Kasumi’s massive mommy milkers into. Which is a shame because DOA 5 is a good fighting game that gets overshadowed by its abhorrent DLC practices.

And just to wrap this all up in a neat little bow, I’m going to give you an estimate of how much the DLC cost. Keep in mind that this only counts the DLC costumes and not the characters which you can buy as part of the full game anyway. But if you want to purchase all of the DLC costumes in the game, it’s going to run you roughly $1,117 or £904. That’s over eighteen times more than the base game itself.

I really don’t know what more I can add. Bottom line the costumes are ridiculous, the DLC exploitative, and the pricing is absurd. It is the biggest black spot on the entire package.

But I think it’s time we move on. We’ve already talked about most of the major modes in the game and they’re all fine. But there is one more mode to discuss and it’s the big one. The main single player mode in the game, Story Mode.

A mode that has appeared in this series before. But unlike past games this isn’t just an arcade ladder with cutscenes, but a full cinematic style story like you see in modern fighting games.

This was something fairly new at the time. DOA 5 came out in 2012 which was a full year after Mortal Kombat 9 which started the trend of big cinematic story modes in fighting games. It wasn’t THE first, but it is clearly the one Team Ninja is trying to ape.

And the Story Mode is… a complete and utter mess. I cannot believe how bad this thing was. It’s one of the most hilariously inept, poorly written story modes I have ever experienced. Where, oh where do I begin with this trainwreck.

I guess the best place is the plot. The game takes place two years after Dead or Alive 4. Helena has now taken over DOATEC and gotten rid of Victor Donovan and his influence, reforming the company back to what it was before, whatever in the hell that was. What did DOATEC do exactly? besides run fighting game tournaments.

Speaking of. she also announces the fifth Dead or Alive Tournament to commemorate this change in direction. Because a fighting game tournament is the best was to divulge your new business strategy. Oh fighting game plots, will you ever make sense.

Meanwhile, Kasumi is worried that her clone, Alpha-152, is still around since she apparently failed to destroy it in the last game. So why is she only worried about it now? You’d think she would have spent the last two years hunting it if she was that worried about it. The ninja’s also get involved since they want to put a permanent stop to this clone plot, and they want to uncover Donovan and his new organisation, MIST.

Donovan still doesn’t show up by the way. Five games in and the main villain, the puppet master pulling the strings behind the scenes and the instigator of the entire series events, hasn’t fucking done anything yet. We weren’t waiting this long for the villain in Guilty Gear, and if you know the absurdity that is Guilty Gears plot you know that says a lot.

You may be wondering how the Tournament and the whole MIST/Kasumi Clone plot tie in together. Well that’s the beauty of it, they don’t. The Tournament is completely separate from the main plot; the Ninja’s don’t even participate in it at all. So, the DOA Tournament which has been the main narrative drive in this series, is now completely pointless.

That is miraculously dumb. Even Tekken 8, as stupid and as bafflingly insane as it got, at least tried to tie the King of Iron Fist Tournament into the main story. This one can’t even do that right. And the Tournament consists of most of the story, I’d say about 75% of it. Meaning that for three quarters of this story, NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS IN IT!

You’re basically stuck watching a bunch of unrelated side stories for a good chunk of the run time. The game is split between different characters who each have their own part of the story. Sort of like how NetherRealm studios does its story modes.

Except, unlike a Mortal Kombat or Injustice where every chapter moved the story forward in some way, here the individual character chapters are basically their own mini story going on within the larger narrative. The basically kept the character focused story structure of the previous games but tried to integrate it with a cinematic story mode structure.

These do not go together at all. Let’s be honest, the main plots of fighting games are not that interesting. Most usually just default to the old evil organisation hosting a fighting tournament plot because it’s simple enough to understand. When they don’t and try to do something more complex, they usually wind up being a convoluted mess. That’s what happened to Mortal Kombat anyway.

But that’s not what we’re interested in. We’re more invested in the individual character stories, their rivalries and personal struggles. Most character-based fighting game stories, like you saw in past Dead or Alive games, were all about playing through a character’s own story, and it worked.

Partly because they were smaller stories that could be easily divulged in an arcade ladder, but also because they were self-contained. It didn’t matter if they were connected to the main story or not because all they needed to do was show the story of the character it was about.

But in a cinematic story mode that central plot needs to be at the forefront. You need a narrative throughline to keep the audience invested. That doesn’t mean you can’t have individual character moments, but they need to tie into and move forward the main story in some way. Otherwise they feel like padding.

But cinematic story modes allow for a lot more spectacle. You can have larger fights with more stakes than just simple character rivalries. They can allow the main villains to take centre stage and show how threatening and evil they can be rather than just be the final opponents you beat in an arcade ladder with cheap as hell tactics.

Dead or Alive 5’s Story Mode because it doesn’t lean into either strength. While it looks good owing to the base game looking good, there aren’t that many impressive action sequences and because the story has no central antagonistic force throughout, the story lacks any kind of tension or stakes.

Even the individual character stories don’t work because they don’t tie into the main story at all. They’re so disconnected from the core plot that they feel like filler despite taking up the majority of the run time. There’s no momentum in the narrative because of this.

