Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re covering Dead or Alive Paradise. So, confession time: I was originally planning on covering Xtreme 2 next, and would just off-handedly mention Paradise there since it’s basically a trimmed-down port of Xtreme 2. However… I sold my Xbox 360 years ago and it turns out that the current Xbox 360 emulation scene is pretty poor, so I can’t get Xtreme 2 running on my computer. During the writing of these articles, I did end up buying an Xbox One on the cheap just to play Dead or Alive 4 and a handful other Xbox exclusives, but Xtreme 2 is not backwards compatible, so I straight-up cannot play the game at all. As a result, that leaves us with Paradise to fill in this entry. Paradise is a PSP Xtreme game and is notable for being the first time Dead or Alive made the leap to a handheld console. How would this change affect the gameplay? Read on to find out…

Love

• The Handheld Experience – The DOA Xtreme games have always struck me as being ill-suited for full console releases. Aside from having to explain to your friends and family what you’re doing when they catch you playing one of these games on your living room TV, the limited and repetitive content do not incentivize long play times, which is going to make it harder to justify getting the game started, loaded, and running when you’re probably turning it off again in about half an hour. In this regard, experimenting with Paradise on a handheld was kind of a genius idea. Play whenever and where ever you want, when it starts getting boring put it into sleep mode, come back when you’re in the mood. For a breezy game like this, it’s pretty much the perfect way to play.
• Photo Mode – The biggest new addition to Dead or Alive Paradise is the ability to take photos of the girls while playing. This definitely heightens the voyeuristic aspect of the previous game and, honestly, is a pretty cool feature. We all love photo modes in modern games and this is the sort of game that seems purpose-built for it.

Mixed

• Rio – The only other new thing Paradise brings to the fold is Rio, a blackjack dealer who you can unlock as a bonus girl. Unfortunately, everything about her is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s nice that we get another girl added to the roster. On the other hand, her design just doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the cast and she stands out like a sore thumb as a result. On the one hand, it’s good that they have actually given her an animated model in the casino you can ogle when you choose to play against her. On the other hand, she’s the only in-game model in the casino and it just hammers home how fucking half-assed these games are. Would it fucking kill them to let us be able to see the girls we’re playing against instead of a static profile bubble showing their heads (aka, the lowest-effort solution possible)?

Hate

• PSP Hardware Ill-Suited For This Game – So… as good an idea as a handheld DOAX game is, the PSP was not the right system for the job. PSP games are basically running on hardware somewhere between the PS1 and PS2, so you can imagine that it really struggles to provide the kind of graphical fidelity that a game like this requires to be in any way arousing.
• Limited Content – Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 introduced several new mini-games to its vacation simulation, but even then, it struggled to hold any interest on a second go-around and suffered much worse reviews as a result. With that in mind, it is pretty disappointing to see Paradise actually remove three game modes (pool slide, marine race, and tug of war), presumably because the PSP just couldn’t handle them. While there are many more swimsuits to purchase and unlock compared to the original game, the lack of additional mini-games really hurts Paradise and makes it feel about as content-bereft as the original DOAXBV. This goes doubly so, because…
• The Grind – In DOAXBV, you could choose to grind if you wanted every girl to have every swimsuit available. It would take a while, but it was entirely optional and you could just as easily just play as your favourite girl(s) and buy whatever swimsuits suited your fancy. Not so in Paradise. More swimsuits means more to buy and some of the new additions are expensive. There are also more girls in this game, so that means more girls with exclusive suits that you need to manage to try to get anything specific. Oh, but the worst part of all this? Two of the mini-games are locked behind watching gravure videos of the girls relaxing. That might not sound too bad, but you’re underestimating Team Ninja’s willingness to make you grind for basic features: you have to watch fifty and one hundred unique gravure clips in order to unlock these two modes. To put that in perspective, if you spent an entire vacation watching nothing but gravure clips, you’d only have fourty-two watched at the end of it (and, since these clips need to be unique, you’re going to have to cycle through several girls over several vacations to achieve this). It seems pretty clear to me that you’re intended to casually play through as all the girls once, playing volleyball and trading swimsuits between them and then unlocking each game mode to give you a bit more to do on subsequent runs. This already sounds repetitive as all hell, but then we have to take into account that these two mini-games kind of suck. Worst of all is beach flags, a fucking awful button masher game that lasts like ten seconds each time (just like your mom). Then there’s butt battle, which is at least kind of funny in a juvenile way, but it’s also basically designed to be the dullest fighting game ever made. Oh, and then there’s the apex of this game’s salacious content, the pole dancing sequences. In order to unlock these, you need to have viewed every single gravure video for each girl, unlock a special slot machine, and then get lucky enough to get the jackpot on it, at which point you’ll get a special ticket to watch the pole dance. The sheer grind this game asks of you to get one moderately sexy sequence that you could watch on goddamn Youtube for a fraction of the effort is just mind-boggling. Why do developers of “sexy” games like this always put several barriers of bullshit between you and all the content they’re trying to arouse you with?
• Dating Sim Elements Are Even More Tedious – So I already hated the dating sim elements of the original DOAXBV, but they added another layer of bullshit to the system between then and Paradise. Now you need to memorize what colour of wrapping paper a girl likes in order for her to accept anything. What realistic and deep gameplay systems this game has! It retroactively makes me appreciate that, for all its problems, the original game didn’t fuck around with menial bullshit like this.
• The Boob Physics – OH MY GOD. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE BREAST PHYSICS IN THIS GAME!? I’m not exaggerating here when I say that the breast physics in Paradise are on-par with the psychotic slinkies we saw in the original Dead or Alive. They bounce all over the place like fucking springs on meth. I like it when my video game boobs remind me of real boobs, not a plate of gelatin in an earthquake. This is not sexy, it’s fucking stupid. It’s legitimately bad enough here that I find myself asking if this is the result of some setting I screwed up without realizing it? Is it a fault with the emulation…..? It legitimately feels wrong. Like, I maxed out the boob physics in the other games just to see how ridiculous they could get, but nothing has looked this bad on the boob-front since the PS1 era.

Dead or Alive Paradise (and Xtreme 2 by extension) are a lesson in how more isn’t always better. Xtreme Beach Volleyball was content-bereft, sure, but it also gave that game a certain amount of focus that made it easy to just relax. Paradise is so thin on stuff to do and requires so much grinding to get to any of its content that it just makes the whole thing feel like a chore. Add in that it’s on hardware which is ill-suited to the experience, and Paradise is the first game in the franchise that I’ve looked at so far which is just straight-up not worth bothering with.