Halo: Final Thoughts (BONUS)

And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! I’m so glad that I managed to finally get through the Halo games – like I said at the start, I’ve had a lot of enthusiasm for this series, long before I got a chance to play them for myself. As you can see with my Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list, Halo 3 was such a well-crafted shooter that it made the list, and Halo 2 even cracked my top 25, which is pretty wild for a game I played for the first time only a few months prior! Funnily enough, my son has somehow found himself interested in Halo after getting some of the Mega Bloks figures. During the course of these playthroughs, we had a few magical evenings where he would sneak down past his bedtime and excitedly watch me play some Halo for a little bit, delighting in seeing Master Chief kick some ass before being sent back to bed. Hopefully I’m instilling in him some of that same wonder that first made me fall in love with this franchise.

As a bonus, I started 2025 with a throw-back session of Halo 3 multiplayer with friends. It was absolutely glorious, we all had a blast fragging each other. I honestly think that these games’ multiplayer modes might be even better today than they were on release – it’s so refreshing to play a multiplayer shooter that doesn’t have any battle passes, live service bullshit, paid cosmetics, daily/weekly challenges, etc. It’s just pure, unadulterated fun, tuned just the way you like it, thanks to Halo‘s fantastic custom game options!

Halo Games Ranked

Here is how I would rank the mainline Halo games’ campaigns:

If you read all of my Love/Hate articles, then I feel like these rankings should be pretty self-explanatory. However, these rankings would be a bit controversial in the Halo fandom, so…

  • S-tier: Halo 2
    • Halo 2 is simultaneously the most unabashedly fun game in the franchise, and expands the narrative scope to a far grander and cinematic degree. Is it more linear? Sure, but I do not particularly mind when we get linear games like this (also, I think people overstate how open the original Halo was). Halo 2 is a fantastically-curated injection of fun.
  • A-tier: Halo 3
    • Gameplay-wise, Halo 3 is probably the tightest, most well-balanced, and best-developed campaign in the franchise. However, its narrative is pretty weak for a trilogy-closer, especially in comparison to its predecessor, which makes me less-enthusiastic about it. I love a satisfying ending, so Halo 3‘s weaker narrative is a legitimate mark against it for me.
  • B-tier: Halo Infinite, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Reach
    • Halo Infinite at the top of B-tier and ahead of Combat Evolved is probably my most controversial opinion on this list, but I loved its gunplay that much. If not for the open world hurting the game’s level design, this could have had a serious shot of hitting A-tier, that’s how much fun I had with it.
    • For a lot of Halo fans, Combat Evolved is their favourite game in the franchise, so seeing it rank below Infinite is probably infuriating them right now. I’ll reiterate what I said before: the level design is just not fun to play. Between confusing levels with reused assets making it difficult to tell where you’re supposed to go, and repetitive encounter design, I spend way too much time in Combat Evolved not enjoying myself to truly love it. That said, it laid a rock-solid foundation and I really have to give it credit for how revolutionary it was on release.
    • Halo: Reach was somewhat disappointing to me. Its narrative and characters just didn’t resonate with me, and the fairly substantial changes to the series’ gameplay makes it less fun to play than Halo 3 was for me. It just kind of plodded along and then, suddenly, it was over. It definitely gets better as it goes, but I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I wanted to.
  • C-tier: Halo 4, Halo 3: ODST
    • Halo 4 operates kind of like fridge logic: you enjoy yourself when you’re playing it, but when it’s all over and then you think back on it, you decide that you enjoyed it less and less. It’s decent, but definitely a step down after one of the greatest game trilogies of all-time.
    • Halo 3: ODST down this low is probably the second-most controversial opinion on this list. Some people will say that this is their favourite campaign in the franchise, and claim it’s so deep and emotional: what game are you people playing that I missed out on? I cannot stand the characters’ dialogue, the semi-open world sections are dull, and the combat encounters are poorly-balanced.
  • D-tier: Halo 5: Guardians
    • Halo 5 was obviously going to be at the bottom of this list, to the point where I almost considered putting a tier between C and D and calling it “comically empty space to emphasize how much Halo 5 sucks”. It’s a bad Halo game in particular, but it’s not even a good co-op shooter either.

Halo Weapons Ranked

There are a lot of weapons over the course of this series, so naturally I wanted to rank them. Note that I am not ranking each individual weapon for each time it appeared in a game; rather, I am only using the best version of each weapon, which will be noted on the image. Some weapons are technically “different” weapons in subsequent entries, but if it’s just “_____ with a different name”, I’m just going to cover the peak version of that gun. Some weapons don’t really have a “peak” version, so I’ll go with the game that introduced them instead (eg, the sniper rifle is great and basically the same in every Halo game, so I’ve assigned it to Combat Evolved). Finally, Halo 5 and Infinite have “upgraded” versions of each weapon, which I’m ignoring entirely, since they would throw off the entire list.

Okay, got it? Here’s my ranking of the weapons:

There’s no way in hell that I’m explaining all these individually, so I’ll let this list speak for itself. However, I will break these down by game to see which one has the best weapons! There are 60 weapons on this list, but I’m going to exclude the 7 grenades since they can’t really be associated with one particular game, for a total of 53 weapons across 8 games to look at. Points will be awarded with the first place (M90 Shotgun) getting 53 points, the second place (Beamrifle) getting 52 points, and so on.

So, with that said, here’s how the points broke down:

  • Halo: Combat Evolved: 169 points (42.25 average)
  • Halo 2: 253 points (36.14 average)
  • Halo 3: 255 points (23.18 average)
  • Halo 3: ODST: Literally fucking zero, lol.
  • Halo: Reach: 151 points (16.78 average)
  • Halo 4: 249 points (27.69 average)
  • Halo 5: Guardians: 67 points (33.5 average)
  • Halo Infinite: 287 points (26.09 average)

Some observations from this data:

  • Halo: Combat Evolved has only a few weapons that have stood the test of time compared to its sequels, hence its fairly low point total. However, those weapons that have continued to stand out are top-tier (literally, that game’s shotgun is insane and topped this list without question).
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, Halo 2‘s weapons have also really stood out for being great, with the second highest overall average and a very high point total. I would say that, arguably, this would make it the strongest overall roster (if not for the completely outclassed Brute Plasma Rifle, this game’s overall average would be nearly identical to Combat Evolved).
  • Halo 3 is, unfortunately, brought down by its glut of very mediocre weapons, which tank its overall average. It’s probably got the best-balanced weapons of the entire franchise, but it doesn’t really reflect well on this list, because many of its weapons end up getting poached by other entries in the franchise where they performed better.
  • Halo 3: ODST getting zero points doesn’t surprise me much. No weapon in that game really stood out to me, and it plays worse than Halo 3, so this was kind of inevitable.
  • Halo: Reach has a lot of unique weapons, so it was inevitably going to get some points here, but having the lowest overall average and a very low point total shows just how “good” these additions were. If not for a series-best Needler, things would be pretty dire.
  • Halo 4 also introduced a lot of new weapons, four of which ended up being personal favourites, which give it a solid overall average. The guns here are pretty good, what else can I say? Oh, one thing to note though: if I was counting grenades, then Halo 4‘s average would get tanked, because Splinter and Pulse grenades SUCK.
  • Halo 5: Guardians only had two entries on this list: the most overpowered Plasma Pistol in the franchise, and the Splinter Turret. All of the other Promethean weapons were more interesting and fun in Halo 4, so this game gets absolutely screwed as a result… which is good, because it’s what it deserves.
  • Like 4, Halo Infinite introduces a glut of new weapons to the franchise, but most of these are incredibly fun to use, hence its highest overall point total. However, it has a fairly low overall average due to the really generic UNSC rifles and the awful Disruptor pistol.

Halo Enemies Ranked

Like the previous category, I’m taking into account only the “best” version of any particular enemy type across the series. I’m also not differentiating the sub-classes of enemies (Elite Zealots, Brute Chieftains, etc), each ranking has taken them all as a whole. The main exception to this are Jackals, which have a few very distinct variants, which I have given their own entries:

And, just for fun, we’ll do the same scoring system as last time (out of 21 total entries):

  • Halo: Combat Evolved: 96 points (10.66 average)
  • Halo 2: 27 points (9 average)
  • Halo 3: 0 points… ouch.
  • Halo 3: ODST: 9 points, both total and average.
  • Halo: Reach: 15 points… again, both total, and average.
  • Halo 4: 18 points (9 average)
  • Halo 5: Guardians: 18 points (9 average… I’m noticing a pattern here)
  • Halo Infinite: 27 points (13.5 average)

I definitely need to give some observations from this data since, now that I have it call collated, it’s skewed pretty badly by the small sample size:

  • It should really go without saying that Halo: Combat Evolved skews these numbers significantly, claiming 9 out of the 20 enemy types on this list. This game established how the core enemy types play (Grunts < Jackals < Elites). In nearly every subsequent game, they’ve either functioned identically, or they’ve been notably worse. It’s amazing how well they captured the fundamental essence of these enemy types right out of the gate, and the game deserves all the accolades for it. However, the Flood enemies drag the total down somewhat – they’re decent as a way to shake-up the core gameplay, but they are very repetitive to fight and you quickly tire of dealing with pod infectors and bursters, not to mention all the ones firing rocket launchers at you. The Sentinels are also really dull and ineffective enemies.
  • Halo 2 mostly continues the formula established by its predecessor, but it does introduce a couple new enemy types. Most notably are the notorious Jackal snipers. They are potentially lethal, but they’re handled fairly in my opinion and are a pretty ingenious addition to the formula. The Drones are also a fairly unique and underutilized enemy type, but they’re at their best here in this game. Unfortunately, this game also has the Sentinel Enforcers, those annoying-ass, large, shielded sentinels that you have to blow apart piece by piece to defeat. Every time I had to fight these things, it was a total slog. The only thing keeping them from the bottom of the list is that they’re at least an uncommon enemy type.
  • Halo 3 had zero enemies make the list… which, I guess, isn’t too odd, since it’s basically a trilogy-closer and isn’t introducing anything completely new. In my opinion, its enemies aren’t doing anything particularly new or notable compared to its predecessors or successors.
  • Halo 3: ODST, on the other hand, actually gets some points this time, for the Engineers. These guys have been very under-utilized through the series, mainly because they aren’t impactful by themselves and have the potential to be annoying when they buff all nearby enemies with an overshield. I didn’t find them that annoying in my playthroughs, hence their fairly middling placement.
  • Halo: Reach is another game that basically just has the same enemies as before, although it does introduce one new enemy type: the Jackal Skirmishers. These guys aren’t as fun as regular Jackals, but they do shake-up their playstyle substantially – instead of being slow with a big shield, they’re fast with a could small shields. A solid, late-game introduction to the series.
  • Halo 4 introduced the Prometheans… which doesn’t help it too much, because there were only a couple different types of Prometheans, and they aren’t as fun to fight as the Covenant are. In particular, the Watchers are known for being really annoying, due to running away and resurrecting Knights. I did not have much issue with them in my playthroughs, but I could see them being lower in some peoples’ estimation.
  • Halo 5: Guardians, we actually have a couple interesting notes here. The Knights are significantly more fun to fight than they were in Halo 4, hence their fairly high placement in B-tier. However, I really disliked the Armiger Soldiers, which are kind of like mini-version of the Halo 4 Knights, which dragged the game’s overall score down.
  • Finally, we have Halo Infinite, which pulls off a coup by finally perfecting the Brutes. These guys have been a questionable enemy type for so long in the franchise, and have seen so many re-designs to try to get them to work, but I actually really enjoy fighting them in this game. Infinite also features the Skimmers, which show up on occasion and sort of act like the Drones. They don’t make a huge impact, but the Brutes were so good that, funnily enough, they manage to give Infinite the second highest average. Obviously, this is due to the tiny sample sizes, and due to Combat Evolved hogging most of the best enemy types, but funny to note nonetheless.

What Does the Future Hold For Halo?

The future is pretty uncertain for Halo. Halo Infinite‘s launch went well, but it very quickly bled players due to monetization and content issues, and the game has underperformed as a result. 343 Industries has also suffered mass layoffs on both the management and developer level, the studio itself has been rebranded as “Halo Studios”, and they will be using Unreal Engine for any future games rather than Halo‘s traditional, proprietary engine. So… honestly, no one really knows what will happen, but at this point, Microsoft has mismanaged the franchise so badly that there’s no sense in getting too excited for the future.

Personally, what would I like to see for a future Halo game? Well, as much as I enjoyed Infinite, I don’t think it’s the blueprint for the franchise’s future. You can’t just keep making Master Chief fight the Covenant on a Halo ring over and over again. You can get away with a throw-back once in a while, but when that’s done, you’re stuck in the same place you were at before.

I’d also prefer a more curated, linear level design again, but I am fine with the games remaining open world if they can refine the formula and make it more interesting to avoid modern-day open world fatigue. If we can keep the gunplay as good as it is in Infinite, then they’ll already be a long way towards success.

Aaaaaand that’s it for another Love/Hate series! I already have my next one in mind and will begin playing/writing it soon. Writing this one took me a couple months, so don’t expect the next one any time sooner than that. In the meantime, I’ll continue writing and posting here whenever the mood strikes me. (Also, I will continue/finish the Resident Evil Love/Hate series at some point in the future. I have not forgotten it or shelved it for good! I’m just having fun enjoying other things right now!)

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo Infinite

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the most recent game in the franchise Halo Infinite. After all the shit 343 Industries had put the fanbase through, expectations were really low for this game, and then got even worse when people saw the reveal trailer, which necessitated a delay to polish the game up for launch. Since then, I’m aware that the game has been through some major highs and lows, so I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot going in. Could 343 finally right the ship and deliver a worthy follow-up to Bungie’s trilogy? Read on to find out…

Love

  • The Gunplay – As far as I’m concerned, Halo Infinite has the best gunplay of the franchise since Halo 3. Shooting enemies just feels so good. This is largely because your shots feel like they have real impact when they land and there’s some really satisfying feedback that goes along with it. This is best exemplified with the big power weapons, which impact with a massive explosion of fire and colour and a satisfyingly loud bang. Even smaller, standard weapons like the Mauler pack a punch and are really satisfying to blast away your foes with. It feels like they took a cue from Doom (2016) and put a ton of effort into making sure that combat makes you feel like a total badass.
  • Enemies Have Personality Again! – The Covenant in the first couple Halo games had so much personality, making them into some of the most fun video game enemies to fight. Grunts screaming and running when you started killing their comrades, contrasted with the tactical, honourable combat of the Elites made the game feel like it wasn’t just a simple shooting gallery. This was eroded away over the course of the series, with them eventually just feeling like regular video game bad guys that you need to shoot to win the game. In Halo Infinite though, the Covenant soldiers have so much personality again. This is largely due to them being extremely chatty – you’ll hear Grunts acting arrogant, only to immediately start squealing and freaking out when they see you, Jackals obsessing over collecting your bounty, Brutes yelling taunts, and Elites steeling themselves for battle, etc. All this chatter almost makes me feel sorry as I mow them down by the dozen.
    • Also, on a somewhat related note, the enemy variety in this game is fantastic. There have been different tiers of each Covenant troop in all previous games, but they’ve been expanded here and are more notably differentiated in my opinion. For example, let’s look at just the Brutes: we’ve got the standard Brutes, multiple variants in heavy armour, guys with jet packs and heavy weapons, chieftains with various weapon configurations, and even melee-only berserkers who rush head-long at you. Oh, and any one of these can have shields and various weapon combinations, making the variety of combat scenarios even among one enemy type truly vast. Good God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually really enjoy fighting Brutes in this game!
    • On another related note, I love the UNSC banter in this game. They spout all sorts of cheesy one-liners which perfectly capture the feel of early 2000s video game writing.
  • New Weapons – As usual, Halo Infinite introduces a bunch of new and remixed weapons and, due to this game’s emphasis on fun gameplay, there are some truly awesome additions. My personal favourites are the Skewer (which fires a massive, impaling spear which one-shots most enemies), the Hydra (which is kind of like a Halo version of the 40k boltgun, with an alt-fire mode that homes in on enemies!), and the Heatwave (a shotgun that allows you to set its spread to go horizontal or vertical, making it much more accurate at longer ranges). Making things even better, most guns have special upgraded versions which you can get, which make them even more devastating to use. Legitimately, the only weapon I don’t like is the Disruptor Pistol, but everything else I will gleefully pickup and mow down the enemy with.
  • Grappling Hook – Ever since Halo 3 introduced equipment pickups, these games have really struggled to introduce an equipment ability which really sticks with you. The Grappling Hook is easily the best addition to the core formula, bar none. I (perhaps notoriously) hate open world games with dull traversal, but the grappling hook makes swinging about this world quicker and more entertaining, while also opening up space for creative mobility during combat. Making things better, the grappling hook has offensive abilities too, allowing to you grab distant weapons and items, and you can also hook an enemy to swing in for a melee strike. It can also be upgraded to stun enemies, which can be really helpful when you’re getting beat down by a particular guy with a power weapon and need to close the distance to them quickly.
  • The Story – Halo Infinite‘s narrative is definitely an improvement on the previous two 343 Industries games. While Halo 4 was bogged down by lore and Halo 5 was vapid and rushed, Infinite takes a more cinematic, character-driven approach that makes it feel more akin to Metal Gear Solid 5 than its two predecessors. The overall story here is basically a throwback: you’re on a Halo ring and the Covenant Banished are trying to activate it, so you have to stop them. The villains also have a fairly large role in the narrative and often show up to taunt you directly. So, while they are fairly generic and melodramatic, at least they leave more of an impression than, say, the Didact or Eternal Warden did. It takes a while to get there, but this story does end up being fairly entertaining by the end.

