Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re going to be covering the next entry in the series, Dead or Alive 3. Having never owned an Xbox, and not being very good at fighting games, this game was about as far off my radar as could be at the time of its release. However, I’d argue that Dead or Alive 3 represents the franchise at its apex of critical and commercial success, before the series’ reputation turned into a joke and Xbox exclusivity went from a selling-point to tanking its global market share. With that said, would DOA3 be able to live up to the success of its predecessor? Read on to find out…

Unlike the other games we’ve covered so far, there is only one release of Dead or Alive 3 and that’s on the original Xbox (a launch title again, no less). So, naturally, that’s the game I played here for this analysis. Enjoy.

Love

• New Characters – A new entry in a fighting game means new characters, and there are some pretty great additions here in Dead or Alive 3:
  • Hitomi – First off, we’ve got my main for this franchise, Hitomi. She’s great, what can I say? She’s pretty, but not to a gaudy degree like some other characters in this franchise. She’s strong, having mastered karate at her father’s dojo and now seeking to prove herself on the world stage. She’s also very playful, but has a fierce confidence to her which makes her instantly likeable. She also clearly has feelings for Hayate, who she aided when he lost his memories. Now that Hayate has taken up his place as leader of the Mugen Tenshin clan, they are unable to reconcile the relationship they had before, and this somewhat tragic and sympathetic characterization is a driving force for Hitomi going forward. Plus she’s just plain fun to play. The fact that she makes her debut here gives DOA3 a major boost in my eyes.
  • Then there’s Brad Wong. Character-wise, he’s not actually all that interesting or important. However, what makes him standout is his fighting style. He’s a full-on alcoholic drunken master and this lends him an incredibly distinctive and fun fighting style which can be difficult to face-off against.
  • Then there’s Christie, one of the more important secondary characters in the series. She is an assassin who has been hired to kill Helena (and we later find out is responsible for killing her mother as well). She is also one of the more overtly-sexualized characters in the series (alongside Tina Armstrong), which fits in with her femme fatale characterization. Her fighting style is also perfect for her character, showing her extreme precision with which she dispatches her foes, reminiscent of a snake striking.
  • Hayate also makes his official debut here in DOA3. He was technically in DOA2 as Ein, but now that he has his memories back, he actually plays completely differently, so I think it’s fair enough to note him separately. Plot-wise, he’s pretty important to the overall saga, even if he’s probably the least-interesting of the new characters in terms of personality and playstyle.
• Graphics – It might seem like a no-brainer that DOA3 would be better-looking than DOA2, but you really have to see this game in motion to appreciate it. Fidelity everywhere has been improved by a lot, but the most impressive things are the little details. The stage “Snow” is a snow-covered forest and, my God, the snow effects are legitimately impressive. The snow deforms as you move through it, stays that way for the duration of the fight and, if you get knocked into a tree, then blankets of snow will fall down from the treetops. The ninja temple also has a mirror-reflection on the floor which looks insanely good even today in 2024. DOA2‘s presentation was great, albeit with some rough edges that were easy to ignore. With this art style and the additional details, DOA3 just looks downright amazing, full-stop.
• Stage Design – Another key way in which DOA3 improves on its predecessor is in its stages. Rather than just designing more stage hazards, Team Ninja have gotten creative with the types of stages you can battle on. For example, the “Forest” stage is very large and dotted with trees throughout which you can fight around and then knock your opponent into to extend a combo or cause additional damage. It completely shakes up the “flat square with walls” stages that you usually run into in 3D fighters and makes positioning and move choice extremely important. Then there’s the “Ice Cave”, where you can launch enemies into large icicles, which shatter on impact, changing the stage itself in the process. Then there’s the usual falling stage hazards and walls which we’re used to, but the added variety is extremely welcome. Even the more “traditional” stages like “Aqua Palace”, which takes place in an underwater glass dome, are absolutely gorgeous to look at. DOA3 has, hands down, some of the best stages in the series and they make every battle just that much more interesting.
• Ayane – I need to give Ayane a special shout-out in this game. Dead or Alive games struggle to create compelling narratives, but they really managed to craft a satisfying story here for Ayane. As I said in DOA2‘s entry, Ayane is very tragic. Despite being half-sisters, Kasumi was treated as a princess, whereas Ayane was shunned by her clan for being conceived during the rape of her mother. This led to resentment between her and her half-sister and she threw herself into the way of the ninja to gain the love of her adopted father, Genra. In the previous two games, Ayane spent her entire narrative chasing after Kasumi to try to kill her for abandoning their village. This, of course, ended in failure each time. However, in this game, Genra has been captured by DOATEC and experimented on, turning him into a living weapon. Despite the insistence of Hayate and Ryu Hayabusa that they will deal with Genra, Ayane views it as her duty to put him out of his misery, both as his protégé and his daughter. This gives her a much more compelling narrative and, when she ultimately succeeds, it’s a sad moment. You’re happy to see Ayane triumph for once, but her ending shows her crying over what she had to do and the uncertainty of her future in the wake of this event. It’s genuinely heartbreaking and it really cements her as one of my favourite characters in this franchise.

