Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be taking another detour, this time to the 3DS with Dead or Alive: Dimensions. This is a weird little spin-off for a number of reasons: at the time, Team Ninja had worked with Nintendo on Metroid: Other M and they ultimately decided to team up for an early 3DS Dead or Alive project. Given Nintendo and their handhelds’ child-friendly reputation, contrasted with DOA‘s smutty reputation by this point, it was a bizarre team-up. And, on top of that, Dimensions would be a pretty ambitious title, retelling the events of all four mainline games that had been released at the time and featuring the largest character roster in franchise history. All-in-all, it made for a pretty interesting project, one which seemed particularly unexpected for Nintendo’s newest handheld system. Could Team Ninja pull off this weird combination and produce something worthwhile? Read on to find out…

Once again, Dimensions has only had one release, that being on the 3DS. And, unlike a lot of the games in this series, I actually have a physical copy of the game, which I picked up at an EB Games for like $15 years ago (legitimately can’t remember exactly when, but likely 6-10 years ago). Despite that, I somehow never actually got around to playing this game, so it’s been sitting around on a shelf this whole time. This Love/Hate series has presented a great excuse to dust off my 3DS and finally get a chance to try it out. Just one more reason why I took this dive into the franchise’s history!

Love

• Full DOA Experience on 3DS – The main reason I never played Dimensions until now was because I figured there was no way that Team Ninja could accurately bring a Dead or Alive game to an underpowered Nintendo handheld and actually make it play well. Credit where credit’s due, they really proved me wrong on both fronts. The 3DS circle pad works surprisingly well, I didn’t find myself wishing for a controller in my hand even once. It’s got all the game modes you’d expect. Hell, even the graphics are solid – at this point in the series’ history, this would have been the best-looking Dead or Alive game, hands-down. Even today, this is a surprisingly good-looking game.
• Tag Challenge – Dimensions‘ take on tag team mode is tag challenge, which is basically a series of challenge matches that escalate in difficulty as you go. I’ll always play a few tag team matches in any DOA game I try, because I find it the funnest way to play the game. Tag challenge really drew me in though, far more than any other tag mode has. Turning each match into a challenge lends so much more weight to the experience. Tag challenge sounds pretty unfair: you’ll be having a 2v1 against an AI opponent and can get knocked out as many of five times in a match before failing. However, the difficulty ramps quickly, and your opponents are going to have more health and do more damage than you, so you have to manage your tags strategically. If there’s one thing I’m a bit mixed on though, it’s the AI partner. Sometimes it’s nice to have someone who can switch in to give you a breather. However, as you reach the highest difficulty challenges, the enemy AI far outpaces them, to the point where your partner’s HP drops precipitously while landing no hits in return. At that point, I’d probably rather be controlling them myself, because they become a major liability.

Mixed

• Chronicle Mode – Easily the most enticing feature of Dimensions for longtime fans, chronicle mode retells and recontextualizes the stories of the four mainline Dead or Alive games into one epic narrative. This is particularly cool, because the stories of those games were told so poorly, so getting to see them fleshed out could be a love-letter to the fans. However, I will give the first couple Dead or Alive games’ stories credit for one thing: they left a lot of gaps, so you got to use your imagination to piece them together and make them make sense. Dimensions fleshes out the narrative of Dead or Alive quite a bit, but in doing so, it really highlights just how dumb the stories of these games are. This is made worse because, for all the extra plot and context they’ve added in, this story is still not very well-told and it can feel like a jumbled mess with several gaps in narrative and logic. It also doesn’t help that the Dead or Alive tournament itself is extremely unimportant to the plot. The narrative advances with each tournament, but the actual main plot involves DOATEC conducting experiments on the ninja characters and so only a handful of characters have any real importance, while the rest are relegated to the relatively worthless tournament plot. I think it’s fun to play through this game to see a “grander” retelling of the series’ narrative, but I legitimately think that playing through each game in the franchise is a far more satisfying way to experience their stories.
  • Even with all this said, I probably would be on-board with chronicle mode as an abridged version of the series’ plot. However, there are two big retcons here which really move this into “mixed” territory for me. First of all is that Team Ninja have really pushed Ryu Hayabusa to the forefront. This would have released at the height of Ninja Gaiden‘s popularity, so I can understand why this was done. However, having him step in and boss around the other characters and steal their glory makes this come across as Ryu fanfiction rather than something earned. This leads me to my second major complaint, that they absolutely fucked the narrative of Dead or Alive 3. It goes from “Ayane defies her clan and family in order to give her adopted father an honourable death, making her grow into an adult in the process” to “the Ryu Hayabusa and Hayate show, ft. Ayane”. It’s executed so much worse and is legitimately insulting if you’ve ever played through DOA3.
• Touchpad Features – The 3DS’s second screen is implemented… interestingly in Dimensions. It houses the move list, showing you what inputs you need to do in order to pull off a combo, and occasionally will display quick, context-sensitive actions. What makes this interesting is that you can tap on a combo and then your character will perform that combo automatically. It’s a pretty cool feature for showing what moves are available to you and can help you pull off an awesome move you would have struggled to land in the heat of the moment. However, this feature is pretty limited, because you have dozens of moves available, but only a tiny handful are shown on screen at one time, meaning that it’s only really useful for keeping one favourite combo on speed-dial. It would be cool if you could play a tap-moves-only playthrough, but that’s just not feasible here.

Hate

• 3D – The implementation of 3D in this game suuuuuucks. Honestly, this is probably more of a 3DS issue than it is a Dimensions issue, but they did choose to lean into it, so I feel it’s fair to criticize. I had to turn off the 3D almost immediately, because looking at it gives me a headache. It’s also kind of dumb that any photos you take in showcase mode only appear in 3D if you had the 3DS slider on on the console at the time… holy crap, why? I legitimately don’t understand how the game can display an image in 3D and then only be able to display that same image in 2D because of some settings toggle when you took the photo.

Dead or Alive: Dimensions is fun. I really was not expecting the game to play as well as it did, and was thoroughly pleased throughout my playthrough. Gripes about retcons aside, chronicle mode is also pretty cool and worth playing through at least once to get a more straight-forward overview of the series’ narrative. I’m glad that I finally took the plunge and got to check this game out, it’s well worth a look if you have a 3DS.