I was genuinely concerned that Dead or Alive was, well, dead. On its original launch, Dead or Alive 6 was largely seen as a misfire by just about all camps: Koei Tecmo clearly wanted to elevate it into the rotation for serious fighting games, but on reputation alone it was never going to sit next to Tekken or Street Fighter. Meanwhile, Koei’s initial dialling down of the… qualities… that have made Dead or Alive so famous upset the fans who happened to like those qualities.
Koei Tecmo tried to turn things around with costume DLC afterwards, but then there were other controversies around hair colours and just generally Dead or Alive 6 was a mess that it never quite recovered from.
Meanwhile, the free-to-play gravure Dead or Alive Xtreme game has been raking in an obscene amount of money, clearly demonstrating that there is interest in the franchise. Koei just needs to pick its audience.
So I am very excited for Dead or Alive 7. I firmly believe that Koei Tecmo has learned its lesson and just as Mortal Kombat is to blood and bone-crunching violence, Dead or Alive 7 will be upskirts and bone-making grappling. First, though, we have Dead or Alive 6 Last Round; a “definitive edition” of the unfairly-maligned fighter that should help smooth the runway for the next title.
I do think Dead or Alive 6 was unfairly maligned. Firstly, it is a very good fighting game, for players of all skill levels. With so many other fighters, I feel like the entire thing is an exercise in clunky frustration until I sit down for hours to sort through the training mode and get to grips with the ridiculously complex mechanics that developers layer in. That works for tournament fighting, but for people that want to just pick up a controller and have some fun, it’s intimidating. Dead or Alive 6 makes sure that you’re feeling good and pulling off some slick combos almost from your first bout. There’s an intuitive quality to the combo system with Dead or Alive (or at least I find so), which means you don’t feel like you’re trying to lightning round a maths competition to remember them while in the heat of a battle.
At the same time, button mashers don’t get to win against experienced players. This is largely due to the incredibly well-designed counter system, allowing expert players that can read the game and have the requisite ability to respond in the tiny window allowed for counters to turn just about any attack around on a player that isn’t carefully thinking through their attacks. Bouts between experienced players have an elegant, dance-like quality to them, which makes the fighting in Dead or Alive mechanically interesting and satisfying from a gamefeel perspective.
That’s why Dead or Alive 6 deserved more respect in the competitive scene than it got. Now onto its other… quality. Dead or Alive 6 is extraordinarily sexy, to the point where it verges on erotic (though its sense of humour and satire prevents it from becoming creepily sincere about that, which has always been something I appreciate in the series). The women don’t have the same gravity defying airbags in their chest that earlier titles in the series did, but this is replaced with water mechanics that get the costumes wet in just the right places, costumes that are more tantalising than what we’d seen in previous titles, and character models that really take the whole “perfect mannequin” gravure appeal beyond the blocky triangles of older titles.
Say what you want about the sexualisation as a theme (and there are enough essays on the Internet about that subject to fill entire libraries), Dead or Alive 6 did it well, despite the protestations of the fans in the initial instance. With Dead or Alive 6 Last Round, those concerns are irrelevant too because the more overt and ridiculous costumes are there from the start, too. Swimsuits and all.
Dead or Alive 6 Last Round has also had some subtle facelifts to benefit from the more powerful hardware now available. Lighting, in particular, looks better now, which again helps create that gravure vibe, especially when you’re in the vastly improved photo mode. The previous Dead or Alive 6 allowed you to record fights, and then go into the replay and basically swirl a camera around, taking photos as you go. You could pause the camera and move through the fight frame-by-frame, but you weren’t able to do anything about the “choreography”, and the camera features were incredibly limited. This was enormously disappointing given that other games were giving you full photography suites at the time.
Last Round’s photo mode lets you take any two characters, pick a stage, and then pose them in whatever part of any of their attacks that you like. And you can move both characters around individually. And then when you’ve got the perfect pose, you’ve got a host of photography tools to capture the scene nicely too. It’s still not quite as comprehensive as you’d get in, say, a Sony first-party photo mode, but it’s an impressive and entertaining feature, and the fact that it’s entirely distinct from any actual fighting shows that Koei Tecmo is again on board with the idea of Dead or Alive being, at least in a significant part, a game of dress-ups.
Last Round comes with five previously DLC fighters unlocked from the start, which gives it an impressive roster. A further two guest characters from King of Fighters – Mai and Kula – are DLC. Yes, yes, I would rather they have been unlocked as well, but it is still an impressive range of characters that are available from the outset anyway. I’m also quite miffed that I keep offering to have Dee Dee appear as a guest, but they ignore me. Koei, she’s perfect for the role. As a dancer, you could give her all kinds of unique attacks, she can be Honoka’s rival for Marie Rose’s BFF, and have you seen what Dancesport costumes look like? Your artists could have so much fun with her. Please respond to my emails. I send you so many.
It has been seven years since Koei Tecmo even indicated that it saw a future in Dead or Alive, so frankly it’s just a relief that Dead or Alive 6 Last Round happened at all. While Dead or Alive 7 was the really exciting recent news, this is the definitive version of a brilliant, funny, sexy, mechanically entertaining fighting game and I’ve loved stepping back into its ring.
