Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be moving onto the next game in the series, Dead or Alive 2. As I said in the previous entry, the original Dead or Alive was fairly derivative: basically a Virtua Fighter wannabe with marketing that played up the pretty girls in its cast in an effort to stand out. Could Dead or Alive 2 step out of this shadow and make its mark on the fighting game scene? Read on to find out…

As before, I played a few different versions of this game to get an idea of the differences between them. Most of my time was spent playing the PS2 Hardcore version, but I also checked out the Dreamcast port and Xbox Ultimate version. The PS2 and Dreamcast versions are very similar, but Ultimate is more akin to a remake using the DOA3 engine than it is a port. It plays fairly similarly overall, but the graphics are improved and updated quite a bit (eg, Ryu Hayabusa’s default costume has been updated to reflect his look in the recently-released Ninja Gaiden), and the localization has basically rewritten every line of dialogue. You can’t really go wrong with any version of DOA2, but for my part, I tend to prefer experiencing the “original” vision of a game. In that regard, PS2’s Hardcore version is the most complete realization of that idea, but if you want the most polished version possible, then Ultimate is your best bet.

Love

• Core Mechanics – It didn’t take long, but Dead or Alive 2 goes from a rip-off of other fighters to establishing its own identity for the series with one simple addition: throws. With this, a rock-paper-scissors system is introduced, where strikes beat throws, throws beat holds, and holds beat strikes. This, combined with the high/mid/low strikes and hold counter system make playing Dead or Alive a fast-paced, strategic fighter where you can always turn things around with a good prediction, and in order to continue pressing your advantage, you need to mix up your attacks to avoid getting punished. It’s pretty simple to get to grips with and there are tons of combos you can choose to learn if you really want to master a character, but you can still do well just by being aware of the combat triangle.
• Graphics – It’s been said before, but the graphical leap from the PS1 era to the PS2 era was the biggest in gaming history. The visual difference between DOA1 and DOA2 is a great illustration of this. Character models have gone from blocky stick figures to full-on personalities, and stages have gone from flat squares to detailed, multi-level environments. This is particularly impressive because DOA2 was a launch title for PS2 and the graphics hold up fairly well even today. This is largely down to great art direction: the anime-style character design works well for the hardware and has a timeless quality to it which obscures most of the rough edges and lower-res textures.
  • Of course, if you want the highest-fidelity, Ultimate on Xbox is running on the engine from DOA3 and is by far the best-looking version of DOA2 as a result.
  • I also have to give some credit to attention to detail in this game. I happened to notice that, in one stage, I was standing above an air vent and the hot air exhaust was causing the fabric of the character’s clothes to blow upwards. The game moves fast enough that you could play this game for dozens of hours and never even notice, but it was really cool to see… even if it was probably put in as a way to dynamically upskirt the female characters. See, in any other game I wouldn’t even question the intention of this, but DOA has a reputation and it makes you side-eye things.
  • Oh, and somewhat-related to improved graphics: the boob physics are significantly improved. They still look a little goofy if you actively stare at them (something I would never do, I am only staring in the interest of science), but they’re leaps and bounds better than the original game and far less distracting too.
• Stage Hazards – Perhaps the flashiest innovation brought by Dead or Alive 2 is its cinematic, interactive stages. No more squares surrounded by bomb traps, Dead or Alive 2‘s stages each have their own personality. Many stages will have obstacles you can knock an opponent into for extra damage (often causing the object they collided with to become damaged and/or explode). The most impressive hazards though are the falls in certain stages: launch an enemy at the right spot and they’ll go flying off a ledge, over a railing, or through a pane of glass. This not only results in a sizeable chunk of bonus damage, but you jump down after them and then fight on an entirely different stage. Some stages have multiple levels, so your fight can end up telling its own little narrative as you move to each new area. This would become a staple of the franchise going forward and it’s still so cool seeing it here.
  • Also worth noting: there are 20 stages available in Hardcore! That’s just an insane amount of stage variety available!
• New Characters – DOA2 continues to expand the series’ cast with a couple hard-hitters. Most notable is Helena Douglas, who might be the most important character in the franchise. As the daughter and heir of Fame Douglas, the billionaire who established the Dead or Alive tournament, she takes over the company after his assassination and is the one who is involved in organizing all future tournaments. She also has her own motives established here, as her mother was killed in the crossfire when an assassin tried to kill Helena. I also just really like her fighting style: it’s full of grace and precision, which gives her a distinctive personality amongst the cast. Also key to the new additions is Ein, who we eventually come to realize is Kasumi and Ayane’s missing, amnesiac brother, Hayate.
  • Special shout-out to Ayane and Bass Armstrong. They were technically in the PS1 version of Dead or Alive, but they make their full-on debut to the cast here (for the record, we’re going to encounter this situation multiple times in this franchise; I might mention a character appearing in DLC or a re-release, but I consider their debut the point where they’re included in the base game). Ayane is one of the most compelling characters in the franchise. She is a ninja who is a pariah within the Mugen Tenshin clan due to being conceived from the rape of her mother. Despite being close as children, she has developed resentment for her half-sister, Kasumi, due to the unfair way that they are treated and you can sense this in the way that Ayane vengefully hunts her down for abandoning her clan. She has a stand-offish personality and a relentless focus on her mission, but you can tell that these stem from her desire for acceptance. Bass, on the other hand, is a great foil for Tina and provides lots of humour with his hard-ass, doting father act.
  • Unfortunately, this leaves the final new addition, Leon, in the dust… He’s got a compelling enough story, entering Dead or Alive because his lover’s dying words were that she believed that he was the strongest person in the world and he wanted to live up to her image of him. Unfortunately, he basically is just a roster-filler… he is extremely reminiscent of Bayman from the previous game, but with no real plot relevance to speak of.
• New Game Modes – Dead or Alive 2 brings in some new game modes, my favourites of which are tag battle and team battle. Tag battles are what they sound like: 2v2 matches where you can swap in and out with a button press. There are some strategic options opened up by this mode as well, including passive healing while tagged out and you can perform tag throws for extra damage. It’s great fun and probably my favourite way to play DOA2. Team battle is similar, allowing you to take a team of fighters and then engage in fights up to 5v5. These fights play out one fighter at a time, with the next in line swapping in when the previous is KO’d, but it’s an efficient way to get to try out several fighters in one go.