It spends most of its time spinning its wheels on side stories that it makes it easy to forget the main plot exists. Something I think the game is aware about, since there is a previously on style cutscene recapping the story so far to catch up players on the events, despite the story only being three hours long. The story is so poorly paced they have to stop what they’re doing just to bring you back up to speed.

This is embarrassing. Like a bad anime that gets so lost in filler they need to have large exposition dumps just so the audience doesn’t forget about the actual story. You wouldn’t need to do this if this if it was written properly, I’m just saying.

Then there’s the timeline issue. Instead of telling the story in sequential order, the game will instead jump to different points in the timeline depending on when a character’s story events take place. While there is a timeline that can help keep track of events, it doesn’t prevent the story from feeling disjointed.

It’s hard to follow what is going on at times because it jumps between points in time with no rhyme or reason behind it. One moment the events are following a fairly linear sequence, then it will jump back several weeks, then it will cut forward past everything. There’s no logic behind the structuring.

But the sick part about it is, the individual character stories, they were the best part of it. Despite them not moving the main plot along, I still found them to be the most entertaining part of the story.

Were they good? Not really. They were fun, but also very dumb, and they really messed with the games tone. Because tonally the whole story mode is all over the place. The main story is deadly serious, but the character stories range from decently serious but still fun martial arts stuff to some of the cringiest attempts at comedy I have ever seen. It’s almost a full-on cartoon show at times.

The individual character stories don’t even get much development. A lot of them are retreads of their stories in previous games, and half the stories here have no proper conclusion. It’s like playing through the stories in the previous games, but there’s no endings to wrap everything up.

It really feels like this whole cinematic story thing was a last-minute decision. Like they wanted to do a mode similar to past games but were forced into the cinematic route by the higher ups. It certainly would explain how disjointed everything is.

Wait, didn’t I say this was the best part? Well, yes, it is the best part of the story mode. Because despite the many flaws, I do like the characters. It is fun seeing this cast interact with each other and they even give us some fun combinations. These guys have been fighting each other for a while, and it is endearing seeing that they’ve all become friendly with each other in some way.

There is something charming about seeing these guys interact. And some of the stories do at least have some development. We see Hitomi getting stronger and being more respected by Hayate, we see Tina finally realise she really does just want to wrestle and patch things up with her dad (that one was really sweet actually), and Eliot moves on to the next phase of his training.

It’s not like the characters are static. There is some character development here, it’s just not for everyone. But at least this part of the story was fun. It was stupid but that’s part of why it was fun. The story is so awkward a lot of the time that it becomes unintentionally hilarious. It’s so bad that it becomes entertaining.

At least until the main story kicks in. As entertainingly bad as the character stories were, the main plot is just bad. Not only is it boring, I now realise how little I actually care about the ninjas, but none of it makes any sense.

Remember that whole Kasumi clone thing and how she was trying to hunt down Alpha-152? Turns out that wasn’t Kasumi. It was another clone who thought she was Kasumi. Where did she come from? Why does she not remember she’s a clone? Why is she hunting down the other clone? No idea, it’s never explained.

Because nothing is explained in this game. Things just sort of happen; the concept of set-up and payoff seem alien to the people who wrote this. Take Rig for example. He’s one of the new characters introduced in the game and at first, he seems like a nice guy. A bit of a brooder, but he’s friendly enough. Then he turns into a villain and turns out he’s Donovan’s son. If that felt like it came out of nowhere, that’s because it does.

This heel turn happens so late in the game and so suddenly I’m surprised I didn’t get whiplash from it. It’s hinted that there’s more to him early on, but it’s never elaborated on. He’s just an angsty but decent guy one moment and a bad guy the next.

The whole story mode is like this. There are ideas here that could be engaging but they never expand upon them. I never cared about anything going on because it only felt like we got the half-baked idea of a story and not an actual fully fleshed out tale.

Then there are the moments that confused the living hell out of me. So, Kasumi being a clone is already a fairly stupid plot development. Not the least of which being that the main character whose story was established at the beginning is a complete and utter lie. In fact by doing it this way it means the actual main character does not appear in the story until the very end.

But that’s not my problem with it. I mean, it is a problem, but it isn’t the main one I have. No, my issue is this is treated like it’s some kind of major twist. Like the character we were following the whole time wasn’t who we thought it was. This could have worked, if it was handled by people who knew how to write.

For one, Kasumi vanishes from the story for a good chunk of the run time. So the whole idea of following the wrong character doesn’t work because we haven’t been following them. Second this is telegraphed earlier when Hayate and Ayane kill the clone. It’s supposed to be a big shocking moment, but it’s such an obvious bait and switch you can tell the twist coming from a mile away.

Which is already easy considering the story is about cloning. I mean it’s the most obvious twist a story about this could pull. That was the twist in 7th Day after all, and if it’s good enough for Schwarzenegger it’s certainly good enough for Dead or Alive.

But the way they try to hide this is hilarious. There’s a scene early on between Ayane and Hayate where they suspect early on that something’s wrong with Kasum and Ayane is sent to investigate. That first part is not said in the earlier scene, it is kept out of it until the scene is repeated later in the game.

That means the twist is so blindingly fucking obvious they had to hide information to keep it a twist. If that’s the case, then don’t make it a twist. Make it a story about a clone with a tragic fate. That’s what it ends up being anyway, and it would have been interesting to explore that, but they were so busy trying to be surprising they forgot to be interesting.