Mixed

  • Scan Pulse – Halo Infinite introduces a “scan” button, which will send out a pulse which briefly points highlights all weapons, enemies, and interactable objects in the vicinity, and will display where your objectives are. It’s definitely handy, but it also just feels like a crutch: I constantly want to press this button to make sure that I’m not missing anything. The only reason I don’t do it is because that’s really fucking annoying to keep up, so I just resign myself to missing things. That said, there are times where you actually do need it, because you can’t find some random panel where you need to press a button to advance the mission, and it won’t make that clear to you. Maybe it’s just like this because modern games have gotten so big and detailed that it’s way too easy to miss anything important, but it feels like an inelegant solution to the problem.
  • The Characters – A character-driven story needs its characters, and while they are a bit of a mixed bag, what we get here is an improvement on the last couple games overall. First of all, Master Chief is back to being the effortless badass he was in Halo 2, and those Doom (2016) influences have helped make his dry humour even more awesome. Where things get a bit more mixed is in the supporting cast:
    • The Pilot is a coward trying to flee, but gets caught up with Master Chief and becomes exasperated as he gets dragged into danger again and again. He can be somewhat annoying as a result, but he does grow on you as the game goes, and at least I can understand and sympathize with him.
    • The Weapon, on the other hand… I’m really mixed on her. She’s our new AI companion, who is an incomplete copy of Cortana that was supposed to find Cortana, destroy her, and then delete herself. However, upon Cortana’s deletion, the Weapon finds herself still operational, much to her confusion. Her personality is noticeably different compared to Cortana; the Weapon is much more childlike and inquisitive. While she is fairly well fleshed out as a character and I’m glad they’ve gone to the effort to differentiate her from Cortana, she just ends up being kind of annoying to me. Some of this is down to her dialogue, which can be fairly cringey. She’s also our objective-giver, so after every single objective you complete, she’ll say something along the lines of “oh hey we need to go find ____ to advance the story, lets go do it!” This bothers me, because I can just feel the developers prodding me every time she says something like this (which is a lot). Like… it’s an open world, I’ve got camps to capture and soldiers to rescue, I can see my objective markers, just let me do what I want to.
  • Open World Structure – I am fairly burnt out on open world games, so I was pretty concerned about how Halo Infinite would fare as a result. Luckily, it works out fairly well I’d say, although there are some pretty big caveats to that. One of the most revolutionary aspects of the early Halo games were their massive, open sandboxes, so going fully open-world just feels like an evolution of that concept. I think it’s best summed up this way: playing Halo Infinite is like playing Combat Evolved the way you imagined it in 2001. That said…
    • Big caveat #1: Halo Infinite is basically a carbon copy of the Far Cry open world structure which has become very tired in the past decade. For most of this game’s runtime, you’re just capturing bandit camps and dealing with a bunch of filler side quests which provide very little incentive to complete them, other than checking off some boxes on your mini-map and allowing you to spawn more powerful weapons and vehicles at captured bandit camps. Surprisingly, this didn’t wear thin for me (perhaps because the game has a fairly reasonable playtime), but if you’ve been playing more open world games than I have, then this may be a bigger issue for you.
    • Big caveat #2: Halo Infinite has the worst level design of the entire franchise, bar none. Since 343 Industries cannot curate encounters or force you to complete missions in a certain order, objectives are absolutely swarming with enemies, and your missions are extremely generic: press X buttons to expose power cores that you need to blow up, kill all bad guys in the area, blow up X objectives, etc. This would be unacceptable in any previous Halo game, but for some reason, being open world makes this less of an issue for me, even though in the back of my mind I know I prefer a more curated, creative, and diversified approach. The gunplay in this game is just so good that it props up issues like this which would have sunk a weaker game. I think this is why, as much fun as I was having playing the game, I just didn’t find myself wanting to play it as much as some of the other games in the franchise, and my play sessions end up being shorter and more spread out than for, say, Halo 2 and 3.

Hate

  • Skipping Over the End of Halo 5 is Cowardly – As much as I enjoy this game’s throw-back to classic Halo and its fantastic gunplay, I just cannot get over the fact that it skips over the end of Halo 5 and basically soft-reboots the entire franchise to not have to bother dealing with the consequences of it. For all my problems with Halo 5, the ending was downright bold. Only a handful of humans managed to escape Cortana before she fires EMP bombs at all worlds resisting the AI takeover, blasting them into the stone age. This hinted at a future game that’s scrappier and lower-tech, where we have to scavenge for better weapons and armour, akin to The Terminator. Plus, Halo 5 barely even started to deal with Cortana as our new main villain, so having her die off-screen before Halo Infinite begins is borderline insane and makes this entire extended universe of continuity feel like a joke. Instead, it’s back to the ol’ status quo: Chief fighting the Covenant on a Halo ring. Is that all this franchise will ever be? Because that’s a depressing future if it is…
    • Granted, Infinite does touch on this storyline in its final hours, but it’s done in such a way where it feels like we skipped over an entire game’s worth of plot and consequences… like, imagine if Star Wars went from Attack of the Clones to A New Hope. It would feel kind of weird and disjointed, right? That’s kind of what playing Infinite is like.
  • Load Times – Halo Infinite has some of the longest load times that I’ve seen in a game since the PS3 era. The first time I loaded up the game, it legitimately took at least a minute just to get to the main menu. Thankfully, it loads quicker from there on, but if you’re like me and are playing this game for the campaign, there’s an extra “fuck you” in store: the game always loads into the multiplayer menu, so you have to then select “Campaign” and then go through another lengthy loading screen to play that. Thankfully, once you get in-game, there are basically no more loading screens, but it’s still enough friction up-front that I sometimes didn’t even want to bother starting the game up.
  • The Other Equipment Choices Suck – If there’s one big issue with the grappling hook, it’s that it’s arguably too good… which is actually kind of a problem, because you have other equipment you can use. However, they are so inferior in comparison that they aren’t worth using at all. Like, the first equipment you can switch to is the Threat Sensor, which… highlights nearby enemies. Big fucking whoop. The only time you might want to use this is when an Elite pulls out an energy sword and uses its active camouflage. However, I would literally rather blindly fight an invisible enemy that can one-shot me than go through the convoluted sequence of button presses to switch from the grappling hook to the threat sensor… so that’s exactly what I did. I legitimately never used any piece of equipment other than the grappling hook the entire game, and never felt like I missed out for this.
  • Rough Around the Edges – Halo Infinite is a game that ended up needing to be delayed for a full year in order to get it into a shippable state… and thank God they did, because the game we got is still pretty rough at times, so I can only imagine what it would have been like if it released in 2020! I’m talking some pretty stiff animations, questionable optimization (substantial frame drops are not an uncommon occurrence), random bugs, weird ragdolling (especially when you die), guns turning into unintelligible blobs that stretch infinitely across the game world, etc. Oh, and there’s one mission where you will be told that you need to visit four beacons, which will be marked on your map and everything. However, these beacons do not allow you to progress until after you’re told about the mission, at which point you are expected to walk forward a little bit to actually trigger it. On two separate occasions, I fast travelled away before the mission triggered without even realizing it, and was then left completely confused about why I couldn’t do anything at these beacons. This could be a minor annoyance, but the area you need to go to to trigger the mission is far away from any fast travel point you will have unlocked up to this point, which turns it into a giant, confusing headache which is far too easy to find yourself mired in.
  • Overpowered Weapon/Vehicle Spawns – As you complete objectives in Halo Infinite, you will get “Valor” points which allow you to spawn a chosen weapon or vehicle if your Valor is above a specific threshold. Initially this will allow you to call for an assault rifle or a mongoose ATV, but you quickly start getting the ability to call in upgraded versions of the game’s strongest weapons, or even goddamn Scorpion tanks! It’s cool that they give you the choice, I guess…? But, at a certain point, you have to actively choose not to trivialize the game if you want to have fun. It also robs that feeling of excitement in the tank sections in previous games, as it was no longer this surprise awaiting you, and I just kept finding myself starting every mission with the exact same overpowered guns.
  • Worst Vehicle Physics in the Franchise – You can spawn in any vehicle you want at forward operating bases (FOBs) that you capture. This sounds great, especially since it can take a few minutes to get where you’re going in this open world… however, I usually just hoof it on foot, because the vehicle physics in this game suck, particularly for the warthog and mongoose. Like, they control about as well as ever, but they crash, flip over, and get stuck on the terrain constantly, which I can only assume is due to the open world structure and a lack of polish.

Halo Infinite really surprised me. I had heard that its campaign was decent, but I’m so sick of open world games that I was not expecting much at all. Its gunplay was so immediately fun though that it sucked me in. It may look like there’s a lot of things I hated about this game, but honestly, these are all nitpicks. For literally every single one of these complaints, you can add onto the end “…the gunplay sure is fucking great though”. I had an absolute blast with Halo Inifinite, to the point where open world bullshit and a cowardly plot reset couldn’t even dampen my enthusiasm for the game.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo 5 – Guardians

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 5: Guardians. I’ve been well aware of this game’s reputation long before I played it: stories about the marketing being deceptive, the game being full of repetitive boss fights, being downed constantly in co-op, and a despised story. Honestly though, I didn’t dislike Halo 4 as much as some people, so I’m going into this with an open mind. Maybe it can shake-up the series formula in some interesting ways? Maybe all the shit people sling at 343 Industries is unwarranted? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Meridian – Halo games haven’t really bothered to explore the wider cultures of humanity. That sort of thing is generally relegated to the EU novels. As a result, it was fascinating when the game heads to the human frontier world, Meridian, and we get to see the tension between the UNSC and the colonists. In the Halo universe, the SPARTAN program was developed to crush dissent from separatist colonists. The animosity that the people of Meridian hold towards the SPARTANs is palpable, and the way that the SPARTANs have to be extra polite to avoid pissing them off makes for some legitimate tension. Perhaps the most interesting thing here though is that Meridian’s governor, Sloan, is an AI. This took me by surprise, but it’s kind of brilliant: of course humanity would have AI politicians, it makes so much sense to implement. Making this even more interesting, Sloan is in the early onset of rampancy, making his actions somewhat erratic and making the whole situation even more tense, since he could go off the deep end at any moment.
  • Quality of Life Improvements – In its efforts to modernize the franchise, Halo 5 has some nice quality of life improvements. One that I particularly liked was that you can now swap seats in a vehicle by pressing A instead of having to go through an animation to leave the vehicle and then manually move to find the seat you want. The game also allows you to give simple commands to your squadmates, which they will follow fairly reliably.
  • More Movement Options – In line with Halo 5‘s QoL improvements and modernizations, movement has been overhauled to be much faster and more in-line with the FPS games of the day. You can now grab ledges while jumping, do a charging attack or a ground pound, do a quick rocket thruster dodge, aim in mid-air to float momentarily… oh, and you can just sprint endlessly now too. As you would expect, this shakes-up the series’ core game feel and pace substantially.

Mixed

  • Modernized Controls – When I was playing through Combat Evolved, I kept getting tripped up by its old-school control scheme (R1 to reload and pickup items? L3 to crouch? B to melee? L2 to throw grenade?). FPS control schemes have become so standardized that it’s weird going back to an older game and trying to get acclimated. However… I just played through six Halo games that all retained that control scheme. Going into Halo 5, I was used to that traditional scheme and was completely thrown off when it played exactly like a modern shooter (B to reload/pickup items, L2 to aim down sights, L1 to throw grenade, etc). I didn’t like this at first… but, honestly, this is just me complaining about the game being different. Changing the controls to be more familiar to modern gamers is fine and does not take away from anything. It’s not even like Resident Evil‘s tank controls, where you’re being nostalgic for a fundamentally different way to experience those games: you could remap the controls if you wanted to and it would play the exact same.

Hate

  • Fucking Loot Boxes – This game has paid loot boxes in it. Do I even need to say more than that? That, by itself, should give you an idea of the sort of bullshit you’re going to be subjected to in this game. Strap in, we’re just getting started here…
  • It’s a COD Clone – The back half of the PS3/Xbox 360 era was a graveyard for FPS games trying to emulate the success of Call of Duty. Every franchise was bending over backwards to change or dilute its core tone and gameplay systems in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator COD fan. Here’s the thing though: every one of those games that went all-in on mass appeal failed. By the time that the new console generation was rolling around, this was pretty well known and we were getting far less COD clones. Hell, with the dawn of the PS4 and Xbox One, even COD had outstayed its welcome and was facing some pretty heavy backlash. So, I can only imagine that 343 Industries looked at all these failed COD clones and said “We can do worse”. I could feel the influence of Call of Duty on this franchise since at least Reach, but in Halo 5 it is blatant (even down to the aforementioned modernized controls, which basically just bring the franchise into parity with Call of Duty). Nearly every bit of gameplay that was distinctly “Halo” has been stripped away in favour of appealing to the Call of Duty crowd.
    • The biggest impact of this approach is that the combined arms, open sandbox structure that most Halo games employ (to varying degrees) has been largely eliminated in favour of much more linear shooting galleries. In their place, 343 Industries have instead inserted several bombastic, scripted set-piece action moments that Call of Duty campaigns are famous for. These moments just feel vapid, the sort of noisy light shows that we had largely tired of years earlier. Meanwhile, the linear levels are painfully mediocre, with every level being a series of “kill all enemies in this room to unlock the door, then move onto the next room and do the same, etc”. These moments were always the weak, filler portions of the previous Halo games, so seeing that be the core gameplay loop here is pretty dire. That said, if this was the only problem, then Halo 5 would just be mediocre. However…
  • Co-op Focus Screws the Game Design – Halo games are famous for their campaigns which can be played through entirely in co-op. I actually was unaware that you could play up to four-player co-op in these games as early as Halo 3, but you honestly would never realize it: the campaign was clearly designed for single-player and is balanced as such. Halo 5, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up with four players in mind, which means that things have changed quite a bit…
    • Pity Halo 5‘s level design: not only is it getting fucked for being a COD clone, but then the four player co-op comes in to fuck it from an entirely different angle. To accommodate entertaining four people at once, combat encounters are far less focused. Each area feels like a miniature multiplayer arena, where you start the encounter by picking a lane and then clear out all the enemies there until everyone has cleared out their zone. You end up getting swarmed by enemy forces from all angles, including occasions where you have enemies spawning behind you. The game ended up reminding me way too much of Operation Raccoon City, although the core gunplay was good enough that it’s not quite that bad at least.
    • Since you can be revived now, Halo 5 is simultaneously more forgiving and more punishing than other Halo games. Sure, you can get revived by your partners if you play sloppily, but you also get a lot more overpowered enemy attacks that will either one-shot you (such as the Eternal Warden’s melee attack), or which have splash damage which is difficult to negate (such as incineration cannons, the Hunter fuel rod cannon, etc). Naturally, you are going to hear “I’m down, need assistance!” a lot.
  • The Story – Halo 4‘s story was a mess, but at least it had a solid emotional core that you could latch onto. Halo 5 ditches much of the sci-fi gobbledygook that plagued its predecessor, but it’s no less confusing for it…
    • First of all, the narrative is poorly conveyed. The actual plot here is pretty simple: Cortana is back and evil now, Master Chief goes AWOL to try to find her, SPARTAN Locke is tasked with apprehending Master Chief, and they all get caught up in Cortana’s plot to resurrect the Guardians – giant Forerunner robots which were used to enforce order in the galaxy. Good luck keeping track of what’s going on though, because Halo 5 just assumes you already know what’s happening at any given time. Like… to give you an idea of how bad the storytelling in this game is, the game just suddenly assumes that Cortana is evil before we actually have any reason to believe that to be the case. You’re just expected to go along with it, but that’s a massive change that needs some time to breathe. Or how about the Guardians: they’re supposed to be the big threat that the game revolves around, but we never really get a sense of what they do or why they’re so scary. Again, the game just assumes that you already know what’s going on.
    • Then there’s the inciting incident which puts this entire plot into motion: Master Chief gets knocked out, hallucinates about Cortana, who gives him some mysterious directives, and then he just decides to do what she told him to (to the point of disobeying his superiors to do so). Like… what the fuck? I get that Halo 3 and 4 had weird hallucinations with Cortana, but they never really came across like they were “real”. This here in Halo 5? It’s full-on space magic, I don’t know how else they can really justify it.
    • Maybe the worst part about this story though is what it does to the Master Chief. He spends this entire game chasing after Cortana instead of dealing with the existential threat of the Guardians… in fact, by chasing after Cortana, he’s actually kind of complicit in everything that happens. You could argue that he was pursuing Cortana, because she was the source of the threat and he needed to eliminate her to stop the Guardians… but that never happens. He encounters her and then they have a chat instead of trying to eliminate the problem. It’s also not like this is the Cortana we knew before; she is clearly an entirely different person now, so it should be easier for him to do what’s needed. Is… is this what 343 Industries were trying to convey from the whole “you’re not a machine” theme in Halo 4? Are they saying that he needed to be way more selfish and damn the rest of humanity for his own interests? Guys… are these tech bros a bunch of libertarians…? Fucking insanity.
  • The Characters – Related to all the previous issues we’ve already discussed, the characters in Halo 5 suck. Theoretically, it’s kind of cool that 343 Industries brought Master Chief’s squad mates from the Halo novels into the games. Having ODST‘s Buck become a SPARTAN is also a pretty cool move. However, none of this ends up mattering, because none of them have any development, interactions, or characterization beyond “is a soldier”. Even Arbiter’s return isn’t particularly interesting, because he basically does nothing (although I do find it hilarious that they make a point of telling us that he’s a feminist, because he breaks Elite tradition and allows females into his ranks, LOL).
    • The Eternal Warden is, apparently, supposed to be this game’s main “bad guy”. He’s a Promethean construct who occasionally shows up to oppose you. You end up having to kill the guy like seven or eight times across the course of the game and it becomes tiring very quickly. I also don’t get his part in the story at all. He’s like a rival to Cortana, but she slaps him around like a bitch at every turn. When she vanquishes him at the end, you’d think it would be a big “oh shit, she just killed the powerful bad guy!” moment, but I didn’t feel anything. Dude sucks.
    • Also, probably goes without saying, but having multiple SPARTANs in your story is lame. Master Chief’s cool, largely because he’s the only man capable of saving the day. When you have an entire squad of SPARTANs, it dilutes that importance and your squad doesn’t feel exponentially more powerful than you did when you were solo.
  • Technical Issues – Okay, we’ve gotten through the big problems, now onto some smaller fish… This game has some really weird technical issues, the most obvious of which is that enemies will render at a lower frame rate if they’re more than a few meters away and you’re not looking directly at them. I can only assume that this was implemented to keep the game running smoothly and to deal with optimization issues (it reminds me of similar issues in Pokémon Violet). However, this game doesn’t look that good, so I assume that it’s probably a combination of having to accommodate four players and general development incompetence. Oh, and speaking of incompetence, the NPC AI is worthless. You can give commands, sure, but your squad mates will struggle to kill anything, and their pathfinding makes having AI operate vehicles an exercise in frustration. I saw my squad mates get themselves killed constantly, including one particularly funny moment where we had to escape a massive Covenant vehicle. I escaped in a Banshee, only to turn around and see that my squad was still fucking around inside before the whole thing blew up and took them all with it.
  • Interactive Cutscene “Missions” – Halo 5 has three “missions” which can only really be described as interactive cutscenes. In these sequences, you and your companions are tasked with finding an NPC, talking to them, and then finding another NPC and talking to them. These sequences legitimately last anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes at most, and make absolutely no sense to me. They even count as full-on missions for the achievements! I’d get it if all cutscenes in the game were done this way, but no, the game has plenty of cinematics, so I honestly do not understand what the hell they were doing with these things.

