Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! Yeah, that’s right, we’ve got a special little addendum to last year’s big Love/Hate project. At that time, I mentioned that I wasn’t able to play Dead or Alive Xtreme 2. This was because the game is not backwards compatible with modern Xbox consoles, I did not have a Xbox 360, and I could not get past the title screen when I tried to emulate it. As a result, it was basically unplayable, much to my disappointment.

So, funny story: I sold a bunch of my old Warhammer 40,000 codices a couple months ago and, as a result, had some fun money in my Paypal account. I was browsing for a copy of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for my physical game collection, and I found one for a decent price. I figured that I’d get it just for collecting purposes… But then, when I got it, I immediately started browsing for a decent price on an Xbox 360… uh, suffice to say, I can now review the game properly.

DOAX games tend to be fairly dull experiences for me. Even then, I was especially cautious about DOAX2 for a couple reasons. First of all, its PSP port was fuckin’ shit. I can also recall that this was the first DOA game that reviewed poorly. I’ve always found this really curious, because the first game reviewed well… isn’t this just that game, but with more to do? Was there just a rapid maturation of the the games journalism industry in that three year period? Or did adding a bunch of content actually screw up the formula? Read on to find out…

Love

• Marine Race – The flashiest new addition to DOAX2 is the marine race activity, which allows you to straddle a jet ski and race up to three other girls around the islands. As you’d expect, it plays like a, err, stripped-down version of Wave Race, but it makes for a fun and challenging activity. I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as the volleyball, but it’s pretty close. The various jet skis also have their own stats and specialties, so they also give you something to work towards, as the really good ones are expensive. Marine race is also by far the most ambitious activity in the entire Xtreme franchise, taking you all across the Zack Islands and showing off some pretty good water physics for the early Xbox 360 era. The fact that it has never returned really gives DOAX2 a unique selling point that makes it worth revisiting.
• More Xtreme – Look, we all know what you’re looking for from a Dead or Alive game that’s promising “Xtreme” content, and DOAX2 is definitely pushing the envelope compared to its predecessor. For one thing, there are significantly more revealing swimsuits available, the most revealing of which are just impractically ridiculous. The added power of the Xbox 360 has been put towards important things, namely, modeling pokey nipples onto nearly every outfit (you can’t even see them in-game, but you sure as hell cannot miss ’em in the sports shop). The boob physics are insane, approaching the ridiculous levels of floppiness we saw in the original DOA on PS1. “Butt battle” has been added, which makes for a pretty poor mini-game, but if you’re just looking for an excuse to make the girls clap their cheeks, then it works. Oh, and the coup de grace is undeniably the pole dancing sequences, which require so much grinding to unlock that I doubt most players have even seen them in-game. Say what you will about all this, but the game is certainly living up to its namesake, while towing the line of tastefulness.
• Improved Volleyball Camera – The first DOAX had this weird camera which would follow the ball around the screen. This would often cause your character to be moving around off-screen, which can make setting up to return a serve difficult. DOAX2 fixes this by making sure that all four girls are on-screen at all times. It’s a pretty small improvement, but it’s the sort of thing that should have always been there, and makes going back to the first game feel worse as a result.
• “Be Friendly” – One of the new activity options in this game is that you can now choose to “be friendly” with your chosen partner. This is a pretty minor addition, but I really like it! It’s basically a standard gravure sequence, but with two girls hanging out together instead of just one. I think that this makes for a clever way to work in the partner mechanic, which otherwise gets completely ignored outside of volleyball. I also just like it from a roleplay perspective: win a bunch of volleyball games with your partner and then reward them with a gift and some relaxation time together!

Mixed

• Graphics – While the graphics here are of a higher fidelity than the original DOAXBV, they run into the same issue DOA4 did: they just aren’t that much of an improvement on the previous game. Some of this is probably down to the cartoony art style reaching its limits on HD hardware, but there is clearly a ton of asset reuse going on as well. Not bad, but could be a lot better.