For as confusing as this part was though, the part of the story that confuses me the most is what happened to Lisa Hamilton. To recap, she was the scientist behind Alpha-152 and was the one who experimented on Hayate in DOA 2. In the last game though she felt guilty for her actions and tried to stop Donovan’s plan as the masked wrestler La Mariposa.

But in 5 she’s back to working with Donovan? And Kokoro’s mom is involved too somehow so I guess she’s evil now too. What happened? Lisa was good in the last game but now she’s back to being a villain. Was the whole change of heart thing a lie, is this whole thing a psy-op against Donovan? This is never explained.

I thought at first that she was acting as a spy, and it is hinted that she isn’t entirely loyal to Donovan, but I don’t know what her deal is now because the game doesn’t elaborate on what her motivation actually is. This is either one elaborate con-job or character assassination, and the game is so vague on details it could go either way.

The thing is though; I only know this because I played the other games. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what was going on. I would just think she’s a generic evil scientist who changes her mind at the end. Because she does help the heroes out in the finale because she still feels guilt about Hayate, which is what made her rebel against Donovan last time.

What is the plan here? What are you actually doing with this character? She’s more inconsistent than Netflix. Having played the previous game I’m certain there’s more going on they just don’t show, but if I hadn’t, I’d just think the character was doing things for the sake of the plot.

Story Mode doesn’t do a lot to bring people up to speed on the series. It has character bios before chapters which helps, but not every character has them and the bio’s themselves don’t give you all the details. So certain nuances with character relationships will be completely lost on newcomers.

Even if you have played the prior games, it still leaves you confused because some details just don’t add up. Like Christie and Helena meet up at one point and there isn’t that much animosity between the two even though Christie killed Helena’s mom. Seriously that is never addressed despite it being the inciting incident of Helena’s entire story.

In fact, Helena herself is one big question mark if you never played Dimensions. Because that was the game that established she had a relationship with her dad whereas in prior games she wanted nothing to do with him. Hope you played the 3DS spin off because that had major retcons to the lore. It’s like Kingdom Hearts, and when you go full Kingdom Hearts there is no saving you.

Look, I could go on folks, I honestly could, but I think you get it by now. This Story Mode is a mess. It’s paced terribly, it wastes so much time on filler side stories, it’s incredibly awkward, it makes no sense at all, and whether you played prior games or not you’ll be lost on certain details. Did it do anything right?

Well, it’s presented well. The game already looks good, so it has that at least, and the cutscenes are well shot and animated. I’ll even say the visual gags aren’t actually that bad, they just feel out of place.

And the voice acting is solid. A lot of the cast from Dimensions came back so we have a cast of veteran voice actors like Laura Baily, Kira Buckland and Troy Baker among others. Some got replaced, but they were replaced with other veteran voice actors that all do a very good job. They all fit their characters, and they all did a very professional job while also having fun with their roles at the same time. If nothing else I didn’t hate watching the cutscenes, just absorbing their contents.

So it isn’t a complete dumpster fire, but it’s still a smouldering heap. I didn’t even enjoy playing it because for some reason the AI is way harder than it is in other modes, and because you swap characters frequently and I didn’t remember how everyone played I had to mash buttons and hope for the best. Still had more fun than I did playing 4 but still.

This mode sucks, it’s by far the worst mode in the game. Not a good sign when the big mode of the game is also its weakest. It has no replay value either, so once you finish it, you’ll never touch it again. You don’t even need to do so for the cutscenes since those are available in the Gallery.

Thankfully, the other modes are much more fun and do have replay value. It sucks that I accidentally unlocked everything because I did want to play more of it and try out more characters, but that option is gone now.

That said, they’re still the same modes you’ve seen in the other games in the series. There’s still not much new here aside from the Combo Challenges, and while they have replay value in unlocking all of the costumes, they don’t have the longevity to play them for more than a couple of rounds.

It can get tedious trying to get everything. I know this because there were characters where I didn’t accidentally unlock everything, and trying to get everything for them was a tedious process. I think that’s why the game came with the cheat code to get everything because it knew players wouldn’t have the patience to play Arcade and Time Attack over and over again.

It makes me wonder why they never stuck with the Dead or Alive 3 model and lock outfits behind certain objectives. That was a far better method to me. Thing is, from what I can gather, the vanilla version of Dead or Alive 5 did have this. Unlockables there were locked behind objective like playing online ranked matches, beating modes on harder difficulties, or by getting a certain number of titles, which are things you add to your online profile.

This was scrapped in favour of just making you play through Arcade and Time Attack in later revisions. I guess it was to make this stuff more accessible, but surely they could have done both. Have the player unlock costumes either by replaying the single player modes, or complete certain objectives. Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate gave you multiple ways of unlocking everything and it worked great there.

Still, I’d say the single player content is good. Not great, but solid. It might lack longevity, but the modes are enjoyable for a couple of rounds, and I can see myself putting it one to play through them every once in a while.

It just lacks in something special. If it had something extra like some sort of mission mode or career mode I would say it’s far more robust. The Story Mode is the big mode on offer, and sadly it’s as fun as counting grass.

