Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! For this final entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation. Remember how I said that there was a free to play version of Xtreme 3 on PC which evolved into something else? This is that “something else”. You can still see some of the bones of DOAX3 here (some assets, cutscenes, etc are pulled wholesale from it), but the game plays entirely differently and there has been significantly more content added. Being somewhat active in the DOA fan community, I’ve been aware of this game for a long time, but never had any desire to check it for a variety of reasons out until starting this Love/Hate series. What sorts of changes can we expect from a free-to-play version of Xtreme…? Read on to find out…

Despite being a free-to-play PC exclusive which has only released in Asian territories, there are (somehow) still two releases of Venus Vacation. The main version of the game is available through DMM Game Player, and there’s also a version available on Steam in Asian territories. Despite being the same game, each version has pretty substantial differences in content, with it being said that the Steam version is generally a year behind the DMM version. Confusingly, the game might also be in different languages, depending on where you set your VPN downloaded the game. There might be a version with English translated menus, but I played using a Steam version which was like 99% Japanese, so I was relying on fan guides and general fucking around to figure out what to do. For what it is though, I think I can give a fair opinion about my impressions after spending several hours on the game.

Love

• Graphics – Might as well say it one last time: once again, the graphics for a Dead or Alive game are great. Moreso than any other game in the franchise, Venus Vacation‘s entire appeal revolves around its visuals, so it’s good to see that they nailed this aspect of the experience, since you’re going to be doing a lot of ogling.
• Chibi Avatars!!!!! – One of the first things you see when you start this game is a big booba chibi Honoka bouncing on a volleyball. At first my reaction was “oh Team Ninja, never change”, but it was pretty cute. However, when you get into the game properly, all the girls have a few different chibi arts, and they are adorable. I’m not exaggerating when I say that these were far and away my favourite part of the entire game, to the point where I want to get stickers printed for all the mainline Dead or Alive girls.

Mixed

• Gravure Videos – I’ve always complained that gravure videos are at odds with the design of the Xtreme games. They give you a very limited number of activities that you can complete in a single vacation and only some of these activities give you any incentive (ie, Zack dollars) to complete them. Gravure videos are the worst of all worlds by being barely interactive, short, and providing no incentive other than just letting you ogle the girls for a few seconds. Venus Vacation provides probably the best execution of the idea that I’ve seen thus far though, by making gravure videos unlockable rewards that you get for completing volleyball matches. Turning these into bonus rewards is such an obvious move that I have no idea why they didn’t do this earlier (actually, I do know why: because there’s already barely any content in the other Xtreme games). That said, this goes into mixed simply because it takes FOREVER to unlock them. After five hours of play, I had just unlocked my second gravure video, which is kind of nuts. The only reason I can see for this ridiculous grind is that you would unlock all the videos for all the girls in a week or two if you earned them at a reasonable rate, but that’s not really an excuse, is it? That’s just fucking the customer so you can keep making them run on the content treadmill forever.

