Man, when I started this blog thirteen years ago, I never would have expected that I’d manage to reach four hundred posts! I had started a couple blogs prior to this one and those struggled to continue after the first couple posts, so having this monument to my writing, thoughts, and their evolution over time is just… well, it’s difficult to quantify, really.

Knowing that I was approaching this milestone, I knew that I had to do something special to celebrate. Given that my two hundredth post was about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, and my three hundredth post was about the DOA movie, I obviously had to find a way to dive back into the Dead or Alive well once more! And, wouldn’t you know it, the timing for this milestone would be reached in fairly close proximity with Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme, a brand new spin-off entry in the franchise. Given my previous commentary about this game during preview season, I also knew that there was the potential for some really spicy opinions, and those kinds of articles are always the most fun to write. Suffice to say, I knew that I was going to need to write a review of it for the occasion. So strap in for my thoughts on Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme!

While the Dead or Alive Xtreme games had some very basic dating sim elements stapled on, Venus Vacation is a full-on dating sim, presented through a visual novel format. The game has a robust photography system, and much of the game’s “content” revolves around watching the girls and waiting to take the perfect shot. Much like Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and Venus Vacation, you play as the “Owner”, hired by Zack to oversee the Venus Islands and manage the upcoming Venus Festival. In order to prepare for the festival, you go around recruiting alluring women you meet to be a “Venus” to do promos for the festival. The game doesn’t really elaborate on what being a “Venus” entails, but I understood it to mean “a supermodel who embodies the essence of ‘beauty'”. Each of the Venuses is vying for your affection, so you have to decide who to show preference to. Most of the game involves you watching the Venuses interact and making occasional dialogue choices. You also can take photos throughout each level to increase the pictured Venus’ interest in you and earn them more fans. On rare occasions, you may be asked to do a QTE sequence. If that sounds dull to you… well, I don’t think you’re cut out for visual novels, sorry.

So Who Are Our Cast of Venuses?

Venus Vacation Prism has brought over six of the girls from Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation for you to photograph and woo:

Misaki is the first girl you meet in the game. She’s the stereotypical Japanese “trad-GF” archetype: constantly working, polite, sweet, modest, and innocent. She takes a long time to get out of her shell and feel comfortable with herself. She is far too insecure to make the first move, so you need to do it for her. Romancing Misaki is all about making her feel comfortable enough to show off her voluptuous body to you… which just gives me the ick. As a grown man experiencing this game, trying to romance this shy and innocent girl makes me feel like I’m grooming her, ugh! I was legitimately uncomfortable pursuing her romance, so I just romanced the other characters instead. This left Misaki visibly disappointed and saddened throughout the entire game, but since she didn’t make the first move, I just roleplayed that I didn’t even notice this as I cucked her with the rest of the cast.

Disappointingly, the only girl from the mainline Dead or Alive series in this game is Honoka… but, like, she’s Honoka. She feels out of place in the mainline Dead or Alive games, but she’s right at home in Dead or Alive Xtreme.

Honoka’s the second girl you meet in Venus Vacation Prism. True to her portrayal in Dead or Alive 6, she’s a simple sort: not particularly smart, but sweet and fun-loving. She doesn’t have much of a personality to speak of… which is why I’d say that Honoka is literally just this game’s “teenage boy’s fantasy” archetype: she’s got ridiculously massive tits, and a personality so dull that it couldn’t possibly intimidate the lowest common denominator (y’know, those sorts of cowards who get angry if the object of their affection has any sort of self agency). Romancing her is all about having fun and staring at boobs as much as possible. That’s… fine, really, but so shallow that it couldn’t hold my interest.

The third Venus you’ll meet is Tamaki. She is very open, has few boundaries, and greatly appreciates honesty and forthrightness. She’s heavily bi-coded, fawning over the Venuses just as much as she flirts with you. She’s also a bit of a goblin, flirting with you to see how you’ll react, teasing people, groping the other Venuses, and she’s a borderline alcoholic. She immediately begins flirting with you the moment she lays eyes on you, and is not shy about trying to seduce you.

And I love this.