Halo 5: Guardians was a fucking experience. Moments after the game started, I just sat there and went “Oh. Oh no.” Taken on its own, Halo 5 is a mediocre-at-best co-op shooter with a weak narrative. In the context of this franchise though, Halo 5 is straight-up insulting. As you can see from all the “Hates” listed here, the game was fundamentally compromised on a design level and these issues cascaded to make by far the worst game in the entire franchise. Halo 5 gleefully packs so much of the stuff I hate about the past decade of gaming into its runtime, shedding everything you might have liked about Halo in the process. Oh, and making matters even more annoying for me, in particular: I just made a list of my 25 Worst Video Games of All-Time, and it’s already outdated. Halo 5: Guardians definitely deserves a spot on that list. Is this a bad time to announce that I’m intending to update my best/worst-of lists in about five years time to see how much they’ve changed in that time? Because, unless I play a lot of shit games between then and now, Halo 5: Guardians is sure as hell gonna be on there.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo 4

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 4, the first new entry in the series by 343 Industries! I’ve heard really mixed things about this game over the years. On launch, it was lauded, but with the disappointment surrounding subsequent entries, it has retroactively been considered to be shit by Halo fans. Then again, ODST and Reach are loved by Halo fans, and I found them to be fairly disappointing, so maybe the disdain for this game is just complaints about it being different? Now that I’ve finally gotten the chance to play it, read on to find out what I thought…

Love

  • Graphics and Presentation – If there’s one area 343 Industries have undeniably improved over the previous Halo games, it’s the graphics and presentation. The CGI cutscenes are almost film-quality and the in-game cutscenes are more cinematic than ever. The graphics are also really good for an Xbox 360 game, to the point where I had to triple check that this wasn’t an Xbox One launch game. This game also makes you feel more like you’re seeing the world through the Master Chief’s eyes by having bits of helmet on the fringes of the screen and HUD projected onto his visor. I initially thought that this was going to be distracting when I started the game, but it ends up being really immersive and I stopped noticing it almost immediately.
    • Okay… I say “undeniably”, but this is also, apparently, a pretty controversial opinion. Turns out that people complain that the environments don’t look good and that there’s the early-2010s desaturated filter applied to everything – I did not notice this even once and I can only assume that this is just a symptom of the “343 can do nothing right!” complaints.
  • Improved Driving Controls – The driving controls have been refined once again, making vehicle-based gameplay more enjoyable. This is especially true for the Ghost, which is just buttery smooth to drive now.
  • New Weapons – As usual, Halo 4 introduces several new weapons to try out. Some are certainly better than others, but I particularly love the Binary Rifle, it feels so good to snipe people with it. I also quite enjoyed the Rail Gun for similar reasons, and the Storm Rifle is a cool upgrade to the Plasma Rifle.
  • Cortana – Jen Taylor is absolutely acting her ass off in Halo 4. Cortana has always been the best character in the previous games, but she’s especially relevant here. The entire emotional core of the game revolves around getting you to care about (and then be worried for) Cortana as she slowly succumbs to Rampancy (a condition in the Halo universe that causes AIs to “die” after around seven years as they become too complex to sustain themselves). Does she feel somewhat different compared to the previous games? Yes, but she’s also reckoning with her impending, inevitable death, and is realizing that she has so much that she still wants to live for. When Cortana’s facing down her mortality and says “They’ll pair you with another AI. Maybe even another Cortana model if Halsey lets them. It won’t be me… you know that right?”, Jen’s performance broke my fucking heart.
    • Also: call me a gooner if you want, but I actually quite like the redesign Cortana received in this game. It’s not very faithful to her design from the first couple games, and she’s been sexualized in a blatant attempt to try to get you to fall in love with her… but I’d be lying if I said it was not appealing. Hell, one could even argue that, as Cortana has come to develop a legitimate love for the Master Chief, she’s intentionally choosing this design to deepen their relationship to one another.
    • On that note, a bit of a side-tangent: I think my favourite Cortana design is from Halo 3. After that, I think I’d have to go with Combat Evolved‘s more sassy, punk-looking version of the character, just because of how different it is from the rest of the series. I guess that means that Halo 2‘s design’s my least favourite; it just feels like a half-measure on the way to the Halo 3 design.

Mixed

  • Prometheans – The new enemy type, the Prometheans, are decent. They may have been introduced a bit too early though: the Flood weren’t introduced until the sixth mission in Combat Evolved, which allowed them to shake-up the gameplay significantly, whereas the Prometheans show up at the end of the third level in Halo 4. The other issue with them is that they aren’t nearly as differentiated in their roles as The Covenant are. Each Covenant unit is very distinct and needs to be approached in a particular way. In comparison, the Crawlers and Watchers aren’t particularly different to fight – they’re both very weak and mobile, with the Watchers occasionally spawning in new enemies and flying away when shot. The Knights are the most differentiated and threatening. Some people really hate them for how they can teleport away from danger. This can be annoying, but I didn’t have too much trouble with this during my playthrough and typically killed them before they could escape. Maybe they’re worse on legendary difficulty, but I can’t really speak to that myself. All-in-all, the Prometheans are fine – I don’t enjoy fighting them as much as I do the Covenant, but they’re still passable FPS enemies.

Hate

  • The Covenant – Imagine being there for Halo 4‘s release and speculating about where the story would go next. Humanity won the war against the Covenant. The Prophets were dead, the capital city of the empire was destroyed by the Flood, and the Elites were now an independent faction. Sure, there’d probably still be some remnants of the Covenant continuing to fight, but surely we’d be facing off against some other threat, right? Well… minutes into Halo 4, you fight the Covenant as if literally nothing ever happened. They’re even led by Elites again! It’s just so underwhelming to see them dive back into the ol’ status quo for several reasons:
    • For one thing, Master Chief says that these Covenant seem “more fanatical”, but that does not come across in the slightest. The Covenant we had faced in the Bungie games would literally send suicide bombers at you, I daresay that these ones seem less fanatical in comparison. Like… they couldn’t do something to differentiate them? Even Halo 2‘s Arbiter missions had heretical Covenant who were clearly distinct from the rest of their kin. You’d think that they could make them stand out like that? Or, hell, since their empire is now shattered, maybe their weapons and gear are more ramshackle, or they have less access to heavy weaponry? Literally fucking anything but more of the same…?
    • They also redesigned the Covenant in this game, and I kind of hate what they’ve done to them. Elites have been bulked up massively, but the Grunts and Jackals especially just look wrong to me, ditching their previous designs in favour of something more reptilian. It makes them look less like a conglomerate of unique, unified species and more like a bunch of lightly-differentiated, scaly, alien bad guys.
    • Also, I don’t think the game ever explains why these Covenant are fighting us? This could be entirely on me missing some line of dialogue, but they just show up on your drifting spaceship and attack you out of nowhere. It’s not like they were even trying to link up with the Prometheans, because they start slaughtering the Covenant when they first encounter them, only to turn them to their side moments later. Again, maybe I just missed something that explained this, or didn’t read some novel about this faction, but that kinda leads into my next problem with this game…
  • The Story – Halo 4 has a different tone compared to its predecessors. Combat Evolved and 2 were written like grand, sci-fi military novels. 3 was written like an a blockbuster action movie. In comparison, 4 is written to be this blockbuster, sci-fi space opera. It has a much more melodramatic tone, is more focused on the emotional drama between the characters, and has way more focus on the lore of this universe. This is different, which is not necessarily bad. In fact, I rather like that 343 Industries are trying to put their own spin on Halo: Lord knows that these games’ stories weren’t so good that they couldn’t do with some narrative experimentation. However, the way that they’ve gone about this made Halo 4‘s story more frustrating than enthralling for me…
    • Put simply, the biggest issue with this game is that way too much of the dialogue boils down to Cortana throwing around lots of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo. Rampancy, Requiem, Infinity, Terminus, the Didact, the Librarian, the Mantle, the Composer… you might get a context clue or a single line of dialogue to explain what these things are, and then you’re expected to keep track of that for the rest of the game, or until the game bothers give you another context clue several hours later. I remember Rampancy from the Halo novels, so at least I understood that part, the Didact is the bad guy, and I eventually figured out that Requiem is the new Forerunner installation we spend most of the game on, but so much of this game’s narrative is utter nonsense if you cannot keep all these terms straight. Hell, even when we find out what things are, I still couldn’t tell you what these things even do. Like, Halo is simple: it’s a location to contain the Flood and, when it fires, it will kill all sentient life. Requiem, on the other hand, is… a prison for the Didact, maybe? I literally do not know why it exists or what the fuck is happening in this game. The Composer is probably the most egregious example of this. I guess it genocides people and then… digitizes them into Prometheans or something? How many people did it kill at the end of the game? Hell if I know.
    • I’ve heard people accuse 343 Industries of being a studio that makes Halo games, but hates Halo. I really don’t get that impression after playing Halo 4. The way that they’ve written this game, it screams passion for this universe. However, the way it has been written puts emphasis squarely on “the lore”. The world-building and lore were important to the success of the earlier games, but they were not the most important thing, whereas here it feels disproportionate to your enjoyment of the game. If you are obsessed with the lore, read the dozens of novels, and can actually follow all the gobbledygook they throw at you, you might have a really rich experience. If not… man, you are in for a rough time. Halo 4 just feels like an example of “fans do not know what they actually need”: a lot of the time, it’s retreading Halo‘s greatest hits, while obsessing about the finer details that only the biggest Halo nerds would get excited about. As a result of all this stuff, playing through Halo 4 feels like you’re reading through a fucking Fandom wiki.
    • Also, this probably seems contradictory to my last point, but this game makes some pretty major retcons to the Halo lore. In particular, the Bungie games had heavily implied that the Forerunners were humans (or human-related). 343 Industries have instead elected to make the Forerunners a completely separate species who were at war with humanity at one point. They destroyed human society and bombed us back to the stone age. Then, when they annihilated themselves to contain the Flood, they seeded knowledge into the human genome to eventually create the SPARTAN program and take over the galaxy… which is just fucking insanity, holy shit. It can be easy to miss or gloss over this stuff because of how nonsensical the narrative is, but when you piece it all together, it’s pretty baffling and an awful change to the series’ lore. Like… I still think that 343 Industries are passionate about Halo… like any fandom though, they have a particular way of viewing that lore, which they’ve expanded and pushed in their preferred direction, and that’s rubbed fans who have their own interpretations the wrong way.
    • On a completely different note, the game’s writing is ham-fisted beyond belief. At one point, Cortana says to Master Chief “Before this is over, promise me you’ll figure out which one of us is the machine.” This is a pretty cool line, but it just comes out of nowhere. There’s never been any concern between them about the Chief being too machine-like; it just feels like it was written for the trailers. Then, at the ending, one of the characters awkwardly mentions that soldiers aren’t machines, which was already making me roll my eyes for how unsubtle it was, but then Master fucking Chief himself goes “She said that to me once. About being a machine…” I slapped my fucking head in frustration. WE GET IT, your theme isn’t nearly as clever as you seem to think it is.
    • Oh, and then there’s the grating melodrama. The most egregious example of this is Captain Del Rio. Why is this guy such a fucking dick to Master Chief every time we see him? He’s being confrontational and screaming at the dude who literally won the war for him only five years earlier. It’s a cheap way to add some stakes, but it just comes across as dumb and lazy, especially since most Halo characters to this point have acted professionally and intelligently at all times (except for you, ODST…).
    • All that said: the game does start getting good in the last couple levels. When the third act kicks off, they’ve finished introducing new gobbledygook, so we’re able to focus on the actual important shit: Cortana, Master Chief, and the existential threats they’re facing. I might even be open to the argument that Halo 4 has the strongest finale of any Halo game, because a solid emotional core and strong characters trump all the lore in the world. And this is despite me having no fucking clue what is even happening for most of this finale: it doesn’t matter that I have no idea how Cortana somehow magically saved Chief from nuking himself, because I can understand the emotional stakes between these characters, which are far more interesting than anything else in the game.
  • Sound Design – I’m not really someone who notices or properly appreciates the sound design in a game. Take that how you will, but that tells me when I do notice it that they’re either doing something amazing, or they’re doing something really bad. I had a few issues with the sound design in this game, but many of the guns in particular just sound wrong. There’s also this weird difference between a gun’s sound when you’re using a scope vs hip firing it… like, are you sticking your fucking head into the scope? Why does the Lightrifle sound so weird in ADS, but normal in hip fire?
    • That said, I will give them credit for the good ol’ shotgun though: that thing sounds explosive when it fires.

Halo 4 was… fine. I didn’t dislike it nearly as much as some people did, but it certainly didn’t deserve the high 8s and 9s it got from reviewers on launch either. I honestly think that most of the distaste for the game is a combination of retroactive sour grapes after being disappointed by 343 Industries in latter entries, and for being different from the Bungie games. It’s fine, which isn’t exactly a glowing endorsement, but it’s better than some people give it credit for.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo – Reach

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the final Bungie-developed Halo game, Halo: Reach! Going in, this was probably the Halo game I knew the least about, but I had always heard that it was a solid swan-song for the Bungie games. How does the game hold up today? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Customizable Avatar – Perhaps the coolest feature of Halo: Reach was one that I didn’t realize until I was most of the way through the game. It turns out that Noble Six, the SPARTAN you play as, is customizable and based on your multiplayer avatar. I set that avatar months before I actually got around to playing the game, so I had no idea until very late in the game that my character was personalized, but it’s such a cool feature and a great way to pay tribute to the fans.
  • Perks – The equipment system from Halo 3 has been reworked in Reach and, in my opinion, it’s much more impactful now. The equipment pickups are now replaced with Call of Duty-style perks which operate on a quick cooldown and can be swapped out if you find a perk pickup in-game. There’s some pretty cool options, like the armour lock and jet pack, but (perhaps most notably) these perks finally bring sprinting to Halo (albeit, on a pathetically-short time limit, but at least it speeds up traversal a bit).
  • Long Night of Solace – This is the first level where Reach really stands out from its predecessors. A very big chunk of this level has you piloting a space ship and getting into full-on dogfights with Banshees and Phantoms before flying into a Covenant supercarrier and battling your way through the interior. It’s a level that is epic in scope and execution. While I can see some people getting annoyed with this level, since the flying combat isn’t as good as dedicated flight game and it can drag on a bit long, but it’s such an ambitious and epic level that I have to give it major props.
  • Lone Wolf – Speaking of memorable levels, the finale of Reach is really memorable. You’re given minimal information about what to do (Current Objective: Survive) and then get swarmed by Covenant. Eventually, you’ll come to realize that there is no happy ending, all you can do is take down as many Covenant with you as you can. There’s nothing stopping you from just chucking a grenade at your feet and ending it immediately, but it’s got that Call of Duty Zombies compulsion that makes you want to hop right back in and see if you can make it further next time.
  • Exploding Grunts – A pretty small, but funny change is that Grunts’ backpacks can explode, sending them flying wildly when they die. I love the Grunts for being a bunch of cowardly goobers, and this cartoonish death just makes them even more endearing.

