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Dead or Alive Rules

Tuesday January 28, 2025

The first Dead or Alive game I played was DOA4 on the Xbox 360 when I was 8 years old. I think it gave me brain damage. I guess it’s no surprise that the mascot of this site looks like she would fit right in with the cast of DOA. Anyway, about 15 years later I tried playing DOA2 because it was free and easy to emulate. I liked it a lot, but I mostly just did random shit. I didn’t just mash all the buttons, but I did press various combinations of punch and kick, sometimes with a direction shoved in the mix, hoping that it would be a combo. This strategy worked very well, since my friends were mashing all the buttons. They lost interest as soon as I figured out the hold system, making their PPPPP combos ineffective. It was fun while it lasted. I was happy to get any of them to play a fighting game in the first place.

I have DOA2 on the Naomi, but it doesn’t get played very often. Mostly because the regular crew would rather run CvS2 on the Naomi, or one of the many fighting games playable on the MiSTer. I also didn’t know how to do holds in the arcade version until recently, and playing DOA without holds kinda sucks.

For whatever reason, I was inspired to buy Dead or Alive 5 Last Round on eBay. Maybe I saw people talking about it online or something. That isn’t important. The point is, I have been hooked since it arrived.

I have never really played a 3D fighting game before. I don’t count my extremely short time with Tekken 8 at launch as “playing a 3D fighting game.” I personally have much more fun with Dead or Alive, and I think the casuals I’ve been playing with would say the same. It’s deep enough for me to have something to sink my teeth into and practice, while still being mash friendly and fun for beginners. Basically, I can play this at my local and with my scrub cousin. I can imagine an alternate universe where my highschool friends and I played Dead or Alive instead of Smash, assuming they could look past (directly at) the giant boobs.

Everyone knows this is the horny fighting game. It is not subtle, and the amount of fan service has increased dramatically since DOA2. I won’t pretend that I don’t like what I’m seeing, but if I was only in it for the boobs, I’d skip the fighting games all together and play the shitty gacha game. So yeah, it’s ridiculously horny, but it’s also goofy as shit. It’s funny when your bikini-clad barbie doll gets 12 piece combod into a stray RPG because you’re fighting in the middle of a war zone. I like how Bass has a special taunt when playing against his daughter Tina. He angrily stomps the ground like a freak and yells “TIINAA”

The graphics hold up extremely well for a 13-year-old game. Every stage is cool. Walls to break, cliffs to fall off, explosions, beautiful forests, etc.

I just noticed while taking those screenshots that the crowd holds up signs for the current fighters. Nice touch.

All that and the training stage looks sick, and it has one of my favorite training mode songs to go along with it. Speaking of the music, what the fuck is going on with Lisa’s theme? Hardest song in the game. I can’t really think of any other songs that blew me away, but I wouldn’t say the soundtrack is bad.

I’ve been playing with a PS5 controller, but I find it extremely difficult to do any move that require a diagonal input with the D-pad. If a combo has ↗️🅿️ in the middle of it, I reach my thumb over to the analog stick to input ↗️ instead of trying to press both up and right at the same time. I think using an arcade stick might solve this problem. I also struggle with timing some things, like when to press throw again during a combo throw, but with practice it will eventually become muscle memory.

Tina is my favorite character. I think everyone who knows me could’ve guessed that. I’ve tried a bunch of other characters, and I think my other favorites are Kasumi, Lisa, and Hitomi. Those are the 4 that seemed to have a fun “thing” about them in the combo trials. Sometimes I start a character’s combo trials and immediately think “Oh yeah. Fuck this character.” Marie Rose is one of them, but I was not planning on playing Marie Rose. I’ll definitely keep trying out more characters. When I play with my girlfriend, we usually do random characters and random stages. I can’t believe she even likes this game.

All this DOA made me want to watch the DOA movie. It was bad, but the fun kind of bad. It even had a beach volleyball scene. The characters don’t really fight the way they do in game, and I think Helena is just a totally different character. I had some good laughs. If you like DOA but haven’t seen the movie, you should definitely watch it.

“Modern” “Dead or Alive”

Sorry for complaining yet again about how the current state of the thing I like sucks dick. The last DOA game was DOA6 released in 2019, which bombed pretty hard. I wasn’t paying attention to the world of fighting games back then, but from what I’ve read on the internet, it was a combination of missing game modes, greedy microtransactions (which are still an issue in 5), and briefly pretending like DOA is not the horny game.

The “xtremely” horny beach volleyball spinoff series, DOA Xtreme, has fully devolved into gacha hell. It makes a billion fucking dollars. The latest entry in the series, Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme is releasing in March. It’s a dating sim. “Dead or Alive” has been reduced to a subtitle. I suppose this was inevitable. I don’t have much hope for a DOA7 in the future. Even if it does happen, I think the microtransactions would be unbearable.

It is Xtremely gay that two characters and many costumes for DOA5 have been removed from the PlayStation store. I wasn’t planning on buying any DLC since it’s still so expensive, but I think it’s crazy how I couldn’t have a “complete” copy of DOA5 even if I did decide to blow hundreds of dollars on costumes. This is why I don’t feel bad about piracy.

I don’t want to end this post on a sour note. There’s really no reason to complain about the state of DOA, because nothing can stop me from playing the old games. DOA5 is a great time, and in reality I don’t care all that much about not having Mai and Whatshername. You can probably find a physical copy for around $25, which is a pretty good price for a very good game. You could probably get one of the original Xbox games for even cheaper and play it on your Series X. That’s the only Xbox feature I’m jealous of. Anyway, let me know if this post inspired you to play Dead or Alive. Definitely let me know if this post inspired you to watch the Dead or Alive movie.