To be fair to Dead or Alive 5 though, a lot of fighting games were skimping out on single player content around this time. In fact, what 5 has to offer is largely what was on offer in other fighting games around this period. This was when online gaming was starting to really become mainstream, and a lot of fighting games started to pivot more towards that for their longevity over single player content.

So unlike Dead or Alive 4 whose contents looked far worse when compared to its contemporaries, Dead or Alive 5 is honestly perfectly fine for what it offered. Yeah, there were some games that offered a bit more, but they were the exception not the rule. At least it was doing better than Soulcalibur in terms of single player offerings, but that’s a rant for another day.

But alright, I think we’re done the gameplay and content, now it’s time for the roster. This is usually where I go over all the characters and their stories, but I’m not doing that here. For one there’s no point in going over their stories since I already covered Story Mode. No reason to go over that again.

There are also far too many characters to cover this time. Thirty-Six characters is a lot, which is great for the game, not so great for me writing about it. I cannot possibly cover all of them without this review getting even longer than it already is.

There’s also not much reason to cover the returning characters since they largely play the same. They did get new tools, like Kasumi having more teleport moves, Eliot having longer combo strings and Kokoro having throws she can add to combos for better mix-ups, but their general gameplan is largely the same. There’s not much I can add to it.

So I’m just going to skip the returning characters and talk about the newcomers. Starting with two returning boss characters. Wait what?

Well, I might as well talk about these two since Alpha-152 wasn’t playable in the last game, and Raidou hasn’t been seen since the first DOA, Dimensions doesn’t count since that was a Mortal Kombat Armageddon situation where everyone was brought back.

Alpha-152 is pretty much what you would expect her to be. She’s a boss version of Kasumi; she has a lot of the same chains, but they’re souped up to be more boss like. She does have a few unique moves of her own though like a command throw that does insane amounts of damage.

Alpha is all about the damage in the game, but it comes at the cost of her defence. She can dish out massive combo’s that shred opponents’ health bars, but a lot of them have long recovery frames that leave her wide open. She’s also the only featherweight character in the game so she’s the easiest character to juggle, and her main holds don’t do any damage and just teleport behind the opponent.

In short, she’s got overwhelming power and can dish out some long combo strings, but if you manage to properly deal with it and lay on the offence she crumbles like a house of cards. Because of that she’s generally considered a mid-tier character. Good, but requires a lot of skill and planning to be effective. For as overwhelming as her boss fight was in 4, playing her is underwhelming.

Then there’s Raidou, remember Raidou? He’s back, in cyborg form. How he became a cyborg is a question that’s never explained, at least not until the next game. Anyway, Raidou is a heavy hitting character who has a move set comprised of moves taken from other characters, though unlike in DOA 1 he does have unique moves of his own.

He hits pretty hard, but he’s also very slow and is one of the most execution heavy characters in the game. His commands can be very hard to pull off consistently and what’s worse is his most important move is like this.

Raidou is not very good unfortunately. His slow speed doesn’t serve him well due to how fast paced DOA is, and his execution is so demanding it’s nearly impossible to get any kind of consistent results with him. He’s generally seen as a weak character competitively, and I’ve even seen some call him the worst character in the games. Not exactly a grand return is it.

That is it for the returning bosses, well sort of but I’ll get to that later. For now, let’s finally talk about the newcomers, and why don’t we start with Rig since I already talked about him earlier.

I already went over Rig and his confusing character earlier, but in terms of his design he might be the most 2010’s looking mother fucker I’ve ever seen. Let’s see, dark brooding persona? Check. Amnesia backstory? Check? Hoodie? Check. Tattoos? Check. This dude is like if Alex Mercer from Prototype was in a Nu Metal band. He’s not just a product of his time; he’s THE product of his time.

He is fun to play though. He uses Taekwondo which does make him stand out since he’s the only practitioner of that in a fighting game who isn’t Korean as far as I’m aware. Like any Taekwondo user Rig is all about the kicks. He’s got some punches too, but you want to focus mostly on leg work with him.

He’s also got a few stances that he can combo into and a big part of his gameplan is trying to combo into those stances to keep the offensive pressure up and try to go for his air grab since it’s one of his best combo finishers.

This can be difficult, but when you get to grips with him, he can be a very effective character. I’d say he’s similar to Hworang from Tekken who is a similar Taekwondo fighter with a big emphasis on stances though Rig is far easier to learn.

Next up is Mila who is a young up and coming MMA fighter who looks up to Tina and Bass. That’s pretty much it for her character. No, I’m dead serious, she’s that simple a character. She likes fighting, she works a part time job at a diner and she’s a fan of the Armstrongs.

She’s also one of the least sexualised female characters in the roster. She’s still attractive, but she’s designed to be a lot more, for lack of a better term, normal looking than the other girls. I think the idea behind Mila was to make her a more down-to-earth character, someone who a lot of people could relate too, but it could also be she’s a holdover from the games original grittier direction.

She’s not a bad character though. I think we need more down-to-earth characters like Mila in Dead or Alive, it helps add some groundedness and variety to the roster. It’s just that she doesn’t have as much personality as the rest of the cast, and her design is just meh.