Hate

• Genra Fight – Tengu was a really weird final boss for DOA2, but he at least played like a fitting final boss for that game. Genra, though? Genra is fucking bullshit. You reach the final boss and then suddenly the camera angle of the game changes to over-the-shoulder (despite the controls remaining entirely the same, so it throws your entire perception and orientation off). Genra’s entire gameplay involves pushing you back as far as possible and then hitting you with one of three ranged attacks: a sweeping flamethrower, a blast wave, and an energy ball. You have to perform very specific actions to avoid getting hit by these attacks (either a ducking move to avoid the flamethrower or move IMMEDIATELY when he starts the attack to outrun the sweep, and side-stepping to avoid the wave and energy ball), which effectively turns this stage of the fight into more of an action game or platformer than a traditional fighter. Then, when you close the distance with him, he has a very limited moveset, which can be easily cheesed by holds, which will put you behind him so you can get some more hits in. Oh, and if you launch him into the air with one of your attacks, when he hits the ground it creates a blast which damages you and knocks you backwards, putting you back into the “dodge ranged attacks” part of the fight again. It’s infuriating, punishes characters with movesets which have a lot of launches (like Helena), and just encourages you to cheese the hell out of the fight rather than actually… y’know, playing a fighting game normally. It’s a terrible way to end the game and single-handedly lowers Dead or Alive 3 overall in my estimation.
• Story Presentation – The story presentation in Dead or Alive 3 is pretty much identical to its predecessor (immediately thrown into fights, you get a short cutscene between them sometimes, repeat). Considering that the narrative presentation was one of my few complaints about Dead or Alive 2, it’s pretty disappointing to see it remain unchanged here. The only substantial difference is that each character gets a longer ending cutscene… however, this is also a disappointment, because most of these “endings” are extremely unsatisfying. The aforementioned ending for Ayane is the one big exception, and the endings for Tina, Zack, and Gen Fu are good enough, but for the rest…
  • First of all, there’s the ending which don’t really communicate anything new: Kasumi’s still on the run from her clan. Jann Lee’s still out here fighting people to become the strongest. Leifang goes and beats up some yakuza thugs who tried to kidnap a kid… good on you, but I don’t think this is something you were incapable of before the tournament? Bass’s motorcycle breaks down in the desert and he smashes it, tries to fix it, and gets mad when Tina passes him in a sports car. And then there’s Leon… he goes to a desert oasis and sees a mirage of his dead lover.
  • Then there’s the endings which feel more like an introductory cutscene: Hitomi reminisces about besting her father and leaving the dojo to find stronger foes to overcome. Bayman remembers how his parents died in a war and then goes out to kill Donovan… which was supposed to be his entire motivation throughout this game already, so shouldn’t his ending have him actually trying to do the deed? Then there’s Ryu’s ending, which sees him fishing and then he gets a new ninja assignment and leaves… there’s a cyclical, professional quality to it, but it’s kind of unsatisfying as an ending compared to if it was the introduction to the character.
  • Then there’s the endings which are just a big “nothing”: Brad Wong’s entire ending is just him meditating. Hayate’s is similar, he just stands around in a tree and then jumps out to go do ninja shit.
  • Oh, and then there’s the ending which are literally just fanservice. Helena is on her boat in a red bikini and then jumps into the ocean to swim with dolphins while the camera luxuriates on her body. And then there’s Christie, who has a shower scene with rear nudity and then struts around her apartment in her underwear. It’s by far the most overt, in-game fanservice in the franchise up to this point. I guess you could make the argument that it’s a decent “reward” for the player to unlock, but narratively, these are very unsatisfying endings.
• Sparse Unlocks – One of the ways that DOA games incentivize trying out every character and game mode is by rewarding the player with unlockable characters and costumes. At the very least, you usually get a costume as a reward when you complete a character’s story mode. Dead or Alive 3 bucks this trend in the worst way. There are very few unlockables in this game: usually around one costume per character, and you can also unlock Ein as a playable character. Making matters worse is that there are more costumes available, but they were confined to DLC and/or an Official Xbox Magazine bonus disc, meaning that they’re basically unobtainable today.
• Xbox Exclusivity – This one is a bit complicated, but I think that Team Ninja’s move to Xbox exclusivity starting with this game really knee-capped the franchise’s future. Let’s break this down:
  • First of all, I do have to admit that the Xbox era was a creative and financial boon for Team Ninja. Dead or Alive 3 and the Ninja Gaiden games were major successes for the studio, so I can see why sticking with Xbox seemed like a no-brainer. However, history has shown that the Xbox brand fared incredibly poorly outside North America, so an Asian developer like Team Ninja was ultimately limiting its reach and appeal by sticking with the console for as long as they did (this can also be seen in how the Ninja Gaiden games ended up getting ported to PlayStation within a couple years of release). I suspect that more than ten years of Xbox exclusivity shrank the market share for Dead or Alive, especially compared to its competition.
  • The controllers for the first couple Xbox consoles were also known for not being very good for fighting games, which likely further dis-incentivized people from trying these games out or from taking them seriously compared to their competition.

One of the biggest struggles that Dead or Alive 3 has is that it lives in the shadow of its predecessor. On the one hand, it’s nearly identical in terms of modes and gameplay, with the only major difference being that full 3D movement is much easier to perform. DOA2 already played well, so this means that DOA3 also plays well. However, you expect a sequel to expand upon its foundations and you can’t help but compare it unfavourably when it does not. Between the poor final boss and limited unlockable content, DOA3 isn’t quite able to live up to DOA2, but it’s still a good time in its own right, especially considering the new characters and stage variety on offer. It’s just too bad that we couldn’t get a fully-realized version of the game, because maybe then Dead or Alive 3 could have been the best entry in the franchise.