Mixed

  • Elites Are Back – Look, I know I’ve ragged on the last couple games for being less fun because the Elites were replaced by the less-intelligent Brutes, so I should be happy that the Elites are back here. However, if you put a gun to my head and asked me if I thought that their return was a noticeable upgrade, I honestly don’t think it’s made much of a difference. Hell, even the Brutes don’t feel much like Brutes in this game, they’re just Elites with a different character model. I am not sure why exactly these enemies do not have that spark that made them stand out in the first couple games, but I think it comes down to changes in the enemy AI. Enemies and allies felt like they had personality and intelligence before, but I never really got that sense here.
  • New and Rebalanced Weapons – Reach has quite a few new weapons and has rebalanced a lot of the old weapons, although I’m pretty mixed on both of these aspects.
    • In terms of the new weapons, my favourite is the Plasma Repeater, which is just a straight upgrade on the old Plasma Rifle. The grenade launcher is also pretty cool, although it’s kind of surprising that it took this long for one to get introduced. However, other new weapons, like the Concussion Rifle, Needler Rifle, and Focus Rifle kinda suck. Every time I ran out of ammo and had to pick up one of these weapons, I made a stink face and then ditched them as soon as I could.
    • For the rebalanced weapons, the magnum is awesome again, one-shotting most unshielded enemies with a headshot. The needler is also legitimately good here. In every game thus far, I would try it out just to see how it was, but this was the first time where I would actively seek it out. Unfortunately, the plasma sword is kind of shit once again, especially compared to the brute hammer (which has also been nerfed).
  • Noble Team – Your squad of SPARTANs in this game, Noble Team are… alright. They have significantly more interesting personalities than the goofball soldiers from ODST, but they don’t have any sort of development over the course of the story. They’re introduced with an archetypal character trait, and then that defines them for the rest of the game. Consequently, I didn’t really care all that much when they start dying, because there’s nothing really to latch onto.
  • Story Structure – The fall of Reach is supposed to be this massive defeat for humanity, where one of our greatest strongholds was crushed by the Covenant as they scour the entire surface of the world from orbit. Unfortunately, Reach rarely lives up to this promise, as the game doesn’t feel all that desperate. This is especially true in the first half of the game, where you’re basically just killing time fighting random Covenant patrols. It feels less like a world-ending tragedy, and more like a bunch of SPARTANs getting themselves killed unnecessarily like a bunch of dummies. It’s not until the last couple missions that it finally feels like there are some stakes, but even then it’s not that effective. Hell, I completed the last mission, then the credits started rolling and I literally said “Wait, that’s it?” Sure, it’s followed up by “Lone Wolf” as the epilogue, but I legitimately thought I had a couple more levels of content to go, because the ending felt like an anti-climax.

Hate

  • The AI – As I alluded to earlier, the AI in Reach is pretty poor by Halo standards, especially for your allies. That’s a particular problem in this game, since you almost always have a fellow SPARTAN with you instead of some random marine, so it feels even more egregious when they get themselves stuck somewhere and then have to be conspicuously teleported in front of you to keep up. Vehicle pathfinding is a bit better than it was in ODST, but I had one moment in the final level where the AI was driving a mongoose and then they said “We have to jump it!” over a broken bridge… before proceeding to gingerly drive over the ledge. I got lucky and avoided dying because I got caught on the scenery, but it was a pretty embarrassing moment (especially because my AI companion was stuck at the bottom of a canyon, making their forced teleport later even more noticeable).
  • No Dual-Wielding – A big reason why the weapons have been rebalanced again in Reach is because Bungie removed the option to dual-wield. This has clearly been done for balancing reasons (you can just make the weapon good, instead of having to make it only good when dual-wielded)… but fuck that. I’m only really analyzing these games on their single-player, so let me have my power fantasy. Dual-wielding in Halo 2 and plowing through a horde of grunts was one of the biggest power trips of my life. I kind of hate this competitive multiplayer mentality some developers have with their shooters, just let players have fun.

Honestly, I was pretty disappointed by Halo: Reach. Ever since this game came out, I figured it would be the definitive Halo game; Bungie’s last, big hurrah before the franchise went to 343. While I did enjoy it more than ODST, it’s missing that special spark that made Halo 2 and 3 so much fun to play through. The industry had changed fairly substantially in the decade between Combat Evolved and Reach, and I can’t help but feel like the growing dominance of Call of Duty, and competitive multiplayer in general, influenced the changes in this entry. Maybe it’s better on the multiplayer side of things, but as far as the campaigns go, Reach was a pretty big disappointment for me, even if the game itself is not bad.

Anyway, onto the 343 Industries games, I’m sure those will be much better…

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo 3 – ODST

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over our first spin-off title, Halo 3: ODST! This was a weird little release: the series’ overarching narrative seemed to have concluded, so there was a lot of questions about how Halo would be able to continue. Bungie then announced this game, which had started out as an expansion to Halo 3, but would evolve into its own stand-alone experience. The resulting game is pretty interesting for a number of reasons, not least of all because it’s the first game to not feature Master Chief in any capacity. Would the game hold up without the franchise’s hero? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Experimentation – Halo 3: ODST shakes up the franchise’s normal campaign structure in some pretty fundamental ways, which make the game feel very unique among Halo titles. The campaign is split into two timelines. The A-plot is the present, where you play as “the Rookie”, who has become isolated from his squad and is trying to figure out what happened to them as he makes his way across New Mombasa. The B-plot involves a bunch of flashbacks to the Rookie’s various squadmates as they battle Covenant forces. The B-plot plays out through traditional Halo levels, but the Rookie’s sections occur through a semi-open world as you navigate through the isolated streets of New Mombasa. In these sections, you have to decide how to reach objectives while confronting or avoiding any Covenant patrols you may come across. It’s a fairly unique structure for a Halo game, let alone a stand-alone DLC expansion, and I have to appreciate that they at least tried to do something different here.
  • The Opening Drop is Intense – You name a game ODST (which stands for “orbital drop shock trooper”), and you’d better believe I expect to get dropped from orbit at some point. In that regard, ODST does not disappoint. It opens with some quick character introductions, and then it’s feet-first into hell through a visually-spectacular and chaotic opening that is easily the highlight of the game.

Mixed

  • VISR System – ODST introduces the VISR optical HUD, which has some fairly interesting functionality. It plays similarly to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, outlining objects in the world and highlighting friendlies and enemies. With the larger, more open environments, it can be very helpful to have a way to point out where to go next. However, I can’t help but feel like it is a bit of a crutch, like detective vision in so many games of this era: the environments do not clearly communicate where you need to go, so instead the game relies on waypoints and colour-coded highlights to do that for you. It also doesn’t help that the game often makes VISR basically unusable, since it becomes a visual hinderance in bright areas, forcing you to toggle it on and off regularly.

Hate

  • The Writing and Characters – For all its military realism, Halo has some pretty cartoonish characters between Master Chief’s confident badassery and Sergeant Johnson’s cigar-chomping antics. However, they’re also contrasted against more serious characters, like Jacob and Miranda Keyes, Lord Hood, the Arbiter, or even Cortana to a certain degree. However, ODST is clearly inspired by Joss Whedon’s writing style on Firefly, even down to casting Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and Alan Tudyk in the lead roles. As a result of this influence, the entire cast are a bunch of cartoonish jokers who can’t take anything seriously or professionally (which gets especially egregious when Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer are arguing about relationship drama over comms in the middle of a warzone).
    • On top of this, ODST is framed like there’s a big mystery that you’re building towards, but the story itself is really uncompelling. The flashback sequences don’t really move the story forward at all, they just kind of exist to pad the runtime. It’s not until the last level that the story actually has some interesting developments, but by that point it is way too late to salvage this narrative. Let’s put it this way: the first three Halo games were about telling a story. This game is just fleshing out the series’ lore.
  • The Level Design – While I will give ODST credit for trying something different with its structure, I really hate the move away from a more curated, linear level design. The streets of New Mombasa are huge and weirdly empty. It’s not unusual to spend a long time wandering around without even running into a Covenant patrol. I can see how this might be immersive to some players, but for my part, I found this incredibly dull. I’ve complained before about open world design and how it makes the minute-to-minute gameplay boring, so you can imagine how annoying ODST‘s slow, monotonous traversal gets for me.
  • Health Regeneration System – ODST goes back to Combat Evolved‘s health system, where you have a regenerating shield and a health bar to maintain. However, one key difference is that the game will freak out at you long before your shield has actually gone down. This puts you in a stressed state way more often than previous Halo games. However, when you come to realize that the game is being over-zealous with its shield warnings, you kind of just ignore them and push more aggressively, making this new warning system kind of worthless. It also doesn’t help that health stations are really badly sign-posted, so you can go for long stretches of gameplay without a chance to heal while playing as the Rookie.
  • The AI – Unfortunately, ODST is the first Halo game where the AI feels straight-up dumb:
    • First of all, the friendly AI are incredibly stupid, especially when they’re in vehicles. Their pathfinding is awful, often getting stuck on objects or charging at a tank and then getting you blown up with no real opportunity to prevent this from happening. On more than one occasion, I had a story-important squad mate get stuck and then (very obviously) have to be teleported ahead of me to prevent them from getting left behind.
    • Perhaps worst of all though is the enemy AI. In ODST, you’re not playing as Master Chief, so you should feel out-gunned by Covenant forces. The game certainly throws overwhelming numbers of Covenant at you, but the game feels like it has gimped them compared to previous Halo games. Throughout this game, I felt like I was making reckless plays which would have gotten me killed in any previous Halo game, but I was getting through because enemies would just refuse to shoot me, or have terrible aim. Making matters worse, I was being forced to make these reckless plays, because I just wasn’t being given the resources needed to deal with all these enemies. I dunno who thought it made sense to have me fight two Wraith tanks and two squads of Covenant forces at the same time with just anti-infantry weapons, but the fact that I was able to pull through this with little difficulty is kind of ridiculous.

Halo 3: ODST left me thoroughly underwhelmed. I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, but I really dislike all the ways that this game attempted to shake-up the Halo formula. I appreciate the attempt to differentiate this game, and I’m sure that there are people who love what they were going for here, but nothing they’ve tried here makes Halo more fun to play for me. As annoying as Combat Evolved could be, I still enjoyed myself there more than I did here.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo 3

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the series’ third entry, Halo 3! We’re now past the point where I had any first-hand experience with these games: I remember this game being an absolute blockbuster at the time, and it was the #1 shooter in the world for a few years until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare took over the genre, but I never got to play it. Could it resolve Halo 2‘s cliffhanger in a satisfying way? Read on to find out…

Love

  • New Weapons – As usual, a new Halo game means new weapons, and they’ve introduced some really cool ones here:
    • Best of all is the brute hammer. This thing is ridiculously satisfying to use. It’s devastating, one-shots pretty much everything, has a large area of effect blast when it hits (which will kill multiple clustered enemies), sends debris flying on impact, and makes a really loud noise. It’s the quintessential distillation of the brutes as a species, and it’s fantastic.
    • The spiker and mauler are both really cool options. The spiker is kind of like an SMG version of the needler, it’s really reliable and enjoyable to use. The mauler, meanwhile, is a shotgun pistol. Both of these guns are dual-wieldable, which just makes them even more fun to use.
    • The Spartan laser is also a really cool power weapon that puts out a devastating amount of damage. However, it remains fairly balanced due to its long charge time before it fires, meaning that you have to keep the target in your sights or waste the shot.
    • Oh, and the game now lets you pickup gun turrets from around the environment and use them as power weapons! It’s as badass as it sounds to pick up a heavy machine gun or a plasma cannon and then spend the next minute mowing down everything in sight.
  • Weapon Rebalancing – Halo 2 suffered a bit due to its wildly unbalanced weapons. You could maybe argue that this was intentional, but Halo 3 is clearly trying to make every weapon viable. There aren’t really any weapons here that I wouldn’t want to pickup. Most of the weak guns from Halo 2 have been improved massively: the assault rifle is back and actually useable, the shotgun is worthwhile again (although it’s still nowhere near as good as it was in Combat Evolved), the plasma rifle is far better against non-shielded enemies, the Brute shot is significantly better… really, the only weapon that has clearly been nerfed to oblivion is the energy sword. The lunge distance has been made extremely short, and while it does one-shot most enemies, I’ve had instances where I’ve had to hit a Flood combat form five times to get a kill on normal difficulty… HOW???
  • Epic, Free-Form Combat Scenarios – Gone are almost all the corridor shooting levels from previous Halo games: Halo 3 loves to revel in the large combat arenas where you fight alongside allies and use various vehicles to combat hordes of enemies. Probably the biggest highlight is driving a mongoose ATV while your allies blast rockets at enemy vehicles… and then a scarab walker shows up and you need to disable it, jump on board, and then blow it up from the inside. Combat is straight-up epic in this game!

Mixed

  • Equipment Pickups – Halo 3 introduces several equipment pickups, which operate similarly to the temporary armour upgrades you could find in the previous two games (bubble shield, deployable cover, auto-turret, invisibility, invincibility, flashbang, etc). The big differences are that they are way more common and you get to choose when to use them. They’re… alright. They certainly work, but they do not feel all that important to the combat flow (at least on normal difficulty: I can see bubble shields and deployable cover being way more impactful on legendary). A lot of these equipment pickups are stationary once used, which isn’t really something you want to be doing in Halo most of the time. It’s also really hard to see them; I kept accidentally picking them up by walking over them… I could count the number of times I intentionally grabbed an equipment pickup on one hand and still have fingers to spare for your mom.

Hate

  • The Story – Halo 3 is a suitably epic finale for a story about a galactic war and genocidal alien parasite. However, as it goes on, I can’t help but have several nagging issues about it which sour it somewhat:
    • First of all, the grand, sci-fi world-building of Combat Evolved and Halo 2 is pretty much gone. We learn nothing new about the Covenant society (which, if you’ll recall, had its entire freaking capital city genocided by the Flood in Halo 2). Basically nothing new is learned or introduced here, it’s just culminating the events of the last two games. Aside from a couple big deaths, there’s no risks taken. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s disappointing after the thoughtful writing and big revelations brought in by Halo 2.
    • On a related note, the war just kind of… ends. The prophets are dead, but you’re telling me that there’s no Covenant still choosing to fight? The Brutes sure as hell seemed to want to fight this war, they’re not taking over and continuing the fight? There’s no new power structure forming? Oh, and the game acts like the Flood have been defeated, but that was just one Gravemind… given that we know there are multiple Halo rings still out there, that presumably means that there are several installations which still have Flood on them, right?
    • I get that Cortana’s out of the picture for most of the game due to the events of Halo 2, but you can really feel her absence (and, when she comes back, it’s a breath of fresh air). Definitely makes you appreciate her character more, but the entire narrative suffers without her.
    • I also found it pretty disappointing that the last couple levels are basically just rehashing the ending of Combat Evolved, to lesser effect, in my opinion.
    • Finally, Arbiter’s just kind of “here”. People complained about him in Halo 2, so Bungie folded and he’s no longer playable outside of co-op. He’s still gets a couple story moments, but his character development is stunted and we miss out on a lot of the developments that would be happening on the Covenant side of things (like that the Elites are now working with humanity against the Covenant).
  • Flashbangs – So, something I neglected to mention about equipment: enemies get to use them as well. This is not that big a deal most of the time, but where it becomes infuriating is that one of the pickups is a flashbang. It’s worthless when you use it, but when Brutes start chucking them around, they’re infuriating. There’s a reason most first person shooters do give NPCs flashbangs, it basically makes the game unplayable when they’re used. Thankfully, these were only used on a handful of occasions during my playthrough, but there was one section early in the game where Brutes were just spamming them at me and it drove me nuts. Oh, and speaking of which…
  • Brutes – Brutes just are not that fun to fight compared to Elites. At least in Halo 2, you only start fighting Brutes halfway through, but here they’re the main enemy for a good chunk of the game. Since they don’t have shields, this breaks the strategic weapon choices from the previous two games, since plasma is less-necessary. They’re also a lot less intelligent, so the enemy AI is not nearly as interesting as it was previously.