Hate

• Region-locked – Okay, at this point, there’s zero reason for Tecmo-Koei to be pulling this bullshit. Why is this only available in Asian markets? This is a free-to-play, digital download only, gatcha game. There’s no physical release that they need to pay up-front for production and distribution world-wide. As far as I can see, they would only need to pay localization costs for whatever regions they release the game in (and this is Tecmo-Koei, so that would just be for the menus, they have never given a shit about localizing the voice acting). And don’t give me shit about the “woke mob” freaking out and censoring the game: no one fucking cares about your titty appreciation game and we all know that this is true, because full-on porn games dominate Steam’s new releases. Venus Vacation isn’t even all that objectionable in terms of content (other than the fact that you can still poke the girls, and they respond negatively, but can’t do anything to stop you and get over it in a matter of seconds). I have a lot of negative thoughts about this game, but I think that there’s no reason why this game can’t be available worldwide. This is 100% on Tecmo-Koei being a bunch of morons.
  • Now, this is just me speculating, but the only justifiable reason I can see for Venus Vacation to be region-locked at this point is possibly a strategic move on Tecmo-Koei’s part. As we’ve seen, the Xtreme games affected Dead or Alive‘s perception in the west. They did not sell very well here, and they had the knock-on effect of making the mainline fighting games sell worse too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tecmo-Koei are trying to manage that perception in case they decide to release another mainline game in the future. Meanwhile, the hardcore gooner audience will import or use a VPN to access the games which had primarily appealed to an eastern audience anyway. Tecmo-Koei still makes their money one way or another and only end up needing to focus on a smaller market in the process.
• Basically No Gameplay – Here’s the biggest difference between Venus Vacation and any other Xtreme game… there’s basically no gameplay. Even Xtreme Beach Volleyball at least had people saying “cum for the boobs, stay for the volleyball”, but you can’t even say that here. Volleyball matches are played out automatically, so you just sit there watching the girls play. You’re basically trapped in DOAX3‘s owner mode the entire time, clicking through menus and watching everyone else getting to have fun. The only real influence you have over the match is getting your girls’ stats up, which is done by dressing them up in swimsuits with a higher rating. It’s the “gear level” bullshit you’ve seen in a thousand live service games, and it’s the entire game here. It makes every match basically pre-determined: you either have higher stats and win, or you have lower stats and lose. Which brings us to…
• The Absolute Worst Games Industry Bullshit – To the surprise of no one, Venus Vacation is a full-on gatcha game, and the entire experience has been warped around that. You play volleyball matches to get crystals, which you then spend to spin the wheel and see if you get a better swimsuit to dress your chosen girl in, so that she can win more games of volleyball. Rinse and repeat. This props up several predatory systems:
  • An energy bar which limits how many matches you can play without waiting for it to recharge (or paying to fill it back up instantly, of course). Energy is ridiculously stingy here: you initially get showered in it, but it very quickly slows to a crawl and lets you play a max of three-to-four matches in a single session before having to wait several hours to recharge.
  • Crystals, which you use to roll for swimsuits. You get showered with them early, but the number you get dry up fast as you go (or, y’know, you can buy more…).
  • Daily and weekly challenges and login bonuses to keep you on the grind treadmill and to encourage turning the game into a habitual activity.
  • Blatantly overpowered swimsuits with awful drop rates in the low single-digit percentile. Power creep which has rendered older suits worthless, meaning that you have to bee-line the newest events and get their SSR suits in order to stay competitive.
  • This is just the stuff I came across in my time playing, I’m sure there’s even more bullshit in play that I just never got a chance to interact with (and I know I got the “use your credit card to buy this digital currency!” pop-up more times than I can list). As a result of all this, you might notice that…
• It’s Not About Having Fun, It’s About Compulsion – Like so many shitty fucking games of the last decade and a half, Venus Vacation isn’t a game about having fun, it’s a game that tries to get you addicted to its systems to get you paying money. Let me illustrate how ridiculous this gets here: you can fast-forward through the volleyball matches. Yes, the entire point of the previous games is just an obstacle to completing the grind for more gatcha spins, so you can (and will) skip as much as you can to avoid wasting more time. As bad as that is, then there’s the swimsuits. You’re gonna spin the wheel over and over again, getting swimsuits which are aesthetically pleasing, but completely worthless because they are not an SSR pull. If you play the game long enough, you just save up as many crystals as you can, because everything you can do is worthless outside of special events which drop the new SSR suits. You can’t even enjoy dressing your girls up in whatever suits you like most, because the gear-grind means that they’ve syphoned the fun out of goddamn dress-up. The worst part? I can feel the fucking hooks in me while playing. I wasn’t playing because I was enjoying myself. I was actively bored and getting more and more pissed off at the predatory systems in the game. And yet, I kept playing and skipping through everything, because I had a bunch of energy and didn’t want to waste it, because then I’d get less spins and have less chances to get a good suit. Again, none of this was designed to make you enjoy the game, it has been refined and engineered to make you keep playing. I fucking loathe this kind of design, so Venus Vacation would already be on my shit-list, but it gets an extra twist of the knife in, because…
• This Isn’t Even Dead or Alive Anymore – There’s a lot of discontent in the Dead or Alive fan community towards Venus Vacation, because the mainline series has been basically abandoned in favour of this game:
  • For one thing, after all the content which has been added, Venus Vacation doesn’t even feel like it’s a Dead or Alive game anymore. All the attention from Team Ninja has gone into original characters, to the point where there are eleven girls from the mainline games, versus twenty original characters. This gets worse when you consider that there are multiple, major characters from the mainline games still missing from the roster here (most notably, Lisa and Christie, although it’s also pretty bad that Mila is missing too… NiCO and Rachel, I care less about). That said… most of the new characters just do not interest me in the slightest. Their designs can largely be boiled down to anime tropes and/or fetish bait and, without a story campaign to really explore their character, we don’t get a whole lot of personality to explore.
  • Making matters worse is the pure numbers here. Xtreme games have always been pretty cheap, utilizing the same, OG Xbox-era design with little in the way of improvement or ambition. Compare that to Dead or Alive 5 and 6, which clearly cost a lot of money to make and were actually aiming for a global market, meaning they had much higher distribution costs. From a purely-financial standpoint, can you blame Team Ninja for prioritizing this game over a much riskier mainline entry? No, but from the perspective of a fan of the franchise, it’s frankly disgusting that we’re probably not getting a new, mainline Dead or Alive game any time soon, all because this predatory game prints money at a fraction of the cost. Hell, I have my problems with the Xtreme games in general, but at least they succeeded at being very relaxing, chill experiences with enough gameplay to keep you entertained in short burst. Venus Vacation strips that all out in the name of squeezing money from you.

Frankly, I despise Venus Vacation. That’s mostly due to it representing the absolute worst of the modern gaming industry, but the fact that it has fucked the mainline Dead or Alive games just makes it all the more insulting (and just illustrates further how shit the games industry is in general). And, to illustrate this further, we recently got the announcement of Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme, a new game which is going to be a dating sim (oh yay, my favourite part about Xtreme)… and, as of the time of this writing, it’s looking very likely that none of the mainline girls are going to be in the game at all (edit: as expected, Honoka was the only character from the fighting games that made the cast, but she’s arguably more of an Xtreme character anyway). It’s also quite telling that “Venus Vacation” is getting top billing here – this is basically its own little franchise now. As a fan of Dead or Alive, I hate that this is where we’re at now. Through the course of this Love/Hate series, I genuinely came to love this world, its characters, and their relationships. It’s fucking trash, but it’s my trash, goddammit. Seeing it shunted away due to financial considerations is heart-breaking.

Man… I was not expecting this to make me so depressed. Fuck… can you cheer me up, Chibi Hitomi?