I’m just going to say this up-front: Tamaki was my ride-or-die in this game. I’ve complained in the past about how Dead or Alive girls are almost all portrayed as innocent, untouchable angels, which makes the voyeuristic aspects of these games more uncomfortable. However, here we have a character who is aware of, and in control of, her sexuality, and she expresses her interest in you outright. That is a thousand times more arousing than preying on someone’s inexperience! The franchise legitimately needs more characters like this. Suffice to say, I prioritized Tamaki every chance I got. Romancing Tamaki is all about being honest with your feelings, and having a (relatively) realistic, adult relationship with someone.

Fiona is fucking insane. She’s a yandere, a character who is extremely obsessed with you. That would be weird enough on its own, but Fiona is also a literal princess who has spent her entire life in a castle. Like a week or two before you meet her, Fiona saw an advertisement for the Venus Festival with Misaki, Honoka, Tamaki, and yourself in it and she decided that she needed to throw her entire life away to be with you. Why is she so devoted to you? Well, she liked the way that you looked at the other Venuses and wanted you to look at her that way…

Fucking what???

Personality-wise, Fiona is clearly has social anxiety. She’s soft-spoken and sweet, but her obsession with you makes every interaction awkward. She was also clearly only educated in etiquette and politics, so she needs help from others to understand the ways of the world… ugh, here comes that uncomfortable groomer feeling again…

Quite frankly, I did not like Fiona. I can’t really tell you what romancing her entails, because I didn’t fuel her delusions. She seems fairly sweet, but I’m not into these yandere types, other than Monika.

Just Monika.

Nanami is uncanny. She seems to be intended to be a relatively normal, modern city girl: she’s soft-spoken, sociable, interested in photography, gets bored, and she’s uncertain what her future holds. I actually found this concept moderately interesting, but the more time you spend with Nanami, the less “normal” she feels. She’s excessively soft-spoken and chill, to the point where you become sharply aware that it defines her entire personality. I can’t even imagine her being angry, losing her cool, or even expressing excitement. As a result, she ends up being kind of a bland dating sim character, lacking much of a personality to latch on to. Maybe she has a more engaging personality as you get to know her, but I didn’t have much interest in getting to that point when there were much more compelling choices available. Romancing her is equally chill – just don’t be an asshole, real-life rules apply here too.

But hey, at least she doesn’t give me the ick, so that put her above a couple other characters in my books.

M-mommy!?! Elise is the harsh teacher/boss archetype: she’s stern, strict, and disappointed in you. You need to earn her approval, which makes it feel all the more satisfying when you do. She’s a workaholic and needs someone to show her how to loosen up and have fun. She doesn’t even become a Venus until after several chapters with her, so you get a lot of time to get to know her compared to some of the other girls.

Hoo boy, Elise was waking something in me and, at times, even managed to take some of my attention from Tamaki. Elise may be intimidating and cold to some people, but she’s totally my type, looks very cute, has a great storyline, and feels particularly suited for a dating sim narrative! That said, going for Elise is playing this game on hard mode, because she is particularly difficult to impress and, as the last Venus recruited, you get less opportunities to prioritize her.

“Gameplay”

Given that the dating sim elements of Dead or Alive Xtreme are my least-favourite part about those games, I was not expecting much from a Team Ninja dating sim game. However, this really is a case where going all-in on a concept made for a better end product, because I actually rather enjoyed the dating sim elements in Venus Vacation Prism. Instead of having to memorize the specific colours of wrapping paper that each girl likes to get them to arbitrarily accept a gift from you, Venus Vacation Prism‘s dating sim elements revolve entirely around getting to know the girls’ personalities through your interactions with them and then making dialogue choices which correspond to their interests. You’ll also often be forced to choose which girls to spend your time with, so you can’t just woo them all at once – someone has to end up disappointed. Granted, this is just bog-standard modern dating sim gameplay, but it’s certainly a step up from Dead or Alive Xtreme‘s half-assed approach.

The other big gameplay system in Venus Vacation Prism is the photography suite. You can choose to just take a quick screenshot with a press of a button, but those who really want to indulge can get full 360 degree control of the scene so you can line up that perfect shot, in addition to being able to control the lighting, add filters, etc. The game requires you to get at least six photos by the end of a chapter, but you will likely take several dozen instead, because taking pictures is fun! To make that point clear, every screenshot in this review was taken by me, because I had no shortage of photos to choose from during my playthrough!