Halo 3 is solid, but I can’t help but feel disappointed with it compared to Halo 2. While it is a fitting conclusion for the trilogy, the world just feels smaller and more dumbed down after the expansion it received in Halo 2. The gunplay is definitely improved, so it has that, but I guess this just shows where my priorities are with games: gameplay is just one factor to the overall package, and story matters quite a lot to me, to the point where Halo 2 is the clear best of the trilogy, even though Halo 3 undeniably plays better overall.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo 2

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the series’ second entry, Halo 2! Like I said in the first entry, I had played a bit of Halo 2‘s multiplayer back when we did LAN parties at my church, but other than that, I had very little first-hand experience with the game. I didn’t see past the campaign’s opening cutscene, and I didn’t get that far into the novels to reach any Halo 2 content, so nearly all my knowledge of the game was just general cultural osmosis (Arbiter, the cliffhanger ending, etc). Would it be able to improve the rough edges of the original game? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Major Gameplay Improvements – It’s hard for me to really describe how much better Halo 2 feels to play compared to Combat Evolved in nearly every facet. Let’s put it this way: when I was playing through Combat Evolved, I’d be able to stomach one level per sitting before I’d want to turn it off. For Halo 2, I blitzed through three levels the first time I sat down to play and the only reason I didn’t play more was because I really needed to sleep. So I went to bed, and then I blitzed through another three levels the next day. Throughout this playthrough, I was gleefully playing two-to-three levels back-to-back whenever I could get the opportunity, it is that much fun. Knuckling down to specifics, major improvements include:
    • Vehicle handling is similar to Combat Evolved, but so much tighter and more responsive. No more crashing into everything because you can’t control your damn vehicle (plus, it also confirm that this was not an engine issue, it was very much a Combat Evolved issue, because vehicles are a blast here).
    • Explosives are far less oppressive now. You’ll still die to the occasional rocket launcher or plasma grenade, but the combat actually feels fair now.
    • Weapons held by allies can now be taken, meaning that you can customize the support that they provide, and you can get yourself a better weapon if needed (you are, after all, the best warrior in the room, so why are you stuck with the needler!?).
    • You can also hijack enemy vehicles now, which makes for some epic moments on its own, but it also means that you aren’t necessarily left flailing around if you have a weak weapon and some Elite is charging at you with a Ghost or a Banshee.
    • I also like the changes made to health. In Combat Evolved, you had a regenerating shield and a health bar which would be depleted when the shields went down. In theory, this sounds like a good system, but in practice, it means that you have very little margin for error. Shields down? You need to hide IMMEDIATELY or you’ll die in one hit next time your shield goes down, and who knows how long it will be before you find a med pack to restore those lost health points. Halo 2 simplifies this to just be a regenerating shield and then a set amount of damage you can take before your health and shields fully regenerate. It makes taking damage more forgiving and makes you feel like more of a badass, since you can choose to take that risk to take some damage if it means that you get to kill the last couple enemies in the process without punishing you for it.
  • Dual-wielding! – Easily the coolest new feature in Halo 2 is the ability to dual wield any one-handed weapon. I was grinning ear-to-ear like an idiot as I blasted away with dual SMGs in the opening levels. Granted, you can’t throw a grenade or melee when you’re dual wielding, but it’s very much worth it and, with this franchise’s strategic weapon-based combat system, it opens up so many options. You can choose to double-up your damage potential with a second copy of a particular weapon, or you can choose to shore up one weapon’s weakness with another (eg, SMG in one hand for Grunts, plasma rifle in the other for Elites). This is such an inspired feature and just another aspect of what makes combat in Halo 2 so goddamn fun.
  • New Weapons – Halo 2 introduces several new weapons to the franchise. My favourite is, without a question, the energy sword, which kills almost everything with one melee strike and which closes the distance with an enemy if you swing while close to them. I also really love the beam rifle, which is kind of like a plasma sniper rifle. The battle rifle is also excellent, leaving Combat Evolved‘s assault rifle in the dust where it belongs and I also rather enjoy tearing through Grunts with the SMG.
  • Level Design – One major reason why Halo 2 is so much more playable than Combat Evolved today is that they completely fixed my issues with the first game’s level designs. The way that levels are designed is far better at directing you to where you need to go next, to the point where I never got lost.
  • Graphical Leap – Graphics only matter so much, especially when comparing two twenty-year-old games from the same console generation, but it is notable just how much better the graphics of Halo 2 are compared to the first game (I played both games with original graphics, so their anniversary updates did not factor into this assessment). The character models are so much better and environments are all much more detailed than before, making the opening warzones and areas like the Covenant holy city truly awe-inspiring in open vistas.
  • “Blow Me Away” – As a big fan of Breaking Benjamin, the hype was off the charts when I was playing through Gravemind and this track started playing during one of the toughest battles in the game. You’d think that a post-grunge rock track might feel out of place, but no, it’s easily one of the highlights of the campaign.

Mixed

  • The Arbiter – One of the most interesting additions in Halo 2 is that you have a second playable hero: the Arbiter, the Elite who was in charge of the Halo ring that we blew up in the first game. A lot of the most interesting world-building and narrative beats comes from his perspective, as we get first-hand insight into the Covenant hierarchy and society. He also plays somewhat differently to Master Chief, getting access to an active camouflage system which encourages more stealth gameplay. That said, his levels suffer somewhat due to us not really having much investment in the fate of the Elites initially, as our concerns are on the fate of humanity. This improves over time, but it takes a while to really appreciate this side of the story. Arbiter’s gameplay can also be less enjoyable than Master Chief’s… I wasn’t able to find anything to confirm it, but I swear that Arbiter has less health and/or shields than Master Chief, meaning that you’re going to die way more and have to play much more carefully when playing as him. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not communicated well and, since you swap between the two characters throughout the campaign, the difference in health is going to throw you off every time you swap back and have to remember to play more conservatively again. It’s just kind of a bummer in a game that otherwise makes you feel like a total badass.
  • The Story – This is a true “Mixed” section for me, as the narrative of Halo 2 is extremely polarizing. It’s simultaneously one of my favourite and least favourite aspects of the game.
    • On the plus side, the presentation is way better. The opening sequence of Master Chief’s award ceremony, contrasted with Arbiter’s shaming, is downright cinematic and demonstrates that Halo has some of the best narrative presentation in gaming. In accordance, the narrative scope has expanded to the point where it is downright epic. We’ve got the fate of Earth hanging in the balance as the Covenant launch their final offensive on humanity, we’ve got Master Chief trying to stop a second Halo from firing, we’ve got Arbiter being sent to quash heresy and the getting caught up in a full-on Covenant civil war with three different factions involved. It’s extremely impressive stuff, especially for a goddamn first person shooter from the early 2000s.
    • That said, the way that this story is told is extremely confusing. The story is far more complicated, but the way that it is communicated to the player is often unclear, making it difficult to follow at times. For example, the first Arbiter missions take place on a second Halo installation, but the game takes a while to actually make this clear, and never really confirms if this is supposed to be the same installation that Master Chief and his allies are fighting on at the same time. Similarly, the Flood Gravemind just kind of shows up with zero foreshadowing or explanation. This is arguably the most dangerous being in the galaxy and we don’t really get any indication of what it is until very late in the game (hell, you’d need to use context clues to even clue in that this thing is a “Gravemind”). The way the game switches between Master Chief and Arbiters’ campaigns also doesn’t really help, as you’ll probably forget some of the details of what was happening in each campaign by the time you switch back to the other character.
    • Oh, and I’d be remiss to not mention the cliffhanger ending. I didn’t mind it, especially since I’m playing this game years after we’ve already had follow-up to it, but I can see how the story just suddenly ending with no resolution would be a problem for some people.

Hate

  • Energy Sword Lunge – As much as I love the energy sword, the way that its lunge has been implemented is a goddamn liability. Getting close to an enemy and then swinging will launch you forward in a lunge attack, even if you’re in mid-air. It’s really helpful and helps make the energy sword an absolute beast, but my God, you will launch yourself off the side of the map several times when you first get the energy sword until you come to grips with how it works. I swear, during the first couple Arbiter levels, I died more to the energy sword throwing me off the map than I did to Flood and heretics, combined. I did eventually get used to it around the time when the game stops having so many lethal drops around every combat arena, but it was infuriating for a while.
  • Weapon Balancing – Bungie were clearly aware of how overpowered certain weapons were in Combat Evolved, because the nerf bat has come for them. The shotgun is, sadly, the most nerfed. It’ll kill a Flood in one shot still, but it struggles to down Covenant outside of point blank range (and even here, you’ll likely need a couple shots to do the job) and its damage drop-off is pitiful. The magnum has also been made basically useless, and the plasma rifle’s damage is lower. Beyond general nerfs, there’s a pretty big gulf between the good and bad weapons in Halo 2. The brute plasma rifle, for example, is a weapon you never pick up unless you have no other option – it’s literally just the regular plasma rifle, but it overheats twice as fast. How exciting!

Halo 2 is a triumph. The original game was already acclaimed and revolutionary for its time, but Halo 2 absolutely blows it out of the water in nearly every regard. Everything has been tuned to make you feel like a total badass while playing and the campaign is simply enthralling. If Combat Evolved set the bar for quality, Halo 2 cemented this franchise’s place in gaming history. I’m so glad that I finally got the chance to play this game in full and I hope that I get the chance to relive one of those LAN parties someday soon to really enjoy that multiplayer carnage too.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Halo – Combat Evolved

Surprise! It’s time for a new love/hate series! As you can probably tell, we’re going to be diving into the Halo franchise, going over all the mainline entries and their campaigns. Multiplayer is a pretty major aspect of Halo, obviously, but I’m about 23 years too late to properly dive into these games’ multiplayer modes, so we’ll just stick with the campaigns for this analysis.

As for my history with Halo, I got invited to a LAN party at my church a couple times where we hooked up four Xboxes and played Halo and Halo 2‘s multiplayer. It was an absolute blast and, for many years thereafter, Halo was the gold-standard multiplayer game in my mind, unsurpassed until 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I purchased an Xbox 360 with Halo Anniversary several years later and tried to play through the game’s campaign, but fell off about halfway through before selling the system. Recently though, Steam had a huge sale on for the Master Chief Collection, so I picked it up and finally decided to knuckle down and play through this series. How do these games hold up today? Read on to find out…

Love

  • The AI – No, I’m not referring to Cortana here (although she is an excellent character). No, I’m referring to what was probably the most defining aspect of Halo for me: the incredible amount of personality that Bungie have baked into all of their NPCs. Grunts scream and run from battle when you kill their superiors. When you kill an enemy, they will fire their gun a few more times in a death spasm. Your allies will rage and unload magazines into dead enemies in revenge. These are just some of the more obvious examples, but there is just so much personality baked into the NPCs that it makes them feel like more than just bullet sponges. It’s even more impressive considering that few shooter games today even bother with these kinds of touches to make their world feel real.
  • Enemy Designs – Combat is so much fun in Halo because you can feel how well-designed the enemies are in these games. Each enemy type requires different approaches to defeat them: for example, Elites have powerful weapons and shield generators, requiring plasma weaponry to kill effectively before they obliterate your own shields, while Jackals have an arm-mounted shield which needs to be overloaded with plasma or bypassed with precision weaponry, grenades, or good ol’ fashioned melee. In addition, each enemy type has a very distinct silhouette, making it easy to tell who is who in the heat of combat. As a result of this strong design foundation, Bungie are able to mix and match enemies and environments to make for endless potential for fun encounters.
  • Large-scale Warfare – While Halo is primarily a corridor shooter, like many of its contemporaries, it does open up during a few levels (most notably in the second level) and allow you to engage in large-scale open warfare. These areas are always the game’s biggest highlights, allowing you to pilot vehicles, including the Scorpion tank and Banshee, or you can just hoof it on foot and use the terrain to your advantage. There are also multiple moments where you can choose to just sit back and watch the Covenant fight your allies or the Flood, which helps sell the idea of this huge war that you are just a part of. It’s wild to see this kind of ambitious design in an Xbox launch game!
  • The Lore – The actual plot of Halo is pretty basic: you crash land on Halo, rescue your comrades, and then try to figure out what the Covenant are doing here. What really makes it stand out to me though is how authentic and real it feels. You can clearly tell that the people who wrote it are military history nerds and they ensure that the UNSC characters speak and act like real soldiers. Add in the intriguing zealotry of the Covenant and the mysteries of the Halo installation and this is a world that feels positively lived-in, even in this first entry.
  • The Flood – No one who played Halo for the first time expected it to turn into a full-on horror game about halfway through, but man is it effective. It’s a cool twist which comes just in time to shake-up the gameplay and introduce several new enemy types to deal with, which function differently than any other enemy you’ve encountered up to this point. Plus, y’know, the Flood are an existential threat which really ramps up the narrative as soon as they’re introduced.
  • The Shotgun – Oh. My. GOD! In the pantheon of video game shotguns, Halo‘s is easily one of the most satisfying. This thing is a fucking beast, shredding Flood and Covenant alike in a single blast. Most weapons in this game feel kind of weak, requiring a lot of shots to actually kill anything, but it is so refreshing when the shotgun arrives and bucks this trend. You don’t get access to it until about halfway through the game, but as soon as it was introduced, the entire back half of the game for me was ride-or-die with the shotgun.
  • Weapon Variety – One of the most impressive aspects of playing Halo today is seeing just how unique the various weapons are. This was kind of par for the course back in 2001, but since video weapons became codified as “assault rifle/pistol/shotgun/sniper rifle/DMR/SMG/machine gun”, it’s refreshing to see weapons as distinct and iconic as the needler and plasma pistol. Even the assault rifle and plasma rifle don’t overlap – the assault rifle is purely a low damage, high rate of fire weapon, whereas the plasma rifle specializes at knocking down energy shields and will overheat if fired for too long. There’s simply no overlap for any of the weapons here and, given what I said about enemy design previously, they all have some strategic use depending on the situation you find yourself in.

Hate

  • Level Design – This is my biggest complaint about Halo by far, and it’s the reason I fell off the game the first time I tried to play. It took me months to slog my way through this game and that largely came down to how dull the levels can get at times. This is mainly due to the time-period in which Halo was developed, as you can see the DNA of early corridor shooters like Doom or Star Wars: Dark Forces with these maze-like environments. It’s especially bad because the levels in Halo are, ultimately, quite linear, but I was still managing to get lost because of all the reused assets and non-sensical level layouts which make it hard to tell where you’re going and where you’ve been. Making matters worse, Halo loves to just throw wave after wave of enemies at you. I remember reading the second Halo book, The Flood, and realizing it was basically a full-on walkthrough of the game when it would describe how Master Chief kills all the enemies in a room, then goes to the next room and does it again for another wave. For how dull that was to read, it was a pretty accurate description of how these levels often play out and, while the enemy designs keep things fun, it does start to get a bit much towards the end.
  • Vehicle Controls – As much as I love that Halo lets you shake-up the gameplay by driving vehicles, the actual controls are fucking dogshit, specifically for the Warthog. They are so slippery and unwieldy, causing you to crash into everything if you end up in a situation where you need to drive with any sort of precision. This is especially a problem because the final level requires you to race a Warthog through an obstacle course while a timer counts down. Suffice to say, I failed the first time I tried this and that was almost entirely due to the poor vehicle controls screwing me over.
  • Explosive Spam – Holy shit, the sheer damage and blast radius of explosives in this game is nuts. A single explosion is often enough to kill you instantly and can come out of nowhere, with even basic Grunts frequently hucking plasma grenades at you. You are going to die to explosions all the time, especially in the latter levels when enemies are unloading barrages of grenades, fuel rod cannons, and full-on rocket launchers at you.
  • The Assault Rifle Suuuuuuucks – So I did say that every weapon in Halo is useful in certain situations, but the assault rifle’s the closest we come to a weapon just being worthless. Unlike most video game assault rifles, Halo‘s is only good at extreme close range due to some insane bullet deviation. Even Grunts take most of a magazine at close range to kill, which is insane. The only situation where the assault rifle shines is in killing pod infectors… but that’s not that impressive, because literally stepping on them will kill pod infectors, and they do such miniscule damage that it’s barely worth wasting a bullet on them.

Halo: Combat Evolved is rough. I can see how it revolutionized the shooter genre and it still has some brilliant aspects that hold up today, but actually playing the game can be exhausting at times. Still, for all its rough edges, I’m glad that I finally got to experience this game for myself and live out my teenage dreams for real.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Dead or Alive: Final Thoughts (BONUS)

Whoo, that was quite the journey I just went through. Dead or Alive is such a weird fixation for me. I got into it through its shared universe with Ninja Gaiden and really got into it after falling in love with the shockingly fun movie adaptation. After that, it started turning into a meme on this blog and now I’ve gone and played every game in the franchise and bought copies of most of them. Oh yeah, that happened over the course of writing this Love/Hate series: I had a couple Dead or Alive games already, but I had so much fun that I went and purchased a whole Xbox One and all the mainline Dead or Alive games just to make them mine forever.

