Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive 4. This was the first Dead or Alive game following Xtreme Beach Volleyball, and was the first mainline entry to get an M-rating. Was this deserved? And how would the perception of Xtreme alter the series going forward? Read on to find out…

Dead or Alive 4 is another entry which only had one release, this time on the Xbox 360 shortly after the console’s launch. I actually snagged a copy just for this Love/Hate series!

Love

• Stages – While the stage hazards are a major come-down from Dead or Alive 3, 4‘s stages still show a lot of creativity and character. You’ve got a stage where you fight in the streets of Las Vegas and have to avoid traffic (or push your opponent into it to get some massive damage; I’ve had multiple matches end with one, or even both, fighters getting run over and it’s always hilarious when it happens). There’s a stage in a crowded market where you can smash through stalls, or fall down to a beach and continue the fight there. There’s a cool stage in the savannahs of Africa, with all sorts of wildlife roaming about. There’s a fight on the steps of a mountain temple with monkeys running around and a tomb at the base if you fall down enough sets of stairs. There’s a freaking dinosaur stage, with lots of smaller dinosaurs moving around inside the combat area as obstacles. There’s just lots of creativity on display, which helps make every fight unique, and gives DOA4 more of a “world tour” vibe.
• The Story – Dead or Alive 4‘s story mode is a bit of a mixed bag, but overall a big improvement on its predecessors, and a rather epic culmination to the entire narrative to this point. Kasumi, the Mugen Tenshin clan, the Haijimon sect, and the Hayabusa clan are sick of DOATEC fucking around with their ninja affairs. As a result, they go on the offensive to destroy DOTATEC and stop them from unleashing Alpha-152, a super-powered clone of Kasumi. While the fourth tournament is going on, they attack and begin tearing the entire company down in true ninja style. Meanwhile, Helena is secretly enacting her own revenge against the company to help ensure its complete destruction. We actually get a decent sense of this story from the in-game narrative for once, due to some small changes to the campaign structure. Each character’s campaign plays differently in this game, and each one ends with different final bosses. This really incentivizes playing every story campaign so that you can piece together the plot (not to mention that you can’t get the true ending until you’ve completed all other characters’ stories). All that said, the story is only really good for Ayane, Hayate, Ryu, Zack, and Helena (especially Helena, her ending is downright awesome). Still, considering how epic the main plot is, I can excuse a few duds.
  • Special shout-out to Zack’s ending. It is ridiculous and needs to be seen to be believed. I love how tongue-in-cheek it is, blending pulp adventure, Ray Harryhausen stop motion (!), and goddamn Super Sentai, all with a generous helping of slapstick comedy and Dead or Alive‘s own signature fan service. What’s not to love?