In addition, you are graded one-to-three stars per photo at the end of each chapter. This certainly incentivizes you to take more photos, but the game is really unclear about the criteria to get a higher score. As a result, it can be a bit frustrating when one of your favourite photos gets a one star rating, while some random shot gets two or even three stars.

Lastly in the gameplay department, Venus Vacation Prism will occasionally ask you to partake in a micro-game to earn some affection from a chosen Venus. There are a handful of these, but they are generally just a QTE sequence that’s over faster than your mom. As you’d expect, they kind of suck.

“Story”

Venus Vacation Prism is a visual novel, so that means that there’s more of an emphasis on story compared to other Dead or Alive games, right? Well, about that…

The narrative of Venus Vacation Prism is very shallow and low-stakes. I was not skimping on details earlier when I described what this game’s premise is: you really are just recruiting Venuses and preparing for the festival for this entire game’s runtime. Sure, there are a couple developments (you get caught on a date by the person who you rejected, the head office is threatening to fire you if your performance doesn’t improve, etc), but the whole thing is lacking in any real stakes, twists, or tension. For the most part, you’re just having normal conversations with the girls and hanging out.

That said, I’m not sure that this lack of narrative tension is actually a problem. The Xtreme games carved a niche due to being relaxing vacation simulators, and Venus Vacation Prism‘s breezy “story” achieves the same sort of feel. This game does, at times, really feel like being away a tropical vacation. Like, sure, you’re technically working throughout the game, but your job is so ridiculously easy that it doesn’t get in the way. Despite the extremely mundane narrative, I was still interested to see where things would go. It also helps that I am hopelessly obsessed with seeing new corners of the world of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, so there’s that too…

Despite the very laid-back narrative, there is some thrust which keeps things from getting boring. In the first half of the game, a new Venus will get introduced every couple chapters. This provides some novelty as you get to meet them, learn about their personality, and then recruit them. While this approach keeps things fresh, it takes a long time to introduce all the girls, which can really suck if you don’t care for the early Venuses. Elise in particular is really difficult to romance, due to her strict personality and having much less time to try to blitz her approval rating high enough before the game ends. The game also heavily foreshadows the Venus Festival that corresponds with a romantic prismatic meteor shower as the grand finale, so you’ve always got it in the back of your mind that you’re working towards that final goal. It’s simple stuff, as I’ve said, but it works well enough.

As for the chapters themselves, most will only have a couple of the girls available to be interacted with at any one time, so you can often go multiple chapters without seeing your preferred Venus. Furthermore, there are plenty of mandatory interactions which are not particularly balanced between the girls: Misaki and Elise get lots of one-on-one time with the Owner in which to make an impression on you, but fans of Honoka and Nanami are going to be absolutely starved if they don’t specifically pursue those characters every chance they get (which, combined with their boring personalities, didn’t help my perception of either character any). Each chapter has some branching paths that you can take (usually picking between one of two girls, but late-game chapters will allow you to choose between any of the Venuses). These choices are shown in a handy flowchart in the between-chapter menu, so you can see all the scenes you found and the ones still available. This is much appreciated for those looking to experience everything the game has to provide, but it also shows that your choices, and their consequences, are pretty limited outside of affecting your overall relationship score with the girls.

Much of this lack of consequence is down to the Venuses all immediately falling in love with you as soon as you meet them (other than Elise, who takes a few chapters to get to that point). Even if you consistently reject their advances, they’ll still pine after you as if nothing happened. This was displayed most egregiously for me during Fiona’s introduction. As I stated, I did not like her character’s obsession with me, so I gave her the cold shoulder and immediately stood her up for Tamaki. However, at the end of her introductory chapter, the game railroads you into going on a date to recruit her as a Venus, and acts like it’s a romantic occasion no matter what you’ve said up to that point. While this is the most egregious example I found, you can feel it elsewhere as well. For example, I wasn’t kidding about Misaki when I said I was cucking her at every opportunity: the poor girl was consistently dropping hints that she liked me and hoped that I would reciprocate, but then I’d go and spend my time off with literally anyone else, to her constant disappointment. Like, girl, at this point you’re delusional if you think that I’m going to pick you to be my date to the prismatic meteor shower!