So yeah. I was fond of Dead or Alive when I started this journey. Now, I legitimately and proudly love this series. I still am not very good at fighting games, but I feel satisfied that I now understand how these games play. Hell, I’ll even say there’s a Dead or Alive in my all-time favourite games now. I’m so glad that I got to experience these games for myself, because it’s been an absolute blast. Of course, there’s only so much I can cover in a Love/Hate series, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts that fall outside of the purview of that format that I need to talk about.

Favourite DOA Ladies

I mean, this is a discussion about Dead or Alive, I obviously have to give my ranking of the ladies!

  • S-tier: Hitomi, Momiji.
    • Hitomi’s pretty obvious: she’s my main and I love her look and feisty, playful personality.
    • Momiji is gorgeous and from Ninja Gaiden, so she’s got a pretty big leg up on the competition.
  • A-tier: Ayane, Helena, Kasumi.
    • I LOVE Ayane, so the fact that she’s in A-tier should show just how much I love the S-tiers. Ayane’s just the best-written character in Dead or Alive, full-stop. The way that her tragic backstory resonates through her actions, character, and sense of duty is clear, but not shoved in your face constantly. Seeing that sense of duty force her to put down her own adopted father was tragic. Seeing her take down DOATEC with Ryu and Hayate was badass. She’s just the coolest.
    • Helena’s over-the-top French accent is cute, she’s easy on the eyes, and she has a pretty cool fighting style, but the most interesting part about her is her place in the story. Seeing how she plotted against Victor Donovan’s faction over the course of three games was cool to piece together. This is especially true for DOA4, where finding out Helena’s role in the story was the big reward for beating all the other campaigns.
    • Kasumi is not a particularly well-developed character across the course of this series, but I really have to appreciate how well she has held up as the face of this franchise. Her unwavering resolve and skill are admirable after all the shit she’s been through.
  • B-tier: Tina, Mila, Christie, Lisa, Misaki
    • Tina’s the series’ most overt sex symbol, and I really appreciate that they just committed to it. She also seems like just the sweetest person in these games, telling her father that she’s glad that he still has dreams and ambitions, and encouraging Mila to pursue her own goals. Meanwhile, Tina’s just being the world’s best self-marketer, launching careers for herself in Hollywood, music, and modeling. And, again: communist.
    • Mila is just so down to earth. She works in a diner, trains at a run-down gym, and dreams of being the best if she works hard enough.
    • Christie is the series’ other overt sex symbol. She is a cold-hearted bitch who would kill you in a moment’s notice. Did I ever mention that I love bad women…?
    • Lisa was a big surprise for me during this Love/Hate series. Before I started this, I found Lisa very dull. However, having played all the games, she’s actually really interesting. Her fighting style is really fun, her role in the story actually develops and gets intriguing, and she’s got some of the most over-the-top fanservice outfits in multiple games. It’s also just cool that one of the more important characters in this profoundly Japanese series is a black woman.
    • Misaki’s just really cute. Not much else I can say.
  • C-tier: Nyotengu, Leifang, Honoka, Marie Rose
    • Nyotengu is pretty alluring (again, I like bad women), but not enough to make it into a higher tier.
    • Leifang I’ve always found kind of bland and forgettable.
    • Honoka is so egregiously over-the-top that I kind of have to begrudgingly hand it to Team Ninja.
    • Marie Rose’s overall design is very cute, I just wish that they weren’t clearly trying to evoke Lolita fetishists with it.
  • D-tier: Kokoro, Rachel, Rio, NiCO
    • Before I started writing this Love/Hate series, I probably would have put Kokoro above Leifang in C-tier, as she was similarly bland to me. However, actually playing as her in these games has really made me dislike her. I just cannot get to grips with her fighting style, and got stuck on her campaign in Dead or Alive 4 for nearly forty minutes as a result. And then she’d show up in another fighter’s campaign and kick my ass over and over. Oh, and having basically no development or importance to these games’ narratives since her introduction makes her feel pointless. She’s just the blandest and most forgettable of the cast, only here because they wanted a geisha character, but forgot to make her do anything else.
    • Rachel is just embarrassing. Why is this giant titty demon hunter woman fighting in bondage gear? It was dumb in Ninja Gaiden, and it’s still dumb here. Such an unsubtle attempt to be sexy that it loops back to being uninteresting.
    • Rio’s so inessential and forgettable that I barely even consider her worth thinking about. It doesn’t help either that she doesn’t even look like she matches the art style of the other characters, which makes her feel entirely out of place.
    • NiCO is an even-more egregious attempt to appeal to Lolita fetishists than Marie Rose. She looks like a literal child. Her overly-serious and sassy characterization make it seem like you’re getting lectured by a kid. Like, move over little girl, an adult’s coming through.

Favourite DOA Characters

Next we’ll look at all the Dead or Alive characters and rank them from most-to-least favourite. I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory:

Dead or Alive Games Ranked

Over the course of this Love/Hate series, I’ve definitely enjoyed some experiences more than others. Here’s how I would rank the series from best to worst:

  • S-tier: Dead or Alive 2
    • Dead or Alive 2 was a blast even now. It would have been mind-blowing back in 1999. And the fact that Team Ninja immediately honed in on the triangle system: a way to make their fighting system unique and strategic. This has gone largely unchanged over the course of a quarter century, which is pretty wild to think. The Hardcore version in particular is jam-packed with content. This game has legitimately made a spot in my top twenty five video games of all-time list.
  • A-tier: Dead or Alive 3
    • I did really quite like Dead or Alive 3. Its stages are so well-designed, that it’s a crime that none of its successors have even come close to matching it. Oh, and Hitomi was introduced here.
  • B-tier: Dead or Alive 5, Dead or Alive Dimensions
    • I really like how Dead or Alive 5 modernized this series’ art style, gameplay, and presentation. I hate its DLC practices and how they infested the series from that point onwards.
    • Dimensions was just fun and really remarkable for how well it played on a 3DS! Made it very easy to just laze around and get in a quick match.
  • C-tier: Dead or Alive 4, Dead or Alive 6
    • Dead or Alive 4 is just… underwhelming to me. The story is really interesting. The gameplay just doesn’t feel as good as the previous two games, and the difficulty is borderline unfair at times.
    • Dead or Alive 6 is fine. It’s the newest and flashiest game in the franchise currently, so that gives it a bit of an edge. However, its even more egregious DLC practices, its awful story, and its changes to the core gameplay make it fairly disappointing.
  • D-tier: Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, Dead or Alive Xtreme 2
    • Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball doesn’t have a whole lot to do, but that’s kind of why it works better than its follow-ups. The whole thing feels a lot more relaxing – the game isn’t prodding you to accomplish some particular activity, or disincentivizing you from indulging in the more voyeuristic aspects of the game. You get to choose when you want to have a break in the core gameplay, and that’s pretty cool. Also, it really has to be said that this game’s sexy content is legitimately kind of wholesome. It feels a lot less leery or straight-up problematic like the later sequels would become.
    • The original Dead or Alive is okay at best. It’s so archaic and indistinct that there isn’t a whole lot of appeal. Add in that the enemy AI cheats like mad, making winning an exercise in frustration, and this is definitely one of the hardest Dead or Alive games to go back to.
    • Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is here almost entirely for being available on handheld. This makes the game so much easier to stay relaxed and invested in. That said, the game is still pretty poor and content-bereft…
    • Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (and, by extension, Paradise) just gets the short end of the stick due to its grindy, tedious changes to the first Xtreme game’s formula. Could have potentially moved up for its more expansive activity roster (which has yet to be matched), but not being available on handhelds really makes this a tough sell.
  • F-tier: Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation
    • Fuck this “game”.

How Would I Direct Dead or Alive 7?

Now this is a fun question! First-off, I’m going to be somewhat realistic here: a mainline Dead or Alive game is not a priority to Tecmo-Koei. They are not going to give a Dead or Alive game a high-tier AAA budget. An expansive, Street Fighter 6 story campaign is probably not on the cards. Nor are its graphics likely to be top of the industry again. And there’s no way that they’re going to allow you to scrap DLCs entirely. So, with a relatively realistic set of limitations in mind, here’s what I’d like to see in a new Dead or Alive game:

How would it play?

I think I would be happiest if Dead or Alive 7 played a bit more like Dead or Alive 3, or maybe 5 too. Gameplay-wise, DOA3 was probably the most fun I had, largely because it played pretty much identically to 2 and had the best, most unique stages. That said, Dead or Alive 3 might feel a bit slow compared to a modern fighter, so Dead or Alive 5 might be a little more to their taste. I think that the recent games’ attempts at making the fighting system accessible have been a good move, and are worth looking into further.

In addition, since Street Fighter 6‘s massive success, there’s the question of entire control shake-ups. It would be pretty cool if Dead or Alive 7 took this same approach, allowing an option to control your fighter more like an action game than a fighting game. I’m not certain how well this would work though – the balance of DOA‘s signature 4-point holds could get knocked out of whack if you could more easily predict what standard combo string would be coming next.

What about the break gauge?

I struggle with this one. I’m a bit meh on the break gauge in Dead or Alive 6, but does that mean it should be scrapped entirely, or can it be improved instead? After some deliberation, I think I’d say that scrapping it is for the best. It does add a bit more strategy in a match, but it can just take over the game, as it invalidates the triangle system entirely when used. More realistically, it just functions as a way to both introduce and balance the break holds system. I appreciate the attempt to innovate, but I just do not think it worked this time.

How much fanservice are we talkin’ here?

Having played through almost every game in this franchise, I think I can say with confidence that Team Ninja might have been onto something with Dead or Alive 6 when they decided to start toning down the sexy costumes.

Don’t crucify me yet!

I don’t want to see a Dead or Alive game remove all the suggestive content: it’s part of the series’ DNA at this point. However, looking back, mainline Dead or Alive games overtly embracing sexual content in-game wasn’t even a thing until after the Xtreme games came out. Since then, it’s generally been used as a way to sell cosmetics. I think that Dead or Alive 3 struck a good balance, but I wouldn’t be opposed to pushing even further than that either. That said, let Xtreme be where you push the envelope. You could legitimately make mainline Dead or Alive more appealing to non-fans and convince more people to check things out – you just have to be careful not to alienate the core fans in the process by playing it up in the marketing.

DLC plans?

While I obviously would like this game to just have everything being unlockable in-game, I’m gonna have to include some sort of DLC. Obviously, we scrap the scummy shit from DOA6 and VV. If we have to have DLC, then the costume DLC from DOA5 was at least fair: see costume you like, buy costume you like. Its only problem was the ridiculous price they demanded. After Core Fighters released, this also made the DLC stores an unnavigable nightmare.

Simply put, I would lower the price of the cosmetics drastically. Maybe even give a way to buy DLC costumes in game – at least that way you’re getting people invested and I find it actually kind of encourages spending some money for a costume you like. As far as DLC goes, I’d probably add a few characters, preferably guest characters rather than original characters. It always feels bad when you get a new character in DLC, then know very little about their personality or story until the next game comes along and shatters your interpretations. Guest characters would at least prevent this from happening. I’m also fine with the sort of costume bundles they released, so if people kept buying them, I’d keep offering them. That’s about the extent of the monetization for me.

If they forced me to do Core Fighters as well, then I’d be a hell of a lot less stingy. Bundle characters, stages, etc together a bit more and, obviously, more reasonably-priced.

What’s the story?

Dead or Alive 6 ended with a pretty heavy implication that Helena’s mother, Maria, had been resurrected. Because of this, I only have two reasonable choices: ignore it entirely, or make the next game’s narrative revolve around this plot point. I think it’s a really fitting development for the series. One of the big, unresolved plot points in the overarching Dead or Alive narrative is that Kokoro’s mother, Miyako, has some sort of relationship with MIST. However, we do not know the nature of this relationship, so there has been a lot of suspicion directed her way by Helena. Miyako is head of DOATEC Japan, so being associated with the villains of the series could have some pretty major implications.

So, all that said, what does Miyako have to do with Maria? Well, this is relevant to me, because it gives us an the emotional core you build the entire narrative around. We’ve got a story of two mothers and two daughters, who you can compare and contrast for stronger thematic and emotional resonance. You could probably work in other parent-child relationships into this narrative to make this even stronger (Hitomi and her father, Eliot and Gen Fu, Ayane and Honoka grappling with the knowledge of who their father was, etc), but I want Helena and Kokoro to be the main focus.

In regards to this A-plot, I would indeed have Maria be the unseen observer at the end of Dead or Alive 6. However, I want this to be a tragedy: Maria’s resurrection is everything that Helena has wished for, so it needs to be bittersweet when she gets it. Maria’s back, but she’s quickly losing herself. NiCO experimented significantly on Raidou, so it seems reasonable that she would do the same to Maria. I would imagine her having a procedure to make her like Alpha-152 (Kasumi’s super-powered clone from Dead or Alive 4). Over the course of the game, she is losing control, on the verge of losing herself forever and becoming an unknowable, angry energy entity. Shortly after the end of Dead or Alive 6, she is discovered by Miyako, who reaches out to Maria and tells her that she has the means to cure her affliction. Maria doesn’t particularly trust Miyako, but is desperate enough to accept her help…

I’m not going to get into all the plot details, but we’re going to make this take place about six months after Dead or Alive 6. Like Dead or Alive 5, the first half of the narrative will revolve around the tournament. I considered weaving the tournament and conspiracy plots together more directly, but I ultimately decided against it. I actually kind of like that the tournament gets to be its own thing in these narratives. It lets the tournament be one narrative arc with its own heroes and champions, while the conspiracy plot can have its own separate important characters. This ultimately means that you can have more central characters doing things without having to spread them all thin across a narrative trying to find something for them to do. I like how they handled this in DOA5 and 6, where you get a fair amount of build-up from the characters to show their motivations going into the tournament. In particular, I have some ideas to develop certain characters:

  • Tina’s thing in these games is that she always has a new venture she wants to launch using her appearance in the tournament to drum up interest. In Dead or Alive 6, it was a dream to become governor, until she found out that she’s too young to run. However… I want her to pursue this. Tina doesn’t seem like the sort to just give up. I want her to knuckle-down and say “No, I actually want this dream to come true” and start putting in the groundwork to win an election in five years. Her goal in the tournament will be to make people aware of the initiatives she’s taking to help people in her state.
  • Leon’s been absent from the narrative since DOA3, but I’d like to have him come back. Considering that his entire backstory and motivation revolve around his dead partner’s belief that Leon was the world’s strongest man, it kind of feels shitty if he’s not even participating anymore. I’d like him to be back, but it’s straight-up acknowledged that he has been training like a madman for the last couple years and is now a dark-horse favourite to win the whole thing.

The tournament itself is played out by the bracket so that we can get a clear picture of who participated and won or lost each fight. Participants and brackets in this tournament are:

And here’s how the tournament will play out:

Yup, an Eliot win! The kid’s been training for years and his entire storyline so far has been him uncertain if he’s good enough to complete. Let’s change that! Jann Lee’s on a two-tournament winning streak, and Diego’s the one guy who gave him a challenge last time. They’re clearly the two favourites, so I want them to both lose unexpectedly in the early rounds. This will open up the field for a character like Eliot to make it to the finals. By a similar token, Mila reaches the climax of her current arc by making it to the finals of the tournament against Eliot. Two games earlier, she was giddy and excited to be getting brought into the Dead or Alive community. Now, she’s the second-best amongst them all. Leon also does quite respectably for his big return.

Kokoro’s exit in the 3rd round would mark the continuation of the conspiracy plot, where her and Helena get mixed up with Miyako and Maria. Helena would be overwhelmed by this revelation, but quickly find that her mother’s mind is rapidly leaving her as MIST’s experiments take hold. The ninjas would also become involved at this point to try to thwart MIST’s newest activities. Basically, the story would have Helena have to defeat Maria and put her to rest, while Kokoro discovers that her mother is not a good person, but ultimately saves her life.

Who are the new characters?

So… I know I previously said “Hot DOA MILF, when?”, and Miyako and Maria are seemingly perfect for that… but I don’t really want to make them new staples on the roster. Miyako doesn’t strike me as a fighter if she hasn’t been involved in the past six tournaments already. Plus she doesn’t really approve of Kokoro’s involvement, so it just doesn’t fit the character for me. Maria also doesn’t really make sense as a fighter, but she’ll be the final boss when she turns into a being of pure energy like Alpha-152… so not really “hot DOA MILF” at that point, but she’d be unlockable. Dead or Alive games will typically include two new characters, one male and one female… I don’t really want this article to turn into “look at my OCs!” though, so we’re not going to get too far into the weeds.

Aaaand that about does it for my thoughts on Dead or Alive (for now). That said… I’m approaching 400 blog posts on IC2S… god fucking dammit, I’m going to be buying Venus Vacation Prism for a big, 400th blog post spectacular review, aren’t I…? It just went up for pre-order at the time of writing… God dammit. I legitimately have no interest in the game and hadn’t planned on playing it… but I feel like I have to for the memes once more?

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation

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?

