Dead or Alive has basically become a meme around IC2S. I wouldn’t even count any of these games amongst my top 50 all-time favourites, and I’m not particularly good at fighting games… and yet, there’s something about this series that I always find myself getting drawn to (and no, that “something” isn’t the boobs… well, not exclusively, I swear). Maybe it’s just because I love the movie so much, or maybe it’s because I came into this series through the Ninja Gaiden games, but I have a really soft spot for Dead or Alive. That said, at the time of writing this, I had only really played through the entirety of Dead or Alive 5 and Xtreme 3. I’m immersed enough in this fandom that I found myself with the itch to play through the entire series so I could experience these games in their totality. Of course, that means one thing: we’re starting a new Love/Hate series here on IC2S, beginning with the original Dead or Alive!

Some notes before we go in. Like I said, I’m not particularly great at fighting games. I’ve put a lot of time into multiple fighters over the years, but I’ve always struggled to pull off complex and precise strings of button and directional inputs with any consistency. I wouldn’t say that I’m mindlessly button mashing, but I would get my ass kicked by someone who has taken the time to learn the finer details of their character’s moveset. So, with that in mind, any opinions in this Love/Hate series are from the perspective of a casual fighting game player. Also, there are a butt-load of versions of most of the Dead or Alive games. I’ll disclose which ones I played up-top, because they can make a pretty big difference for a player’s experience. For this original game, I played the PS1 version primarily, but also dabbled with the Xbox Ultimate re-release a bit, and there some pretty substantial differences between them (missing characters, very different graphics engines, stages look different, etc).

So, all that said, how does the original Dead or Alive hold-up today? Read on to find out…

Love

• The Characters – The cast of Dead or Alive aren’t the most colourful roster in fighting games, but there are some pretty fun personalities, even in this original entry. Ryu Hayabusa is probably the most notable, famous for being the hero of the Ninja Gaiden games on the NES (and would become even more notable when Team Ninja gave him a modernized series of action-adventure games during the Xbox and Xbox 360 era thanks to his popularity in Dead or Alive). Zack is downright overflowing with personality, to the point of being borderline obnoxious (but, hey, that’s Zack for you). Tina Armstrong is pretty interesting: she’s a wrestler with larger than life dreams. She views Dead or Alive as an opportunity to catch the eye of Hollywood producers in addition to being a contest to win. Then there’s Jann Lee and Gen Fu, providing the fighting game-requisite “Bruce Lee guy” and “wise old kung fu master” roles, respectively.
  • I also particularly want to mention Kasumi, the face of the franchise. While her personality is a tad dull (generic anime heroine wants to figure out what happened to her brother), her strength, skill, and conviction have made her a very natural and fitting lead for Dead or Alive. That said… am I crazy, or is she a rip-off of King of Fighters‘ Mai Shiranui? Mai’s design is far more egregious than just about anything in Dead or Alive, and it had been established as far back as The King of Fighters ’94, so there’s no way that Kasumi’s design is entirely coincidental, right? Hell, they’re even both ninjas!
• Brunette Tina – One of the most striking differences in the original DOA is that Tina Armstrong is a brunette. Apparently she was always intended to be a blonde, but due to some sort of memory issue in this game, they had to make her a brunette… which I don’t understand at all, but that’s why she is a blonde in all DOA follow-ups. However, I’ll die on the hill that Tina Armstrong looks way better as a brunette. In addition to just generally preferring that look, her blonde hairstyle in later entries is a bit too close to Helena Douglas, and I’ve mixed them up on several occasions at a glance.