That said, this is a dating sim, so most of the game’s consequence boils down to romancing your chosen Venus. There are certain scenes and dialogue options which are only unlocked if you have a high (or low!) enough interest score with a particular girl. The thresholds to unlock these scenes are pretty high, so these are typically only going to be available if you’re actively wooing one or two of the girls above all else. Again, this is pretty standard dating sim stuff, but it would have been nice if you actually had to work a bit to get the girls to like you in the first place.

The game also has a smartphone where the girls will send you texts to chat and flirt. On the one hand, this is a very easy way to get in more interactions and choices without having to go to the effort of animating and voicing an entire scene. It also offers an different feel to conversations, especially with the shyer girls who are clearly more comfortable speaking to you via text. On the other hand, these text conversations feel disconnected from the rest of the game. For example, you’ll get a text and agree to go on a date with your chosen Venus, but then you don’t get a new scene or anything, the game just gives your affection score a bump and moves on. You’ll also be in the middle of a scene with another character when the smartphone will pop up and you’ll start texting one of the other girls randomly before going back to the scene at hand. Hell, you can be in the middle of the scene and then get texts from the girl who is in the scene right in front of you and go off on an entirely unrelated conversation before going back to the scene at hand. I love the concept of the smartphone in this game, but the implementation is immersion-breaking far too often.

Looks That Could Kill

As is usual for a Team Ninja game, Venus Vacation Prism looks fantastic. When this game was originally previewed, the character models felt a bit too realistic and uncanny, but having played the actual game now, this was not a problem at all. Like Dead or Alive 5/6/Xtreme 3, the characters are more realistic-looking, but still stylized enough to avoid the uncanny valley (especially Elise, who I feel deserves special shout-out for her ridiculously gorgeous character design).

Visual novels and dating sims aren’t usually my thing, but from my understanding, Venus Vacation Prism has insane production values for the genre. Most of these sorts of games are low-budget indie affairs with 2D sprites and little to no animation, just due to the economics of such a niche genre. In comparison, Venus Vacation Prism, with its AAA-level graphics, animation, full voice acting, and photography suite is a technological behemoth (to the point where I am legitimately curious if it has sold well enough to be worthwhile for Koei-Tecmo). This certainly helps the game stand out, even if its mechanics are pretty bog-standard otherwise.

Like the Xtreme games, Venus Vacation Prism allows you to dress your Venuses in various outfits and swimsuits and also change their hair style. I like that most of the outfits have additional customization options (for example, the you can choose whether or not you want to wear a zip-up hoodie over a particular style of bikini). However, there are a couple issues with the dress-up system which are hard to ignore. First of all, the number of available outfits per Venus is tied to their number of fans (which is influenced by the star rating of photos of the Venus submitted at the end of each chapter). It takes quite a while to unlock new outfits for each Venus because of this system. Despite giving Tamaki most of my attention during my playthrough, I hadn’t even unlocked half of her outfits by the time I reached the finale, so several playthroughs are going to be necessary if you want to unlock everything (I’ll leave that up to you to decide whether that’s good or bad).

I think that the bigger issue with the dress-up system though is that there just are not enough options available. The game has about thirty-seven outfits per girl, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you realize that the vast majority of these are reskins. Most outfits have three-to-five recoloured variants (some have even more), so these recolours are padding the total massively: discounting all the recolours, there’s only seven outfits available to dress up your Venuses, plus their one unique outfit and two pre-order bonus ones that you may not even have access to. That’s extremely limited, especially since you won’t unlock most of them in a single playthrough, so expect to have a bunch of Venuses all wearing the same outfit around the mid-point of the game…

Core Values

This is a Dead or Alive Xtreme game, so naturally that begs the question: just how lewd does this game get? Well, to put it simply…

…the game’s weirdly kind of chaste and restrained (at least by Dead or Alive‘s standards)?