Her fighting style is fun though. She’s got a lot of decent combo strings, and her holds do really good damage, but her main hook is her feints. She can feint from a lot of her moves which can lead to different follow ups, and she’s got a unique grab game by having different mount stances that she can follow up on with either grabs or strikes.

The problem is the feints leave her wide open, and she’s not exactly the fastest character on the roster. She’s not slow, but she does struggle against a lot of the faster characters. It feels like she’s better as a defensive character because her Holds are very good, but she does have a decent mix-up game that can lead to different grab situations.

She’s a difficult character to fully get to grips with. She can be fun, but I definitely prefer Tina when it comes to my grappling ladies. I just prefer a pure grappler over the MMA style Mila has.

Next is Phase 4, who is just another Kasumi clone. Phase 4 is basically just the mass-produced model of Alpha-152. There is nothing to her, she’s honestly just a filler character. The kind of fighter they make quick and easy to pad out a roster.

Her fighting style is a little different though. She still has a lot of Kasumi’s moves, but her strings are a lot shorter. Unlike Kasumi, Phase 4 focuses less on long combo strings and more about teleport cancelling.

Phase 4 is like Kasumi if she pretended to be Nightcrawler. She has far more options to cancel into her teleport and this can lead to a lot of mix-up potential. The problem is, unless you learn how to teleport effectively there isn’t much more to her. Outside of her teleport game she’s pretty dry and if you don’t enjoy doing teleport mix ups like me then you aren’t going to have a lot of fun with her.

She isn’t bad, I’ve even heard she’s better than Kasumi at a high level, but you really need to learn her to have fun. Which isn’t easy since the timing for her teleports is fairly strict and she’s just boring without that. I just don’t find the character interesting enough at a base level to want to learn how to play her. Kind of a waste if I’m being honest.

So let’s talk about someone a little more interesting, Nyotengu. Wait… Tengu? Oh god they brought that goober back. I really don’t know why Team Ninja is fixated on this guy. I know Dead or Alive 2 was what put this series on the map, but it wasn’t because of the final boss. Tengu was dumb, he came out of nowhere and is one of the weirdest parts of the lore. You just can’t make this dumbass interesting….

Ok, that’s new. Obviously, this isn’t Tengu, this is Nyotengu. A tengu princess from the same dimension as the tengu from Dead or Alive 2. She’s also called the Naughty Tengu Princess, which tells you everything you need to know. She’s the horny version of Tengu.

Honestly though, I do like her a lot more, and no, it’s not just because she’s hot. It’s because she keeps a lot of the mannerisms and moves as Tengu and seeing a lot of the goofier moves being done by a voluptuous woman who speaks in an elegant regal voice, it makes the character way funnier. The juxtaposition is so strong it’s hard not to laugh at it.

This is one of those characters where the fanservice works in her favour. Because the sexier she gets, the weirder the juxtaposition, and that makes it even funnier. They found a way to not only make Tengu work but also found a way to tie the fan service into a character. They had their cake and fucking devoured it.

Mind you I’m probably overthinking this, but taking one of the series main bosses and turning them into a thirsty princess has to be a joke right. Well maybe but a lot of people did find her attractive. She’s actually become decently popular and has become something of a mascot for Team Ninja. She even appeared in the Nioh games as a secret boss so someone on the team must really like her.

She plays like the original Tengu did. She has all the same moves including the tornado, but it’s all toned down since she isn’t a boss character. She still hits pretty hard though and is one of the more damaging characters in the game. Her combos are short, but they do a hefty amount of damage.

Her big new addition is air combo’s. she can cancel some of her strings into a flight stance that can be chained into air combo’s or a throw. It’s really fun to do, but the timing is hard to get down and I’m not that good at it. She’s also slow and that’s not great in this game. She’s not very good competitively, but for a casual like me I thought she was fun.

Next are two characters that come from the Ninja Gaiden series. Since Hayabusa appearing in Dead or Alive led to the creation of the Ninja Gaiden reboot, which also included references and characters from DOA I guess they decided to return the favour.

As for which one’s they went with, we have Rachel, a leather clad demon huntress from Ninja Gaiden 1, and Momiji, a shine maiden for the Hayabusa clan who first appeared in Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword before becoming a playable character in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.

Yep, they went with the women. You know this series by now. These were good picks though since both are popular characters from the series. Especially Momiji, she’s one of Team Ninja’s most popular characters in general. People adore her.

As for how they play, Rachel is interesting in that she’s technically not a new character mechanically. Her move set is heavily based on the Halo character Nicole from Dead or Alive 4. She has a lot of the same moves, but the move set has been expanded so it now has a lot more variety.

Rachel is a simple hit them hard kind of character. She has shorter combo routes, but she hits like a dump truck, and she has a good air grab that can lead to combo extensions. I had a hard time with them though. Dead or Alive 5 seems kind of wonky when it comes to air grabs.

I don’t know if it was the weight system or just how juggles work but I swear it doesn’t work half the time. I can do it in practice no problem but for fights, even if I do the same thing, it just doesn’t work as consistently. Skill issue? Perhaps, but it still felt like something was off with them.

Whatever, she’s a fun character, and I do like that they repurposed the Halo character so that move set doesn’t go to waste. It’s a good way of bringing back guest characters without really bringing them back.

