One of the launch titles for the Xbox, Dead or Alive 3 did a good job of showcasing the graphical capabilities of the system. It's now more then two years later and the game still manages to be one of the better looking games for Xbox. It's nice that they worked hard to make the game look beautiful, but I think they spent so much time in that one area that they forgot to improve on something else. The gameplay!!
Ryu Hayabusa, badass super ninja (play Ninja Gaiden for more info on his ninjutsu badassness) has defeated Tengu in the previous DoA tournament, but not in time to stop him from preventing some kind of worldwide collapse. Now DOATEC is missing, but at the same time, Dr. Victor Donavon from DOATEC's Development Department has completed the Omega Project, creating a new superhuman. This superhuman, Genra, used to be the leader of the Hajin Mon Ninja (of which Ayane is a part of), before being kidnapped by DOATEC and getting turned into a powerhouse capable of doing great destruction. Now a new tournament has been set up for the sole reason of testing out this new creation, called the World Combat Championship (DoA3).....yeah, that's basically the jest of it. I know people don't buy fighting games for the story, but this game has a crappy story mode. Each character has at least 2 or 3 intermissions, 95% of which don't actually have a story to tell, if it wasn't for the descriptions in the manual I would've been completely lost as to what the hell they were fighting for. Most of the intermissions are usually just longer introductions before the actual fights, if the Story Mode doesn't have an attempt to actually tell a story then just call it the damn Arcade Mode....even if it was never released in the arcades.
So, it's a 3D fighting game, that plays like the bastard child between Virtua Fighter and Tekken, what makes it any different from them? Well for one, DoA3 has a move called a Hold which is basically a counterattack move. To successfully pull it off, all you have to do is perform the move right as the other fighter is about to hit you, then your fighter will counter that move with one of his/her's throws. Sounds easy right? Well it's a little bit complicated then that, there are three types of Holds to perform with, a high Hold for to use against high attacks, a middle Hold and a low Hold, you can pretty much guess what those are used for. So you can't just perform a Hold and expect it to work for any attack, you have to be really quick to use which Hold to work against an attack. It's a neat feature but it can be frustrating at times, like when you're in the middle of doing a combo and all of a sudden it gets interrupted by a Hold which happens way to often in fights. It also makes most of the fights consist of a bunch of counterattacking instead of actual fighting.
Another feature in the game is some of the stages are multi leveled, you can knock your opponent off a cliff or out a window into a completely different looking environment. The person being knocked onto the level below will sustain some damage, so it's more then just throwing the fighters into a different area. Some of these stages can be annoying though, like the Lost World stage where you fight in really small areas and can be easily knocked off the ledge unto another small area and there's no end in sight too, it's basically a bottomless pit. Now in addition to the 13 returning fighters, there are 3 new fighters included in this sequel. Hitomi, a karate student, Brad Wong whose fighting style is basically the drunken fighting style (he plays almost identical to Shun Di from Virtua Fighter) and then Christie, an assassin. These fighters fit quite well with the rest of the cast, each of which have different fighting styles. Though most of the fighters do fight similarly to others, there's a father and daughter wrestling pair which almost have the same moves, Leon and Bayman are basically the same person with just a couple of differences and there are 4 friggin ninjas in the game!....okay, so that last example wasn't really a fighting style, but come on now.
There's a slew of of fighting modes to chose from right at the start, Story, Time Attack, Versus, Survival, Tag Battle, Team Battle (2 against 2, 4 against 4 etc.), Sparring (practice) and Watch mode, some modes have actually been removed that were in Hardcore, like Battle Rec. Mode. Most of those are self explanatory, but survival mode is a bit different here then in other games. Unlike other games where the more fighters you defeat the higher you'll be rank, in DoA3 you have to score as much as possible. There are a couple of ways to help rack up your score, one is to defeat the fighter as fast as possible and another is grabbing the items (meat, diamond, gold, cherry) that fall off of the opponents at times and then the Danger Reaches. To set this off, you need to knock your opponent into an explosive wall, the words Danger Reach will appear and during this short time the damage you case to the other fighter will give you higher points then normally, it's a fresh take on the whole survival mode thing. Tag Battle is also another interesting mode, here you pick a team of 2 of which you can switch between any time during the fight, you can even switch between fighters a couple of times while in the middle of a combo if you're good enough. Another neat thing is how you can use both fighters during certain throws, called Tag Combo Attacks and certain pairs even have special Tag Combo Attacks. The only thing I don't like about this mode is how abruptly it ends, as soon as you defeat the last pair you'll get thrown back to the title screen.