I knew I could count on you… *sniffle* Thanks…

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Dead or Alive 6

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry we’ll be looking at the most recent mainline game in the franchise, Dead or Alive 6. This game has had a bit of a contentious history, largely due to its pre-release controversies. During the previews of the game, the fanbase damn near rioted, because they believed that Team Ninja were toning down the suggestive content (less skimpy outfits, no boob physics when it was first previewed, etc). Meanwhile, Team Ninja’s attempts to placate the core fans ended up pissing off the esports crowd they were trying to pander to in the first place with the infamous “core values” scandal. We’re now five years from release, how does this game, the current standard-bearer for Dead or Alive as a fighting franchise, hold up in 2024? Read on to find out…

Dead or Alive 6 has a pretty straightforward release history by this franchise’s standards. There was just one release, that being on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. For this analysis I purchased the PC version… mostly because it was absolute hell trying to find a physical copy of the game in 2024 for a reasonable price. The closest Game Stop with a used copy was two hours away. Getting it on ebay would cost me $40+. No game stores or flea markets in a one hour radius had a copy. No one on Facebook marketplace within five hours had a copy for sale. It’s nuts that a game that came out relatively recently is that scarce. For the record, this also applies to Dead or Alive 5: Last Round. I was trying to find a copy to replace the one I sold, and it is simply impossible to find. Tecmo-Koei must have made some really small production runs of the game, or they destroyed a lot of unsold copies or something, because I had a way easier time finding copies of the first four games that came out twenty years ago than I did for games that came out less than ten.

Love

  • New Costumes – Presumably, because Dead or Alive 6 was courting the esports scene, they chose to tone down the sexuality of most of the female characters’ default costumes. Fret not – most of the “classic” outfits are still in the game, and there’s still plenty of sexy costumes here (Tina’s default costume is proof enough of that… and if that’s not enough for you, you can unlock Christie’s bondage gear outfit too). That said: I actually really like most of the new default costumes they’ve introduced. In particular: the new ninja bodysuits for Kasumi and Ayane, and Helena’s dress? These are fucking hot without having to take the path of least resistance by showing a bunch of cleavage. I also quite like Kokoro and Leifang’s new costumes.
  • Tina is a Lefty – After using Dead or Alive as a springboard to a career as a model, movie star, and rock star, Tina sets her sights on becoming governor (it is left unclear which state she would be governor of). While training with Zack, she tells him, completely unprompted: “When I become the Governor, I wanna give the young ones more hope in the future! Welfare is also important. We have to make the lives of the children better!” C-comrade Armstrong!? Tina is actually based as fuck!? I think my heart just skipped a beat. Legitimately: I already liked Tina before this game, but that one moment made her so much more attractive to me.

Mixed

  • The Graphics – I wasn’t really expecting this, but the more I played of DOA6, the more I came to feel that this game’s graphics are a bit of a mixed bag. Dead or Alive has had the best graphics of any fighter for most of its history, but by the time DOA6 released, the AAA fighting competition had really stepped up their game. Mortal Kombat X and 11, Soulcalibur VI, Tekken 7… the competition of “best looking fighter” hasn’t been stiffer for Dead or Alive, and I don’t think Team Ninja have really managed to keep up with them. On the one hand, the character models do look quite nice and I appreciate the more saturated colours compared to DOA5. However, the characters have this soft, almost plasticky look to them which I find off-putting. In addition, while the character models look pretty good, the environments, NPCs, etc are noticeably worse, especially in the story cutscenes. I’m talking models and textures that are reminiscent of PS3-era games in some cases; it reminds me of Resident Evil 6‘s mish-mash of art styles and effort.
  • Break Gauge – I haven’t really mentioned any gameplay changes since Dead or Alive 2, because there either were none, or they were very minor (ie, DOA5‘s power blows). DOA6 is the first time since DOA2 that we’ve had a fundamental shakeup to the core gameplay, with the addition of the break gauge. This is a bar which fills up as you fight and allows you to spend charges to perform special moves: break blows (a single, super powerful strike that uses the entire bar), side attacks (a side-step that chains into a quick attack), break holds (a single-button press hold that will counter any kind of strike for half of your bar), and fatal rush (a series of attacks that can only be stopped with a break hold and ends with a break blow). I’m pretty mixed on their inclusion here. Fatal strikes and break blows are pretty flashy and easy to execute, which can make them feel like a noob crutch. I’d argue that break holds are fundamentally broken though – the ability to break any combo without having to make a proper call is game-changing and breaks some of the fundamental balance of the triangle system. It’s one of those systems that really makes-or-breaks the experience for you, and I’m not convinced that it really adds anything of substance to the franchise’s core gameplay.
    • Oh and I think I should note something: back in 2018 when the game was being previewed, I had mused that the more visceral violence from break blows could potentially clash with the sexy aspects of these games and make the game feel kind of uncomfortable. I’m happy to confirm that they seem to have struck a good balance, because I was never really bothered by it. Break blows look like they fucking hurt, but it comes across as cartoonish, over-the-top slapstick, and is clearly separated from any sexualized elements of the game.

Hate

  • Story – Hoo boy, we’ve really run the gamut of story modes through this franchise, but I was not expecting Dead or Alive 6 to have the absolute worst narrative campaign of them all. DOA6 does a lot of what I liked about DOA5‘s story: we get a whole bunch of scenes of the characters interacting and palling around outside of the confines of the tournament, while also seeking out new blood to test themselves against. However, the execution here is fucked beyond belief, to the point where I prefer Dead or Alive 2’s primitive approach to storytelling to what we got here:
    • First of all, the narrative itself is awful. Most of the A-plot revolves around Marie Rose hanging out with Honoka, who we come to discover is a bastard daughter of Raidou, the villain of the first game (and also the biological father of Ayane). MIST (a new organization which has formed from the remnants of the evil faction within DOATEC) end up capturing Honoka and Ayane in order to resurrect Raidou, which leads to a big showdown between the ninjas and their evil uncle/father once more. This story just kinda sucks. It meanders way too much, and then is way too rushed at the end (seriously, Raidou comes back, gets into one unceremonious fight, and then is dead again). The tournament itself is also an absolute joke once again, having a grand total of five fights for its entirety, and then moving on to more important stuff. To put that into context, we’ve got more sequences of Nyotengu fucking around with the fighters than we do actual tournament storylines here.
    • Then there’s all the side stories, which are a bunch of cartoonish nonsense. Sure, Dead or Alive hasn’t really taken itself all that seriously, but it feels like a bit too much here. A lot of this is laid on the shoulders of Nyotengu, whose popularity has caused her to be shoved into so many characters’ plots for no real reason. She’s just going around trolling everyone with no narrative payoff to speak of for it. I guess all the tengu flying around and krakens just showing up fill out some of the more bizarre aspects of the DOA universe, but it comes across less as worldbuilding and more like they just wanted to shove the new/popular character in your face as much as possible.
    • Then we’ve got the terrible voice acting. This would normally be its own separate bullet-point, but in this case, the voice acting is actively detrimental to the narrative presentation here. Admittedly, there are a few solid story beats: Helena breaking her aloof façade as she begs Kokoro to stay out of danger because she’s the only family she has left. Jann Lee becoming bored now that he’s the world’s strongest fighter and desperately seeking someone who can challenge him. Ayane, Hayate, and Kasumi reunited in order to face off against Raidou once again. Unfortunately, the wretched voice acting takes 99% of the writing and makes it utterly laughable. I don’t get why this is so bad. DOA5‘s voice acting was fine and most of that cast have returned here, so I don’t blame them. Maybe it’s on the vocal direction? It’s pretty clear that Tecmo-Koei have cheaped out on the localization (the lip sync is also no where near matching what is being said), so I wouldn’t be surprised if their penny-pinching compromised this game’s voice acting too.
    • I think it also needs to be emphasized that DOA6 is actually making a serious effort to be good. They’ve even tried working themes into this story. Everything revolves around family here: NiCO wants to bring back her dead father. Kokoro is mad because Helena didn’t tell her that they had the same father. Ayane finds out that Raidou is her father. It’s played so dramatically, that it’s all the more worse that the execution is so laughable.
    • Oh, and to top it all off, DOA6 has perhaps the most baffling chapter select screen I’ve ever seen. DOA5 had an elegant solution: each character was lined up from left to right, then each character had a few chapters which you would pick from a vertical list. You then complete those chapters before moving onto the next character. Chapters were also numbered and you could see all the chapters at once, so you would easily be able to tell what you were supposed to play next. DOA6 has a similar idea, but throws all structure out the window. Chapters unlock non-chronologically, so you end up having to jump back and forth through the timeline to see if you’ve missed any chapters that just unlocked. Just advancing the story is like playing hide-and-go-seek, which is a lot harder than it sounds due to the weirdly-zoomed in camera. All that work, just so you can experience DOA6‘s garbage narrative, the joy!
  • Honoka and Marie Rose – HOO BOY. I know that there was some discontent in the Dead or Alive fandom about Marie Rose and Honoka being turned into the new mascots of the franchise after their introduction in DOA5. I never really minded this too much: sure, they’re clearly fetish-bait and didn’t have much personality to latch onto, but they have cute, appealing character designs, so I accept them. However, now that I have actually played a story about them, I lost a lot of love for these two characters. Firstly, due to their popularity, they’re pushed to the forefront of the narrative, side-lining a lot of the more “major” legacy cast members. Secondly, they don’t really have much personality to speak of: Marie Rose is uptight and dutiful, while Honoka is an airhead who likes to fight people in order to learn their fighting styles. Seriously, that’s about it, the only development they get is that they become friends over the course of the game (not that we’re shown them actually enjoying each others’ company, they just are friends because they have to be). Thirdly, their narrative sections are cringeworthy. They basically amount to watching the two of them dick about at the tournament, getting into fights as they go, until MIST thankfully shunt them out of the narrative for good. Fourthly, their voice acting is atrocious, like nails on chalkboard (note: I do not blame the VAs for this). Every scene they’re in is them speaking in the most sickly-sweet, cutesy way possible, while even the background music changes to make the scene feel like something from a high school comedy anime. I truly wanted to die any time I had to play a new Honoka/Marie Rose chapter.
  • NiCO – Ugh. I hate everything about this character’s design. Not only is she way too “anime” for me, but she’s egregiously pushing the same Lolita design as Marie Rose, despite being “officially” eighteen. And this is actually a problem, because NiCO is (arguably) the main villain of the game. She’s a head researcher for MIST who is trying to resurrect Raidou in order to figure out how to revive her own father. I even think that her voice actress puts in the best performance of the entire cast, and her fighting style is pretty cool too. None of it matters, because she’s this bright-blue coloured hair child that I’m supposed to take seriously? Why is the fate of the world being decided by three school girls in a world where goddamn Ryu Hayabusa exists (not to mention all the other capable heroes in these games)? But… keep everything the same and then age her up ten years…? We’d have a Dead or Alive character for the fucking ages, my friend! Late twenties, serious, evil, blue-haired, anime science woman who wants to kick my ass?
  • No Tag Mode – For some reason, Team Ninja were not able to get a tag mode running in this game’s engine in time for launch, so they scrapped it. Unfortunately, no tag mode has been patched in since, meaning that my favourite way to play Dead or Alive is not even an option here. That sucks, straight-up. Not much more I can say than that.
  • Unrewarding Unlocks – Up to this point, Dead or Alive games will unlock costumes whenever you complete a character’s campaign and the various game modes. It’s always been a solid and rewarding way to incentivize the player to try out all the game modes. DOA6 seemingly modernizes this by giving you fighter coins which you can spend to unlock whatever costume you want. How progressive! However, it turns out that they really “modernized” it: coins drop slowly and incentivize you to play online to get more (where players will be showing off their purchased cosmetics). Costumes also unlock randomly, so you can’t even work towards one that you like best, which goes against the entire point of giving us the freedom to purchase costumes in the first place. With this system, you’re basically taking a lot longer to get the same things that you could get in prior Dead or Alive games, all in an effort to frustrate you towards paid cosmetics.
  • More Games Industry Bullshit – Anyone could have told you that DOA6 would carry on the monetization practices of DOA5, but I don’t think many would have expected them to get so much more egregious with it:
    • First of all, it has to be said: there’s a lot of DLC available for this game. I can’t even get Steam to display all the DLCs with a total price, because there’s just too many of them for Steam to handle listing everything in one place. That’s just crazy, and navigating the DLC shop is a nightmare. This also makes this game’s Core Fighters version even more annoying, since I can’t tell what is bundled and what isn’t.
    • DOA6 also had one of the most egregious microtransaction scandals in history with its hair colour customization system. The game would charge fighter coins or real-world currency every time you changed a character’s hair colour, including changing it back to default. You weren’t even buying a new hair colour to have available (which would be bad enough), but you were being forced to pay for a basic customization option. In response to the backlash, this was changed (although they’ll still totally charge you for hair colour), but it still goes to show how egregiously this game was designed to fleece the player.
    • This game also shoves its monetization in your face. DLC characters will show up in character selection with nothing to show that they are not owned. If you try to pick one of them, the game will then tell you that you do not own a license for that character, intending to disappoint you and push you to buy them. Then, in the story mode, DLC characters’ chapters show up, but if you select them it will prompt you to buy the license. However, what makes this bad are that they will forever show up as “unread” chapters, with no way to unmark them without buying. This makes navigating the story menu even more confusing and frustrating, since they will show up if you try to navigate to “next chapter”. Some real scummy shit.

It probably looks like I hated Dead or Alive 6, but I honestly didn’t. Most of its best parts are just carried over from all the previous Dead or Alive games. There’s just not much new that’s worthy of note, and that which is here leaves me with mixed feelings. It would be fine taken on its own, but compared to nearly any previous Dead or Alive game, it’s a clear step down in quality.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Dead or Alive Xtreme 3

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive Xtreme 3. For my 200th Blog Post celebration, I reviewed this game for the memes. I was pretty low on it at the time… and yet, this has been the one cartridge in my PS Vita for several years now. Have my thoughts changed then…? Read on to find out…

Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 has got to have the most confusing set of re-releases in the entire franchise (which is saying something). For one thing, there’s no game just called “Dead or Alive Xtreme 3“. The initial two games were subtitled Fortune (on PS4) and Venus (on PS Vita). An free-to-play PC version would be released shortly thereafter, but that ended up evolving into a completely different game, so I’ll cover it later. However, some content from the PC version ended up being incorporated into a re-released version called Scarlet, which would release on PS4 and Switch. However, even this re-release wasn’t identical, because the PS4 version had some censorship (to the point where things which were in Fortune ended up being removed in the re-release), whereas the Switch version is fully unchanged. As a result, the Switch version is easily the definitive version in terms of content, and also for being handheld (as previously stated, Xtreme games play best on portable systems). For my part, I bought Venus for my 200th blog post special, and I still own it to this day. While not as “definitive” as Scarlet, it’s still a very worthy way to check this game out if you’re interested (and, honestly, there’s very little changed between the two versions). That said, I did try out the Switch version of Scarlet as well for reference for this Love/Hate series.

Love

  • Graphics – Good graphics are par for the course for Dead or Alive, but it’s especially worth noting in an Xtreme game where you’re meant to be lustfully staring at the character models for a hefty chunk of the runtime. The new art style from DOA5 really works in this regard, leaving a lot less to the imagination compared to its more stylized predecessors. The PS Vita and Switch ports are especially impressive in this regard, holding up flawlessly compared to their console counterparts.
  • The Ultimate Handheld Experience – This only really applies to the PS Vita and Switch versions of the game, but the more laid-back handheld experience really does make this the best way to play any Xtreme game. The technology has advanced far enough that the compromises of Paradise are no longer a mitigating factor; this is a fully-featured version of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3. Being able to play in short bursts also really helps keep the game relaxing and cuts down on any tedium from the limited number of activities available. While I have my issues with the game, by virtue of being on a handheld, this makes DOAX3 probably the best way to experience an Xtreme game that we’ve ever gotten.

Mixed

  • Missions – One of the new features of DOAX3 is a mission structure. These are basically what you’d expect from a game released in the last ten years: a little pop-up that says “perform X task to get a reward”. These can be an easy way to get a small amount of Zack dollars and gives you something to work towards. I didn’t really give them much notice at the time, but we’ve been so inundated with daily/weekly challenges in games that I kind of hate it now. The tasks are so arbitrary, some are way more trouble than they’re worth, and they ultimately don’t make the game more fun: you’re just doing some chore because the game told you to in order to get a tiny dopamine hit, instead of enjoying your vacation by doing what you want to. Look… the issue with previous Xtreme games wasn’t that there was no direction, it was that the content on offer was way too thin and shallow. Constantly prodding me to do things isn’t content, it’s just preying on people addicted to checking off boxes.