Mixed

• Difficulty – Admittedly, this is a pretty weak mixed opinion here, but I feel like it’s worth noting. On normal difficulty, Dead or Alive 4 is the hardest game in the franchise since the original. In Dead or Alive 2, I could consistently finish a character’s campaign in about ten minutes. In Dead or Alive 4, a game with about the same number of fights to get through, a single campaign run would easily take me between twenty to thirty minutes (or even forty minutes if I’m stuck playing as a character I don’t like). I just found myself getting K.O.’d so many times as the fights get progressively harder. I am not sure exactly why this game was so much of a difficulty spike, but I believe that there’s been one big change made which really contributes: the window in which to execute a successful hold seems to have been reduced significantly. I used to be able to consistently land holds in DOA2 and 3 with relative ease. However, in this game, I found that I was having to be much more precise with my timing to land one. From a high-level standpoint, I can see how this makes sense. However, it ultimately means that holds are less viable and reliable, affecting the balance of the strikes-throws-holds triangle in the process. This is an issue, because the harder opponents will spam holds and/or critical stuns, which will let them effectively stun-lock your health bar to oblivion. Your only real counter to this? Holds… I sure hope you can git gud with your predictive and reactive skills, champ. All that said, I did kind of appreciate the satisfaction that comes from defeating a tough opponent, but the frustration to get there kind of balances that out.
• New Characters – For the first time in this franchise, I’m very mixed on the new characters introduced here in Dead or Alive 4:
  • We’ve got Kokoro, who is the definition of wasted potential. She is potentially interesting: she’s Helena’s secret half-sister, and she’s a geisha who secretly has a passion for martial arts, much to her mother’s disapproval. Potentially interesting ideas here, but nothing is made of it in her story (and, to make it worse, Kokoro has gotten zero development since). Oh, and to make matters worse, I despise her fighting style/move-set in-game. Easily one of my least-favourite characters in the franchise, she’s so dull all-round.
  • Then there’s Eliot. He is a young man who Gen Fu has taken on as an apprentice. Mechanically, that makes him a reskin of Gen Fu. However, narratively, he’s… alright. He’s naïve, polite, eager to learn, and seeking the approval of his master, but uncertain how to achieve it. Decent, but not a lot to latch onto.
  • Finally, there’s Lisa, who simply beggars belief. She was actually introduced in DOAXBV, but they’ve fleshed out her character and gone to some insane directions with her. She’s a DOATEC scientist, and she’s the one who performed the mind-control experiments on Hayate in Dead or Alive 2, and she’s also a secret lucha libre wrestler on the side!? It’s bonkers, but I kind of love how ridiculous it is… unfortunately, her character gets basically no development or anything interesting to do in the narrative. She does play really well though, I love how fast and fluid her fighting style is, so overall she’s probably my favourite (mostly) new character.
• The Xtreme-ification of Dead or Alive – As the first M-rated mainline Dead or Alive game, you can feel how Xtreme Beach Volleyball and the upcoming Xtreme 2 were influencing how these games were made. Sex had always been a part of the marketing of these games, but the actual in-game sexiness was largely confined to boob physics and some cleavage, but it never really felt egregious in any way. DOA4 is the first time where I can say that Team Ninja were consciously pushing this to make overt suggestive content a core part of this series’ image:
  • For one thing, the in-game costumes have started getting over-the-top. I can maybe justify Tina and Lisa fighting in a bikini top as being in-character for a wrestler, but Christie’s outfits are just ridiculous. Her main costume has her wearing an open jacket with no top on underneath, while another has her basically decked out in bondage gear. Not only that, but her entire ending is a video of her dancing in a strip club so she can assassinate some guy. I get that she’s a femme fatale, but these are clearly just pure fanservice at this point.
  • Some of the characters’ endings also seem to have been screwed over due to the push for more fanservice. Kasumi and Hitomi’s endings both have extended sequences of them prancing around topless (with convenient censoring to avoid any actual nudity), which might be a cheap thrill, but doesn’t provide a satisfying end to their campaigns’ storylines at all (this is especially bad for Kasumi, since she play a major role in the main plot and deserved a proper ending). Then there’s Leifang’s ending, which features her shirt tearing open due to her boobs being too big, and then she accidentally (?) gets groped by a guy on the train. It’s… uh, something.
  • Oh, and the boob physics in this game are way less subtle than they were in the last couple games. As a result, they actually look less natural here as they’re jiggling away compared to most of the other games in the franchise.

Hate

• Stagnation – Dead or Alive 4 is the first time where it feels like Dead or Alive is not giving its all. The game still has basically the same features as Dead or Alive 2 and plays very similarly. Like a lot of the very early Xbox 360 games, it doesn’t look much better than an original Xbox game either. This may have been down to the anime art style having reached the limits of what it could realistically achieve, but this is the first time I wasn’t really blown away by the graphics. In a lot of ways, it’s just “more of the same”.

Dead or Alive 4 is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s really just more of the same for the franchise. The franchise’s formula is still fun in its own right though, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you can feel that the franchise has plateaued and isn’t sure where to go from here. If not for the story acting as a big culmination, Dead or Alive 4 would probably be a far less enjoyable experience.