''I don't understand, why were you complaining about the gameplay at the beginning? There's all these modes and there's interesting features. I just don't understand?!'' *runs off crying*
Well, if this was Dead or Alive 2 I wouldn't be complaining about it. Here's the thing: There's no significant improvements what so ever to the gameplay at all, it really does feel like I'm playing DoA2 with prettier graphics and different backgrounds. If this was just another Dead or Alive 2 ''upgrade'' then I wouldn't mind as much, Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore was the excuse not to improve much, it's like it being an Xbox launch was an excuse for it being lazy in the gameplay department. ''Hey! Let's show people how good we are by making this one of the most beautiful games at launch! Gameplay? Umm....hey! Let's make the attacks slightly different depending on how hard you push the buttons! Revolutionary!!''. I don't think I'm going overboard with this complaint, it's two installments (Hardcore and DoA3) later....there SHOULD be some attempt of improving/upgrading/adding something new to the gameplay!
Speaking of improvements, that has nothing to do with gameplay, the graphics in Dead or Alive 3 are really impressive, an area in which Team Ninja never seems to disappoint with. The first thing you'll notice more then anything else is how beautiful the backgrounds look, there's just so much detail in most of them that it can be a bit ridiculous at times. Like the DOATEC HK stage, when you fight on the streets there's a butt load of neon signs flashing everywhere as far as the eye can see, or the Aqua Palace where you're in some underwater building and you can see an abundance of seas creatures swim outside and inside where there are aquariums (kinda odd, don't ya think?), you'll probably end up watching them instead of fighting at least once. The fighters themselves are also graphically pleasing to the eyes, they also have a lot of detail on them, from the tiny objects or pieces of hair that move (you'll notice this the most when playing in the Danger Zone stage) on their bodies, the designs on their clothing like Lei Fang's dress or Tina's Zebra striped pants and the fact that items fall of of some characters during a fight like Leon's glasses or Gen Fu's hat (one of his alternate clothes), to the movements the fighters make. Like how Christie moves around like a praying mantis or Lee Fang slowly waves her hands all over the place and Jann Lee, one of the better examples, seems very lively, bouncing and hopping all over the place and doing poses constantly, does a good job imitating Bruce Lee. The only problem I had with the characters is that they look like a bunch of barbie dolls. There faces looked like it was made of plastic, making them look like a bunch of dolls, either that or they all had plastic surgery (literally). Speaking of bounce (hey, you'd think I would neglect to mention this?), the bounciness of the women in this sequel has been toned down even more and are more realistic this time. You'll hardly see much bounce unless you're looking real hard and only the obvious ones will bounce the most, like Christie due to her skin tight clothing. Hell, the women from Soul Calibur 2 bounce around more then here! Wonder what they'll do in DoA4? Have the women become flat chested and the men have busty breasts and smack around others with them?!......actually, I'd pay to see that. :O
The music in the game is pretty good, but easily forgettable. It consist mostly of a bunch of rock and techno tunes that's actually pretty good during the heat of a fight, but like I said, you can easily forget it once you're finish listening to it. When you first play the game the default settings have the voice and sound effects louder then the music, making it sound more like elevator music, so you may want to adjust the audio settings a bit. The sound effects are okay I guess, they do there job, make smacking noises (I seem to bring this up a lot in my reviews) when people get hit, a collapsing sound effect when getting knocked to the ground or wall. Pretty much the basics, they don't really stand out but they do what they do. The voices are pretty good, they decided to exclude the US voices and just stick with the JPN voices. There are some odd moments with some of the voices though, like Ryu, one moment his voice will sound really deep and old and then suddenly he'll sound like a freaking 15 year old boy. They also seemed to give Kasumi a different voice actor, I think, because she doesn't sound as annoying here as she did in DoA2 where she sounded really squeaky and bubbly.
I'm mixed about this game, nothing has really changed since the first Dead or Alive 2 game but at the same time it's still decently enjoyable. Okay here's the deal, if you've never played any of the DoA2 games and wouldn't mind playing a button mashing type fighting game, then you might want to check this out, especially now that it's part of the Platinum Hits collection. If you did play the previous installments however, then you may want to think about it a little bit before purchasing this because it's basically the same game with better graphics. Graphic whores will eat this game up though; if you're looking for a deep fighting game, however, you may want to avoid this altogether.
Overall Rating: 7/10