Hate

  • Owner Mode – The big, marquee new feature of DOAX3 is owner mode. This mode allows you to… oh goddammit. It’s a full-fledged, goddamn dating sim mode. Given how much I hated the dating sim elements in the previous Xtreme games, you can imagine my feelings about owner mode. It plays out as a second layer for the main game, with your own inventory and money, and you can even switch between girl mode and owner mode on the fly. The main difference is that owner mode doesn’t allow you to play as any particular girl, so you can only really sit and watch everyone else vacationing, while managing their happiness with gifts and trying to get the girls to try on skimpier swimsuits. There’s not a whole lot to it to be honest, and it’s about as dull and tedious as the dating sim elements from the previous games. About the only thing it adds to the formula is that the girls are now doting on you, the player, instead of having fun interacting with the other girls the whole time, but that opens up some issues…
  • Envelope Pushing – Look, by this point in the franchise, Dead or Alive is no stranger to racy content. Frankly, as much as I may roll my eyes at some of this stuff, none of it has been truly objectionable up to this point (other than the sexualization of minors in the first few entries, because Japan). DOAX3 has about as much sexuality as you’d expect, but it pushes the boundaries of taste moreso than any other game in the franchise thus far, to the point where even I have to admit that it gets downright creepy:
    • Sure, all the girls are officially over eighteen now, hooray. However, this is also the proper debut of Marie Rose, who initially appears to buck DOA design trends by having a very slight figure. However, this seems less of a character diversity decision, and more that she’s clearly been designed to appeal to lolita fetishists. There’s also her foil, Honoka, who is also designed to look like a schoolgirl, while also having the biggest knockers in the entire franchise, and the contrast between the two characters is clearly intentional.
    • In their efforts to play up the dev’s lascivious fantasies, the game can turn into a sexual harassment/assault simulator. If you give a girl a new swimsuit, she can choose to try it on in front of you if you agree to close your eyes. The game then gives you the option to peek, which causes the girl to freak out and cover herself up (there’s no nudity regardless, but it’s clearly about the voyeurism and humiliation fantasy). There’s no real incentive to do it… but, then again, there’s no in-game incentive not to do it (other than affecting their happiness), and the devs have clearly put it in there to be used. Same goes for the VR mode. Now, I do not have a PS VR, so I can’t verify this myself, but the VR mode allows you to poke and prod the girls and cause them to get audibly uncomfortable. However, no matter how far you go and how much they say “No!”, they’ll get over it and be back to doting on you soon enough. Team Ninja, I implore you: consent is fucking hot. There’s nothing hotter than an experienced woman who wants to ride your dick to oblivion because she’s obsessed with you. This game portrays its girls as a bunch of naïve, innocent angels who don’t realize how hot they are, and then allows you to take advantage of them. It makes everything feel way creepier than it needs to, all because it might appeal more to some degenerates.
  • More Games Industry Bullshit – To the surprise of no one, DOAX3 continues the games industry bullshit that really started in DOA5, only this time it’s more predatory. Sure, there’s less DLC overall here, but the way that DOAX3 goes about it is more objectionable. Swimsuits can be bought with real-money premium tickets. There’s a swimsuit shop with random suits which rotates items daily, so you’re pressured into buying what you want now, because you don’t know when it will be back. Oh, and missions often will require you to buy a particular swimsuit from the owner shop, which further pushes you to make a purchase now, because the suit may not be there if you wait to grind some in-game currency first. Several swimsuits are also premium-only and it can cost $10 Canadian or more to purchase a single one, which is egregious, even compared to DOA5.
  • Missing Characters – For the first time in an Xtreme game, there are female characters from the main cast missing from this game. These aren’t minor characters missing either: we’re talking Leifang, Tina, Christie, Lisa, and Mila. This is especially baffling for Tina and Christie, who are the most sexually-liberal characters in the franchise, and for Lisa, who was literally introduced in the original DOAXBV. Given that Marie Rose and Honoka take center stage in this game’s marketing, you can’t help but feel like more “important” DOA characters got bumped off the cast for either being too “old” (early-to-mid 20s for Tina and Christie? Not in my masturbation-fantasy, thank you very much!), or because racism (…c’mon, we all know that’s a big factor in why Lisa, the only black woman in the franchise, isn’t here. Even if you wanna say “well the game was released in Asia only and they don’t have black people there!”… that’s still racism, my dude, sorry to break it to you).
  • Culture War Bullshit – To the outrage of fans, DOAX3 was never released outside of Asian territories. An official explanation wasn’t really elaborated on, but there are a few prominent theories:
    • Amongst dumbasses, the narrative is that SJWs (which is what they called “woke” at the time) whined too much and caused Tecmo-Koei to prevent the game from being released worldwide. While there were some game journalists reporting on the game at the time, generally people just didn’t give a shit about Dead or Alive anymore by the time this game released. That, and the game was announced to be an Asia-only release before any theoretical outrage could happen anyway.
    • According to Team Ninja themselves, the reasoning seems to boil down to “western retailers would not stock the game“. That was a pretty claim dubious at the time (you’re telling me that they couldn’t do a digital-only release at least to get some more money…?), but I can kind of understand it. I can see a big retailer like Walmart refusing to carry the game… but that’s because Team Ninja have spent so much effort marketing the Xtreme games as porn that of course Walmart doesn’t want to deal with Karen getting mad that Little Timmy was exposed to big booba from the box art he saw at the store.
    • The truth of the matter, as far as I’m concerned? Dead or Alive Xtreme games have never sold particularly well in the west. Manufacturing and distributing all the discs required for an international release is not going to have the kind of return on investment that Tecmo-Koei need to justify an international release. It’s ultimately more sensible for them to release it in Asia, drum up some controversy, and then have interested gamers import it. I wouldn’t even be surprised if we found out that Tecmo-Koei had some sort of deal with PlayAsia to split on the added import fees.
  • No Innovation – When it comes down to it, this is still the exact same game we got on the original Xbox thirteen years earlier, just with a couple more features awkwardly bolted on. We’re still going on a fourteen day vacation with a morning/afternoon/evening/night activity cycle and doing the same activities that we did in the last game (less, actually, since marine race and water slide are still missing). The menus are basically identical. Art assets and animations have been reused wholesale. I complained about it at the time, but it still holds true: DOAX3 is the sort of game that would actually benefit from being open world and letting you actually explore a little bit instead of being on a strictly scheduled timeframe. But, of course, that would cost money to implement, and there’s no way Tecmo-Koei were going to greenlight that. So, instead, we basically just get more of the same, but in a prettier package.

For the most part, my original review of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 holds true today. However, when I wrote that review, I underestimated just how compelling the “relaxing” part of the game was. It was so easy to destress by firing the game up for a twenty-or-thirty minute fantasy vacation. As a result, a lot of the game’s most serious faults are mitigated, while its qualities are enhanced. That said, the game is still definitely very niche and not particularly good, but I don’t want that to come across like I think the game is irredeemable garbage. It’s fine to find some enjoyment in something that is imperfect.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂

Love/Hate: Dead or Alive 5

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive 5. This was my first DOA game: having played all the Ninja Gaiden games on PS Vita, I decided to check out this game’s Vita port since Ryu Hayabusa was also in it. And thus, this whole journey and obsession with this franchise began… I recall enjoying it at the time, but it has been probably around eight years since I last played it.

First off, a bit of history is worth mentioning before we get into the Love/Hate properly. Dead or Alive 5 represents something of an identity crisis for Team Ninja. Long-time studio leader, Tomonobu Itagaki, left Team Ninja and the series’ Xbox exclusivity ended with the franchise in a shaky position. Dead or Alive needed to figure out its place in the gaming market and evolve if it was going to stay viable. Could they pull together and accomplish this? Read on to find out…

Dead or Alive 5 has a lot of different releases: the game originally released on PS3 and Xbox 360, and then they released Dead or Alive 5+ on PS Vita. Then there was an Ultimate version which was released on PS3 and Xbox 360, and finally Last Round, which released on PS4, Xbox One, and PC (although the PC port was actually based on the last-gen versions, so it doesn’t look quite as good). I had Last Round on PS4, although I apparently sold my copy at some point years ago. As a result, for this replay I used the PS Vita version, but between the PS4 version and the PC port (which I have tried out), I can say that they all play pretty similarly, with each re-release primarily adding more content.

Love

  • Story Mode – I’ve been pretty harsh on Dead or Alive games’ stories throughout this Love/Hate series, but that’s largely down to them being really dumb, or poorly told (or both). Dead or Alive 5 tries to modernize the series to match the sort of cinematic, western-led experiences we were getting in the late PS3/Xbox 360-era. The result is a story mode which dispenses with the “pick a fighter, play through a few matches with the occasional cutscene in-between, fight a boss, get a unique, character-specific ending when you’re done” structure and instead follows a more expansive, linear narrative that covers the entire cast by the end. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the old structure well enough, and Dead or Alive 5‘s narrative is still dumb, but I really like how this game presents its story and world. For the first time in the series’ history, we get to see how all these characters live, interact with each other, and the world that they inhabit. We get to see them interacting casually, like there’s this tight-knit community of Dead or Alive tournament fighters who stay in touch with each other and seek out new contenders to bring into the fold. The linear structure also helps the tournament to not feel completely superfluous: more than half of the narrative is dominated by the tournament, so we have some actual stakes and escalation and we excitedly wait and see who the winners and losers are. Then the last third of the narrative concerns the on-going DOATEC conspiracy narrative, providing a fitting conclusion for the game. I can see some people getting pissed off that they undid the climactic events of Dead or Alive 4 here, but I didn’t mind too much. I thoroughly enjoyed Dead or Alive 5‘s story campaign, it was nice to see a more cinematic take on these characters and this world and it helped me appreciate them all the more for it.
  • The Characters (New and Old!) – Springing off of the last point, the more fleshed out story mode means that we also get more layers to all of the characters than we have been able to get up to this point.
    • Starting with the existing characters, I want to give a special shout-out to Eliot. I didn’t really care about him in Dead or Alive 4, but here I found him very endearing. As one of the younger cast members, he is insecure about his abilities, eager to learn from others (including a fun pairing with Brad Wong), and constantly training to become the best. There’s also a rather cute scene where he is crushing hard on Christie (poor boy, she would annihilate you), but is too inexperienced to know what to do about it. It’s refreshing, because we rarely see anyone (other than Zack) acknowledge how hot the characters of these games are, so it gives him some humanizing in the process. Bayman also gets some much-needed characterization. He was always such a boring, generic strong-guy mercenary character in the previous games, but here we get to see him as a consummate professional, a soldier, and a leader who tries to keep his comrades safe. It’s not a massive leap, but it’s enough to at least make him more interesting.
    • Of the new characters, by far the best is Mila. She’s just great all-round: she’s an employee at a diner whose hobby is MMA, which causes her to catch the eye of the Dead or Alive fighter community. She’s a big fangirl for Bass Armstrong, and it’s very cute getting to see her freaking out about getting close to these characters she’s idolized for years now. She also just has a cool, down-to-earth design, and plays well to boot.
    • I also have to shout-out some pretty major guest and DLC characters for this game. We’ve got four characters from Virtua Fighter (Akira Yuki, Sarah Bryant, Jacky Bryant, and Pai Chan), some of whom actually make cameos in the story mode. DLC/re-releases would eventually bring in Ninja Gaiden characters Rachel and Momiji (who is a god-tier DOA waifu), as well as King of Fighters‘ Mai Shiranui, and even Naotora Ii from Samurai Warriors. Some other major characters were added via DLC, but I’m going to hold off on mentioning them further until the next couple games where they got their proper introductions…
  • New Art Style – The anime-like aesthetic from the first four games served them well and has helped those games still look pretty impressive today, but it was reaching its limits by the time of DOA4. A full visual overhaul was implemented for DOA5, adopting a more detailed and realistic art style, although it does maintain some more subtle stylization. All-in-all, I quite like the change, although the colours are a bit washed out (this was pretty typical of games of the era, and would get a lot more saturation in subsequent entries). It’s not going to have quite the same staying power as the earlier games’ style, but it was easily the best-looking 3D fighter of its era and still holds up today.

Mixed

  • More Overt Sexual Content – In the wake of Dead or Alive 4 and Xtreme 2, I think that Team Ninja had a sit-down where they were trying to figure out the future for the franchise. Xtreme 2 sold very poorly in the west, and there was clearly a sense that they needed to appeal more to western gamers with the new art style, full English voice acting, cinematic production values, etc. Hell, they literally made the tagline for this game “I’m a fighter”, as if to remind you that this game isn’t just about hot women in skimpy outfits. In spite of this, Team Ninja continued pushing the Xtreme aspects further into the mainline games:
    • The main example of this is that every fight ends with you being able to control the camera as you focus in on whatever parts of your fighter you want, for as long as you want, whether they’re in a victorious win condition, or an exhausted and vulnerable crumple on the ground… which, I shouldn’t need to clarify, is clearly intended to invoke some rather lascivious fantasies…
    • Whatever the original intent for DOA5 was, they would lean harder into the suggestive aspects as the game went on: not only did we get hundreds of swimsuits and various other lewd costumes, but they also introduced full-on gravure videos straight out of the Xtreme games.
    • One indication of how focused this game is on pushing sex over its predecessors is what I call “breast inflation”. For four games, Tina had the biggest rack, and it kind of legitimately made sense for her character: she’s the ideal, hot, wild, freedom-loving American girl and, as a professional wrestler, it actually made sense for her to have some of the more revealing outfits in the series. However, come DOA5, we got not one, but two characters with bigger boobs than her. One was Rachel from Ninja Gaiden, which you could argue was just Team Ninja following that character’s established look. However, brand new DLC character Honoka doesn’t really have an excuse: she’s a school girl with boobs so big that you could suffocate between them. She’s clearly intended to be fetish bait, something that Team Ninja would continue indulging going forward…
    • One big positive I’ll say for this game’s sexual content though: at least everyone in the cast is of-age now!
    • By the way, that’s not to say that any of this sexual/suggestive content is bad, per se. However, this was my first DOA game: I had no idea that, only a couple games earlier, the sexy stuff was all in the marketing and the games themselves were focused on the fighting. The Xtreme-ification of the mainline entries only accelerated the notion that these games were made for “gamer weirdos”, furthered the punch-line that this series was not to be taken seriously, and made it so that these elements could not be separated or toned down without provoking backlash. If Xtreme had never happened and the games didn’t push the envelope each time, I doubt that the series would have declined as badly as it did. It’s unfortunate that that’s the case, but that’s just the reality of marketing a game to the sexually-conservative western audience.

Hate

  • DLC Overload – Dead or Alive 5‘s DLC model really set the tone for the kind of bullshit which has infected the fighting game genre in the past couple generations. I get that it’s all cosmetic stuff, but it’s still scummy for several reasons:
    • First of all, the price of these sets is simply ludicrous. This game had seven season passes during its lifetime, each of which cost more than the entire game itself. For costumes! Just looking at Steam, where I know for a fact that some items have been removed, all DLC for this game currently totals up to a whopping $1,184.68 (Canadian)!!! That is, frankly, a ridiculous price to charge to get the “full” Dead or Alive 5 experience. Like… what experience can they possibly offer which is worth the price of fourteen full-priced AAA games!?
    • Secondly, it’s not exactly subtle that Team Ninja are monetizing the gooners in the audience. Most of the DLC packs are for swimsuits and other skimpy outfits, and there are also some DLCs for “private paradise” scenes (literally just the characters frolicking in the sand for like thirty seconds). It’s not an exaggeration to say that the horniness of the audience is being exploited here for a dirty buck (especially when the in-game unlockable outfits are far tamer in comparison to the stuff you have to pay for).
    • Thirdly, I feel like I really have to reiterate just how much DLC there is for this game, to the point where it’s straight-up confusing to navigate. The DOA wiki tells me that, just for Last Round, there were at least 952 costumes for sale across 43 costume bundle packs, some of which were included in the seven season passes, and some of which were not. I get that this was their way of monetizing the game and continuing to justify supporting the series, but it sets an awful precedent for the franchise: you’re producing a cosmetic cash shop with a fighting game stapled onto it, and every subsequent release needs to escalate this until the entire edifice implodes in on itself and the fighting game part becomes unviable to continue. Given how the series has advanced since DOA5, my fears at the time were well-founded…
  • Core Fighters Is a Scam – Oh and exacerbating all the DLC issues is the Core Fighters release of the game. In theory, it sounds like a good idea: release a free-to-play version of the game where you can just pay to get the parts you want. Of course, like every other “only pay for what you want!” service, it ends up being a massive scam where you pay significantly more for everything in the end. Everything that could be monetized here is, including freaking stage music. Tecmo-Koei seem to have been pleased with the results though, because Core Fighters is the only way to get Dead or Alive 5: Last Round digitally now (you have to buy a bundle to get all the “base game” content, but it doesn’t make navigating everything less of a headache, and the fact that it’s an extra step to pull it off clearly shows that they don’t intend for you to take this route).
  • Rig – Unfortunately, the other new character introduced in Dead or Alive 5 is Rig, who is one of the dullest characters imaginable. He very clearly is intended to “appeal to western audiences”, which is probably why his face looks identical to Jake Mueller from Resident Evil 6. He’s got a mysterious past, his own unique fighting style he developed, and he is literally named after the oil rig he works at and has spent his entire life on. Oh, and for some reason, he ends up being the big bad of the game with zero warning. Wow, so much information for me to latch onto. Is it any wonder that the female characters are the most popular in these games when the male characters get this much to work with?

Dead or Alive 5 is a pretty good time. I love the change in production values and how it makes this world and characters so much more believable. However, the ways in which it transformed the series into a DLC-factory sucked at the time of release, and have proven to be even worse than we imagined in hindsight. It’s unfortunate that that leaves a stain on this game’s legacy, because it’s otherwise a pretty great reimagining of the series’ formula.

If you liked this article…

I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