Like, don’t get me wrong, the game’s still horny – the camera will linger on the girls’ boobs, most of said boobs are massive, and there are plenty of revealing bikinis to dress them up in. Compared to the Dead or Alive Xtreme games though (and especially Venus Vacation, which this game is directly spun-off of), the game’s downright modest. Sure, the bikinis are revealing, but they’re just fairly normal bikinis, as opposed to, say, the downright insane Venus swimsuit from Dead or Alive Xtreme. And sure, this game will occasionally have scenes which are egregiously fetish bait (most notably involving Misaki: in one scene, she nervously tries on a bikini in front of you, and in a later scene she’s bent over for no real reason and you’re clearly being invited to upskirt her), but that’s nothing compared to the literal pole dance sequences in the Xtreme games. And don’t even get me started on the ability to sexually harass the girls whenever you want to in Venus Vacation…

Conversely, Venus Vacation Prism takes the opposite approach, where acting like a creep and fixating on the girls’ assets above all else will leave them unimpressed, unless they actively invite that kind of attention from you. As I’ve said in the past, a big reason why the Xtreme games feel creepy is because the girls don’t seem to have any agency and are completely innocent angels, so all the voyeurism you engage in explicitly happens without their consent (as their reactions to you poking and peeking on them make clear). Venus Vacation Prism, on the other hand, wants you to form a connection with your chosen Venuses, make them want to open up to you, and will straight-up punish you for disrespecting the girls’ boundaries. Again, having Tamaki openly flirting with you and taking notes about the things that turn you on is orders of magnitude more sexy than the ham-fisted sexuality we get in the Xtreme games.

That said, this is still an Xtreme game: you’ll have plenty of opportunities to ogle the girls, but I really cannot understate how relatively restrained this game is. You can dress the girls in the most revealing outfits you can unlock, you can take their shoes off to get the best look at their toes (you know that someone on Team Ninja was begging them to implement this feature), and you can make all your photos zoomed on their girls’ cleavage, but that’s entirely up to you and the game doesn’t really incentivize it one way or another. Hell, despite having the series’ vaunted boob physics and ass physics (they move like gelatin this time!), you will almost never notice any jiggling outside of the costume selection screen.

It also really needs to be said, that Venus Vacation Prism feels restrained, not only in comparison to the Xtreme games, but to visual novels in general at this point. We’re living in an era where pornographic visual novels appear on the front page of Steam. Mobile app stores and Youtube ads are infested with a plethora of generic, anime, gooner gacha games. While the ending I got with Tamaki slyly implied that sex was had off-screen, a lot of this game’s contemporaries would be revolving entirely around showing the act rather than implying it. Dead or Alive Xtreme was salacious in the 2000s, but in 2025, a game like Venus Vacation Prism is downright modest compared to the competition. Am I suggesting that they should go all the way and release a Dead or Alive game with full nudity and sex? No, I think that would stray too far from the series’ identity, but it’s just something worth thinking about when putting this series’ sexual themes into a wider context.

Further to that point, there’s absolutely no reason why this game could not get a Western release, aside from Koei-Tecmo being a bunch of cowards. The biggest criticism you could level at the game is that it might give you unrealistic expectations regarding dating, but a) it’s a fantasy, and b) that’s something you could say about any dating sim; it’s just inherent to the genre. Sorry, butthurt culture warrior Dead or Alive fans, but there’s nothing particularly objectionable about this game that would draw any protest or negative attention (other than, y’know, some fucksticks loudly gooning over the game on social media and drawing derision over that; aka the Stellar Blade effect). This Asia-exclusive release strategy is honestly just Koei-Tecmo being idiots, with the absolute most charitable reading being that they want to preserve the Dead or Alive series’ reputation as a fighting game in the West and not dilute that with spin-offs that historically have sold poorly here. It sucks, but at least it’s easy to use a VPN or import the game if you really want to try it.

Bottom-Line

I enjoyed Venus Vacation Prism a lot more than I was expecting to. While I would have certainly preferred a new, mainline Dead or Alive entry, I think it’s extremely unfair to judge this game based on what it isn’t rather than what it is. For what it is, it’s a pretty bog-standard, low-stakes visual novel with some well-integrated dating sim and photography systems. As a result, it’s definitely a pretty niche experience, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy my time with it. Frankly, it’s a considerably more engaging and enjoyable game than any of the Xtreme spin-offs, so I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to getting more spin-offs of this nature in future… just a long as we get Dead or Alive 7 sooner or later!

5/10

(5/10 means the game is pretty average and has some niche appeal – that doesn’t mean it sucks, gamers!)