Mixed

• Undeveloped Mechanics – Dead or Alive was created as a response to Virtua Fighter, and you can tell that in how the game looks and plays compared to its sequels. This even extends to the signature “provocative” aspects of this franchise: they were just intended to be something to differentiate it from Virtua Fighter. The main differentiating mechanic in this game is the hold/counter system, which allows you to anticipate where your opponents’ attack will be coming from (high/mid/low) and then time a counter-attack to turn the momentum in your favour. While this is fine, it largely turns fights into a game of reflexes and “counter throw whenever the enemy tries to attack you”. It’s especially difficult to go back to this game after playing its sequels, which do much more to develop their own fighting system and have a lot more depth to them. Ultimately, the mechanics of Dead or Alive are fine in a vacuum, but compared to what’s to come, you can feel how undercooked they are.
• The Boob Physics – Look, I get that titillation is a core part of this series’ identity, but in this entry in particular, the boob physics are just straight-up fucking dumb. Sure, they help this game stand out compared to its competitors, but they’re like goddamn slinkies, flopping around all over the place wildly. This was dumb enough at the time, but after even a few years of technological advance, these physics were just downright ridiculous, which is a problem when you’re trying to make a titillating game with attractive characters. On the other hand, they’re a source of unintentional comedy, so I can’t hate them entirely, but future games would treat boobs with much more… grace.

Hate

• Difficulty – Look, I definitely don’t mind a reasonable challenge, but DOA is downright unfair. Playing through the campaign on normal difficulty, you have to win two out of three rounds to beat each opponent and then move onto the next. For the first half of the roster, this was a breeze. However, as soon as I got to Bass Armstrong, the difficulty spiked by an insane degree. From what I’ve read, the AI reads your button inputs and then counters them, artificially inflating the difficulty (and I’m pretty sure that their damage rates have been buffed as well). This makes winning two out of three rounds an astronomically difficult task. Just beating Bass Armstrong once took me longer than entire campaign runs in subsequent DOA games. I sincerely doubt I would have had the patience and/or ability to push through to the end if not for save states between rounds. And that’s just for one hard opponent! Ayane and Raidou are just as insane! I am actually not sure how much of this is specific to the PS1 version: Ayane and Bass are both exclusive to the PS1 version of the game, so it might just be this particular version was made to kick your ass extra hard.
• Boring Stages – Another way you can tell that Dead or Alive is riffing on Virtua Fighter is how the stages look in this game compared to subsequent entries. The stages are basically just flat squares with a perimeter which explodes and causes extra damage to whoever crosses it first. It’s pretty boring, there isn’t much more you can say about it than that.
• Underage Bullshit – Oh Japan… never change. Kasumi, the face of this franchise, and the character with the most revealing outfit, has been confirmed to be underage during the events of this game (and the next three mainline entries). Team Ninja clearly knew what they were doing too, because her age is unlisted on her bio in a bid to obfuscate this (a trend which carries on with other underage characters in this series for the first few entries). I get that this is a cultural thing, but considering that they clearly knew what they were doing and how that would be perceived, I don’t have any qualms about calling it out. It makes all the marketing playing up how hot the girls in this game are go from “oh 90s game ads!” to outright fucked up. It’s also just fucking dumb? You want your big booby hot girls to lust after, but then make them young, immature, and too innocent… it’s the sort of shit that makes this series come across as creepy. And, for some stupid fucking reason, the first four games in the franchise all take place in the same year, and the only reason I can imagine for that is just so that the audience can keep perving on the underage characters! The underage bullshit established in this game has, by itself, landed this franchise in hot water on multiple occasions when, otherwise, there really isn’t anything objectionable about them. There’s a reason why from Dead or Alive 5-onward, all characters were aged up to at least eighteen and all new characters never go below that age… which is still fucking stupid on its face, but at least it’s not outright problematic at that point. God forbid a character get into their mid-20s, let’s get some age diversity in this franchise, goddammit! (MILF DOA hottie, when?)

The original Dead or Alive is… fine. I didn’t dislike my time with it, but the excessive difficulty, combined with how differently it plays from its successors made me not interested in playing more of it after I beat the campaign mode. There’s certainly some novelty in going back to this game to see how much this series has evolved, but I would say that the series only gets better from here.