Hate

• Dating Sim Bullshit – Maybe I was too harsh on DOAXBV‘s dating sim mechanics, because they are orders of magnitude worse in DOAX2. It’s not like the systems are all that different, but they’ve added several layers of additional bullshit which make getting new bikinis, sending gifts, partnering up, and managing the other girls affection levels an infuriating affair. In addition to having to know which gifts each girl prefers, you now have to make sure that you wrap it in the right colour of wrapping paper, give it to her at the right time of day, and then cross your fingers that she’ll actually accept it… because, yeah, on top of all of this, there seems to be some RNG at the end of the day that governs whether they’ll actually do what you want. It all adds up to make the actual act of engaging with this game’s systems a fucking chore.
  • That’s not enough though, no: next, you have to hope that your chosen girl is actually available at the time of day you need her to be. This is actually harder than it sounds: at each point in the day, there are usually a couple girls who are just gone doing God knows what. Even if they do show up, you cannot give them gifts or ask to partner with them if they are in the marina. This was actually a legitimate problem for me at one point: I had lost my partner and was desperately trying to recruit Kasumi because I had no partner and had been sending gifts to her for a couple days, but she then spent a full two days in the marina (that’s fifteen percent of your entire playthrough pissed away for nothing).
  • On top of all of this, the entire dating sim mechanics are mercurial as fuck. In my first playthrough, I lost one volleyball match, and then my partner ditched me about halfway through the vacation. I then spent the rest of the vacation having a miserable time unsuccessfully trying to recruit a new partner, but no one was interested, despite following the gifting guides perfectly. For the aforementioned attempt to partner with Kasumi, I had given her three gifts which she enthusiastically accepted, but she still would not partner with me. Meanwhile, on my second vacation, I was ditched by my partner after only one day (lol), but I managed to max out affection with Kasumi and Hitomi after only a couple gifts over the course of a couple days, and Hitomi even accepted an expensive bikini from me… but then I had a third playthrough where I did the same things and she fucking left the island after I tried to give her a bikini… I have no idea what made these outcomes so different, but I hate how this system is such a chore to try to manage. Would some more transparency about how each girl feels about you really hurt the experience? Would cutting out the bullshit make the experience worse?
  • There’s another, overarching issue with the dating sim elements of this game: it makes volleyball matches legitimately stressful. Every time you lose a point, let alone an entire match, you feel a creeping dread… Is my partner going to ditch me now? Do I need to start giving them gifts to keep them happy? Do I need to start getting a backup partner ready, just in case? This is a DOAX game, I just want to chill and not worry about this bullshit.
• Poker – I usually really like the poker minigame in the casino, because I’m good enough at it where I can win big with some regularity, negating some of the grinding that is endemic to these games. However, poker is absolutely busted in DOAX2 for one glaring reason: if you cannot match the maximum bet at your table, then you automatically fold and lose all the money you’ve already bet. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the best hand, if you don’t have 500,000 Zack bucks in the bank, then you risk losing everything if one of the girls starts raising you. I double-checked the other DOAX games and this is an issue entirely unique to this particular entry, but it absolutely sucks. As a result, I just avoided the casino in general, choosing instead to just grind volleyball matches, since this was safer and, by the time I had enough to even gamble with, I’d just buy a swimsuit and start the process over.
• New Activities – While marine race provides an experience nearly on-par with the first game’s volleyball, most of the new activities are really underwhelming and do little more than dilute the core gameplay systems:
  • DOAX2 is also the game which introduced Beach Flags, Butt Battle, and Tug-of-War. As I’ve stated in the past, these minigames suuuuck. Beach Flags in particular is terrible, whereas Butt Battle and Tug-of-War are basically just boring, unengaging guessing games. While it is kind of nice to have them there as a distraction or an option to earn some money if your partner ditches you, they also come with the caveat that you have to buy tickets in order to unlock them. They aren’t super expensive, thankfully, so getting them is nowhere near as grindy as it was in Paradise, but still… am I really going to spend my Zack bucks on fucking Beach Flags?
  • The other minigame that is exclusive to DOAX2 (other than the marine race) is the water slide. This sees your chosen girl go down a slide for about 30 seconds and you have to avoid falling off of it. Unfortunately, the controls are very finnicky and it’s extremely easy to fall off course. Failing results in no payout and the characters are going so fast, are so high up, and go flying so far that it legitimately looks like they die every time you fail. That’s at least kind of funny, but the risk/reward of water slide is so bad that it’s not even worth engaging with after the first couple tries.
  • On top of all of this, none of these activities involve your partner. I’m pretty sure that part of the reason why my partners would ditch me was because I was trying out these other activities, and therefore not doing anything for their affection rating with me (or, worse, maybe you even lose affection if you fail… the game is super obtuse about how this works). If you do too many of these solo activities, I’m fairly certain that it’s actively detrimental to your vacation experience, because having no partner really limits what you can do and how much money you have to work with.
• The Grind – If you play DOAX2 just to have a relaxing vacation with some eye candy, then you probably will have an alright time. However, if you are looking to accomplish anything, then prepare for an ungodly amount of grinding. Let’s put it this way: you want to get one character’s expensive swimsuit gifted to another character. To do that, you can’t just buy it and give it to them: you have to make sure you max out affection with that character (which will take days of gifting), play enough games of volleyball that you can afford the $1 million price tag that most expensive suits have (which will take you a few days to do), and then pray to God that they actually accept it. I don’t even want to imagine the number of playthroughs it would take to 100% this game, you’re probably looking at hundreds of them in a game that is, may I remind you, extremely thin on content to begin with.

Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is a weird case for me. On the one hand, it’s arguably the definitive DOAX game: it’s got all the characters in the franchise up to that point, it’s got the most activities of the entire franchise, and it feels like there was still some ambition that went into the making of it. However, the amount of added tedium really does explain why this game reviewed so much worse than its predecessor. Having to engage with the dating sim bullshit makes playing this a grindy slog that gets in the way of any sexiness you might have tried to mine out of it. Is it worth spending ~$100 to track down a copy of the game and a used Xbox 360 just to experience it? Ehh, I’m happy that I finally got a chance to experience it, but I’m a massive DOA simp, so I’m definitely in the minority on that.