Momiji meanwhile is another ninja character. Fast strings, long combo’s, you get the idea. I will say I think that she is one of the more enjoyable ninja characters. Her main gimmick is having jumps she can cancel into that lead to air combos. I’m sensing a pattern here. She even has a double jump that can give her more options. They aren’t difficult to do either, making her a fun beginner friendly character with strong combo and mix up potential.

But, she is still another ninja. She’s the fifth ninja style character in the game, seventh if you count the Kasumi clones. I know all the ninja’s have something that makes them unique, but fundamentally they all feel a bit too similar.

Then again, I suppose every fighting game series has that one archetype they like to use repeatedly. Street Fighter has Shoto’s, Tekken has the Mishima’s, Mortal Kombat has, well that also has ninjas but with different elemental abilities. I guess this is just DOA’s version of that. Still, I do think they need to start varying them up a bit more. At least make one of them a zoner or something, they can’t all be rush down monsters.

Alright, the next two characters are some of the more divisive characters in the series. Marie Rose and Honoka. Because depending on who you ask they’re either the best characters DOA had in years, or the characters that ruined the franchise.

When they first debuted though the response seemed mostly positive. In fact, they became incredibly popular that they sort of took over the franchise. They appeared on the covers of the newer Xtreme games, and whenever DOA had a crossover in a Musou game or whatever, these two wound up being representatives for it.

This, as you can predict, did not sit right with people. A lot of fans didn’t like how these two came in and hijacked the entire series and felt like they didn’t feel like DOA characters. Others argued they were a breath of fresh air and really like what they brought to the series.

Mind you the divide is easier to explain via geography. Marie and Honoka are popular, in Japan. Japan is where a lot of people love them, while the west couldn’t stand them and it’s not hard to see why.

They’re Moe girls. That’s what it all boils down too. Their look, personalities and overall design is largely based on Japanese Moe culture. A culture that is largely frowned upon in the west, but very well liked in Japan.

Point is, they’re cute anime girls. It’s not hard to see why some loved them and others wanted to burn them at the stake. Them becoming the new faces of the franchise only strengthened that division.

It’s the Scrappy Doo effect. They make a new character to breath new life into a franchise, character becomes popular, they overuse said character and replace beloved staples with them, everyone turns on them, and they become running jokes in how terrible they were.

I don’t think these two are quite at that level yet, although it’s worth noting the backlash didn’t start in earnest until Dead or Alive 6. So we’ll see what happens when we get to that. As for what I think of them in 5, eh, they’re fine.

Look, I hate anime. I do not like it at all, and I find a lot of the tropes cringy as all hell. I am not the man to opine on these two objectively, but they aren’t that bad in this. I have no real strong feelings on them one way or the other. Do I find them cringy? Oh hell yeah, but not as cringy as other anime style characters. They aren’t nearly as bad as someone like Lucky Chloe from Tekken. She makes my blood boil in how annoying she is.

I will say their more anime designs do clash with 5’s attempts at gritty realism, but maybe that was the idea. They wanted to bring more colour and fun into the mix. That is why a lot of fans found them refreshing, but I can see why that clash may have alienated some people.

I don’t agree with the notion that they don’t feel like Dead or Alive characters though. That kind of notion is hard to really quantify. Like, what even constitutes a “Dead or Alive character” exactly. Is it that their designs clash with the designs of the rest of the cast, because they don’t. The design philosophies seem close to the rest of the characters. I never felt like they were out of place.

All that said, I do have reservations on Marie Rose. Remember in Part 3 when I said this series could have used more diversity in its body types. Well, that wish was granted, and the monkey’s paw is curled into a fucking fist. I mean she has a unique body type, she has a smaller body and bust size, so they got that right, but why did they go the gothic loli route.

These kinds of characters can work. Look at Amy in Soulcalibur, I like her, and she has that kind of look. But you know what they didn’t do with Amy? The thing you shouldn’t do with these characters. Sexualise them! Because it’s fucking creepy and weird.

Now, Amy is underage while Marie Rose isn’t, and Amy did get a lot more attractive designs when she became Viola so it’s probably not the best comparison. But yes, Marie is eighteen, a fact I had to double check because she doesn’t look or act like she’s eighteen. She looks like she’s twelve, or at least in her early teens and she acts like a child. It weirds me out.

In all fairness though, Marie’s outfits are tamer compared to the other girls. They’re not really trying to be sexy so much as they’re trying to be cute which I guess isn’t that bad. But even then, some of these outfits do feel like they’re pushing it, and considering she became the face of the Xtreme series, yeah, I’m not giving the doubt that much benefit.

And the whole acting like a child thing is just that, an act. There are clear indicators that it isn’t her real personality and it’s just a performance she’s putting on to go with her look, which does show the whole Lolita thing is pretend. It’s simply the style she’s going for.

It’s weird, but I’ve seen far, far worse. Honestly, while part of me is creeped out by Marie Rose, she’s honestly fine. They at least make it clear that the loli thing is purely aesthetic and that she’s not an actual child. If they hadn’t, I would be a lot more concerned.

As for how they fight, Marie Rose is a very fast character with a lot of easy to learn combo strings. She’s one of the easiest character to pick up in this game, which is likely another reason she became so popular.