Hate

• Story – Look, I don’t have huge expectations for story in a fighting game. Hell, DOA1 has no in-game story presentation, or even endings (in the PS1 version at least), but I didn’t ding the game for that because it wasn’t really what that game was going for. DOA2, on the other hand, is aiming higher, and as a result it has farther to fall if it fails. Unfortunately, the story presented here is nearly incomprehensible. You get thrown into your first fight with zero setup to establish character motivation or what’s even happening. Then you move onto the next fight, rinse and repeat five or six times until the final boss. Now, between some matches, you may get a five second cutscene to establish some character motivation or to highlight that a particular match-up is important. If you play through every character’s story mode, then you might be able to piece together an extremely rough idea of what’s going on, but even that leaves a lot of gaps and misconceptions (particularly when Helena accuses Ayane of being the assassin who killed her mother… we’re given no confirmation if this is true, but there’s also no reason to question this, and it wouldn’t be confirmed to be false until years after the game’s release).
  • The worst part of all this though is the final boss, Tengu. Nothing about this guy makes sense. He’s a demon from Japanese folklore who is causing mischief and screwing around with Ein’s memories. But, considering that he’s the final boss for everyone, he might have something to do with the people running the tournament as well…? Fuck if I know. They’d later retcon that Dead or Alive 3‘s final boss was the one who summoned tengu into our world, but that’s clearly not what they intended at the time this game released, so what the hell was the idea when they made this game…?

I had a blast with Dead or Alive 2. I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, but I ended up having way more fun with it than I was expecting and walked away thoroughly impressed. As someone who is not particularly adept at fighting games, it scratched that itch I used to get playing Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny for hours on end. It’s on the shorter end of things (entire character story modes can easily be completed in ten minutes), but that just makes the game better for me – it’s easy to just pickup and play, especially now in an era where you can play PS2-era games from the comfort of a handheld emulator. If you have any interest in the franchise, I would heartily recommend checking this game out.

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

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

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

Love

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

Mixed

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

Hate

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

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