Her main focus is on holds. Marie has a lot of different command holds and a lot of her combos start with them, meaning she has strong tools for both defence and offence. She has tools for nearly any situation, but the downside is she lacks damage. Marie’s damage output is pitiful; she does in ten hits what most characters do in five.

Because of that I’ve seen polarising positions for her in tier lists. Some say the tools she has make her a good character, like a high mid-tier, while others think she’s a bottom tier because her damage is so bad. I think she is a fun character to play, but you really need to be good at keeping pressure up and have good defence if you want to get the most out of her.

Honoka meanwhile is literally just a collection of moves from other fighters. You know how Raidou copied a lot of moves but still has unique moves of his own, Honoka is like that, but without the second part.

Her entire move-set is a grab bag of moves from the rest of the cast. She’s got some of Zack’s kicks, some of Tina’s throws, she’s got at least three different stances from Helena, Brad and Kokoro. There’s nothing unique here. She has no moves of her own to make her stand out.

Looking at her, I think Honoka is meant to be another joke character. She doesn’t have a proper fighting stance, and her music sounds like the opening to a romantic high school anime. I think the joke is she’s just a high school student who has the moves of everyone else. It’s not particularly funny, but there is a certain comedic charm to that idea.

I mean look at Sakura from Street Fighter. That’s kind of the same thing. A high school girl who fights like the main character Ryu. Except Sakura worked because, while her move-set was derivative, it was still done in an original way that gave it its own goofy personality.

Honoka meanwhile is just a school-girl model with animations from other fighters. It can be funny when she uses moves from big body characters, but there just isn’t much to her. I can’t even say she’s that effective either. Her move-set is just too random. It doesn’t feel like she has any real gameplan and lot of her combo strings and stances don’t seem to go together very well.

So while I don’t mind Marie Rose’s gameplay, I really do not like Honoka. She just feels like a very slap dash character. it feels like no real thought went into her other than, “just give her everyone else’s moves”. Honestly if she was like a Mokujin style character where she randomly switched between different characters move-sets, I’d honestly find her a lot more interesting. As is, I can’t say I’m a fan.

That’s it for the newcomers, but we still aren’t done with the roster just yet. Because there’s still a handful more characters left to cover in the form of the guest characters. Yep, following the Halo crossover in 4, Dead or Alive 5 brought in even more guest characters to the roster.

I can even get four of them done in one go because they’re all from the same series. Akira, Sarah Bryant, Pai Chan, and Jacky Bryant from Virtua Fighter were added to Dead or Alive 5’s roster. This is pretty awesome. Admittedly, I am not the biggest fan of Virtua Fighter, but seeing four characters from the grand daddy of all 3D fighting games will always be cool. Now if only they had low polygon skins to really bring the idea home.

It's also extremely fitting in this instance. Virtua Fighter was a huge inspiration for Dead or Alive, and the first game even ran on the same arcade hardware as Virtua Fighter 2. Having Virtua Fighter characters appear in this, it’s like the series has come full circle in a way.

As for how they play, they play exactly like they do in their home games. They have all their moves and combos from Virtua Fighter only adapted to DOA’s mechanics and they did a great job of that. They fit this game very well.

Mind you, it is easy to tell they are from a very different game. What I mean is, Virtua Fighter is the most fundamentalist fighting game out there. It’s not about flashy or over the top moves, it’s about footsie and the fundamental mechanics of the game. It’s as undiluted a fighting game as you can get. It’s so no nonsense that the characters don’t even have taunts.

Compared to DOA which is very over the top and often gives characters some unique gimmick, Virtua Fighter’s characters feel so much more straight forward. There are no gimmicks to these guys just the purity of their fighting styles.

Because of that, they feel odd in how straightforward they feel. This isn’t like Akuma in Tekken 7 where he feels out of place because of how strange his fighting style is, if anything it’s the opposite. The Virtua Fighter cast feel so restrained compared to how excessive the rest of the cast of DOA is. They’re weird, by not being weird, which is very weird.

They’re not the flashiest or even most interesting guest characters I’ve seen but are one of the most appropriate. My only real complaint is the selection of characters. Well only Jacky really. I don’t like playing Akira, but he’s the main character of VF, you need to have him.

Sarah and Pai are also the two most popular female character in the series, and knowing Team Ninja of course they’d put them in. Although credit where it’s due they aren’t as overly sexualised as the main DOA cast. Because Virtua Fighter is too classy for that shit.

But Jacky? Ok it’s not a bad pick by any means. He’s a well-known series regular who’s been in since the beginning and I do like playing as him, it’s not like I hate the guy. It’s just that Virtua Fighter has more interesting characters I would have seen over him, like Wolf Hawkfield. He would have been awesome.

So not a bad selection, I just wish they’d put one of the more colourful Virtua Fighters in here. Still, for integrating characters from a different fighting game they did a damn good job here, and apparently the characters are really good competitively. Sarah is even considered one of the strongest characters in the game, if not THE strongest, so not a bad job I must say.

The last two guest characters are also the only two that you still need to get as DLC. At least I did. The digital bundle I got didn’t include them, so I’m guessing they’re the main DLC characters the Last Round Version received. Or at least the only ones still locked behind it.

The first is Naotora Li from the Samurai Warriors series. That’s a bit of a random pick. Granted the Koei merger did give them access to that franchise, so I guess they were just taking advantage of that. I have no idea who she is since I haven’t played a Warriors game besides the One Piece and Hyrule entries, so I have no idea who she is.

From what I can gather she’s based on a real Daimyo from the Sengoku period of Japan. I don’t know much about that period, but I don’t think it will help. She is based on the real Naotora in the loosest of ways. As for why they picked her to be in this, she’s a girl with big cans, that’s all the criteria she needed for this.

Since she’s from a Musou game her move-set is one of the more straightforward ones in the game. She’s got a lot of long combo strings with her kicks that do a lot of damage, and that’s pretty much all she has. She’s like Zack without any of the finesse or skill required. She’s at least easy to pick up but there’s not much interesting about her.

The only part of her move-set that is interesting is her stance, but since it’s impossible to combo into that and it’s slow as hell on start-up it’s functionally useless. I will say she at least represents her series well visually. All her attacks are big and flashy much like they are in a Musou game, and her Power Blow even looks like a super move from the Samurai Warriors game. So if you were a fan of that series I imagine you’d be happy with her.

But if not, she’s boring. I don’t find the character that exciting, and her gameplay is too one note so I don’t have that much fun with her. She’s also considered one of the worst characters competitively too, so unless you’re super into Samurai Warriors I wouldn’t bother buying her.

The final character is far more interesting though. it’s Mai Shiranui from SNK. The original booby ninja is in the booby ninja fighting game, it’s poetic really. Much like the Virtua Fighter characters this is as fitting a guest character as you can get since Mai’s provocativeness was the inspiration behind DOA’s propensity for bouncing booba.

She’s also one of the most iconic fighting game characters of all time. She even recently appeared in Street Fighter 6. Her being here is an awesome get, stupendous even, and it would be except you can’t fucking play as her anymore.

Yeah, the license for Mai ran out some time ago and she was delisted from digital storefronts. Which sadly means I was unable to try her out. She’s not the only delisted DLC either, there was also a stage based on Attack on Titan that is also completely unavailable due to the license running out. Don’t you just love this new digital age we live in.

The thing is, Mai is still in the game. Her data is still in there and you can still fight her in the Arcade and Time Attack modes; you just can’t play as her. Based on what I could see she does play like Mai with all of her iconic moves. I just couldn’t test it first-hand for myself.

But, since she is in the game technically, that means you can still get her on PC if you mess around with the game’s files. Remember folks, piracy is totally ok if it’s the only option you have. Not our fault they didn’t give us a legitimate means of accessing her.

It's a shame you can’t play as Mai in this game anymore, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play her in Dead or Alive. She’s the one guest character who returned in Dead or Alive 6 so, hey, we’ll see how she turned out next time I guess.

But that, finally, brings us to the end of Dead or Alive 5. After all that, how is the game? Good, very good actually, bordering on great. The gameplay is the most refined yet and the new additions, while not being the true evolution the series needed, do add some much-needed spice to the combat. It looks fantastic with some of the most detailed visuals I’ve ever seen in a fighting game, and it has plenty of content even if the content is a little standard.

The only blemishes it has are the piss poor Story Mode and the questionable DLC practices. The latter of which is far more egregious to me considering what it did to the series reputation. For while Dead or Alive 5 is considered to be a very good fighting game it was ultimately overshadowed by the DLC and overt fan service.

Dead or Alive went from a respected fighting game with an element of fan service, to a game that seemed to only be enjoyed by the goon squad. Team Ninja nickel and diming its player base with costume after costume, many of which were called “Super Sexy” by the way, and said DLC apparently being successful did not help matters.

It didn’t matter if Dead or Alive 5 was a good fighting game, because all people looking in from the outside could see was a wave of fan servicey costumes. It was successful for Tecmo though. Twelve million downloads is nothing to scoff at, but in terms of sales it only sold about 1.5 million.

For reference, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 which came out at around the same time, sold the same units as Dead or Alive 5 and that was the lowest selling game in that series. Meaning Dead or Alive 5 only did as well as the worst performing Tekken game. That is not a good sign.

It’s obvious the bulk of the success came from the free-to-play model and DLC sales. The same DLC that made Dead or Alive look like the fighting game for coomers. So it was a pyric victory. It made Tecmo money, but at a cost of public opinion of the series being flushed down the toilet.

Ignoring all of that though, looking at Dead or Alive 5 in 2025 I did find myself enjoying the game quite a bit. It’s the most accessible game in the series so far, and I do find it to be an enjoyable fighting game that anyone can play. It’s a great game to play casually with friends but it also has plenty of depth for the competitive crowd.

I would recommend Dead or Alive 5 as the perfect entry point for the series. The in-depth tutorial is great at teaching you the basics, and the AI is challenging but never too cheap or unfair. You can also frequently find it on sale for dirt cheap, I know I did, so if you can find the game at a good price I would say it’s worth a go. Just don’t buy the DLC, it isn’t worth it.

Next time, we’re looking at the, so far, final entry in Dead or Alive with Dead or Alive 6. The game that not only tanked the series reputation even further but also pissed away the last remaining goodwill it had with the DOA fanbase. It’s going to be a fun finale.