Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Master System! Once again, this is an entirely new entry in the franchise, despite sharing a name with (by this point) three other games released in a four year timespan. I was not too keen on the previous Sega-exclusive Ninja Gaiden game, would this attempt on the Master System fair any better? Read on to find out…
Love
Graphics – Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is, hands-down, the best-looking classic Ninja Gaiden game. In fact, the graphics are so crisp here that I was legitimately shocked when I found out that the Master System was an 8-bit console like the NES. The graphics here are so much better than any other Ninja Gaiden game of the era that I legitimately thought that this game was designed for a 16-bit console! I adore the art style of 16-bit consoles, so this game is all the more impressive to me for looking this good on such aged hardware! This praise for the graphics and pixel art also carries over to the cutscenes, which are easily the most detailed of the classic era of Ninja Gaiden.
Mixed
Control Complexity – One of the most notable new additions in Ninja Gaiden on Master System is that you now have a bit more control over when you grab onto platforms and walls. This is actually kind of nice: in Ninja Gaiden III and Shadow, you would occasionally jump and unintentionally grab onto a platform above you, which could cause you to get hit by an enemy in the process. With that in mind, having some control over whether you want to grab onto a platform is a good idea and it allows the developers to design levels in more interesting ways. However, this decision lays bare the hardware limitations these games are operating under, and how they struggle to deal with additional complexity.
Like the NES games, you’ve got a d-pad and two buttons to work with, and the game controls pretty similarly, but now you have to hold the up button while jumping to grab onto a platform. This is a problem for two reasons: 1) It’s annoying to have to hold a button to do something that used to be automatic, even if I can understand why they’ve added this. But, more importantly, 2) It makes it way easier to accidentally activate your ninja arts if you need to attack an enemy mid-jump, which wastes your energy and can leave you without any later if you need it.
Similarly, jumping onto a wall has gotten more complicated, for better or worse. You used to just grab onto the wall automatically. Now you need to jump into the wall and continue holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall. This will cause Ryu to turn around, and then you need to press jump quickly while still holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall to jump in the opposite direction. In essence, you’re pressing the d-pad in the opposite direction you want to go in, which gets really confusing. On the plus side, this can allow you to leap back and forth off of walls, opening up new platforming opportunities, but my God is it confusing in execution. I honestly think that this game would have been better off on an actual 16-bit console with more buttons – having a dedicated “grab” button would have made this all so much simpler and with no drawbacks.
Difficulty – The people who designed this game are fucking bastards. The NES games are brutal, but their difficulty feels reasonably fair most of the time and the spikes come when they want to test your limits. Meanwhile, the Master System Ninja Gaiden wants to kill you, full-stop. Many enemies move so quickly that you barely have a chance to react to them. The fucking birds are back, and this time they’re even faster and more erratic than ever before! WHY??? And that’s not even getting to the level designs. In the very first level, you complete one area and the next one immediately puts you on a tiny platform over a pit of spikes, so if you were still moving forward absent-mindedly, you would die instantly. It was at that point I went “oh, so that’s the kind of game you’re playing”. What sadistic bastard thought it would be a good idea to have four bird spawn in mid-jump over an instant-death pit? What idiot thought that what an ice level needed was platforms that send you careening forward if you move even a single pixel AND these icy platforms are covered with spikes? Oh, and then they spice things up even more by adding lightning-fast jumping ninjas and piranhas as an extra “fuck you”. Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is a bastard of a game, but I… kind of enjoyed it? Admittedly, most of this comes down to the modern conveniences of emulation mitigating a ton of frustration, but it was to a point where I was starting to predict the next dickheaded move the game would make, prepared myself for it ahead of time, and would have a laugh after each new development. On top of that, the game is pretty generous with its checkpoints and continues (no “oh, you lost to the final boss? Back to the start of the level” bullshit from the previous games). I actually managed to beat this game, which is more than I can say about any of the NES titles with their “fairer” levels of challenge!
Oh, and as a bonus regarding the difficulty, there’s a game-breaking bug that makes it significantly easier. If you can get your ninja arts stockpiled up to 999, then you will actually have unlimited uses of your art. Suffice to say, being able to create unlimited rings of fire to intercept every enemy and projectile (not to mention being able to walk on spikes without getting hurt!) was overpowered as fuck and is a pretty big reason why I was able to reach the end of the game in spite of all the bullshit it threw at me.
The Story – I kind of view the Master System Ninja Gaiden as the apex of the classic era: sure, it’s got some design flaws that mar the experience, but it’s the flashiest and most refined version of the classic era’s gameplay. However, one notable area in which it falls short compared to the NES games is that its story is significantly less effective. It retains the cutscenes that made the trilogy so famous, but the actual narrative here is disappointing. The NES trilogy were simple, but a lot of effort was put into its characters and wringing drama out of their reactions to the games’ events. Here, they’ve taken a step back – it’s now just about Ryu doing cool shit until the bad guys are defeated. It’s too bad, you can see how this franchise’s emphasis on narrative just dropped off until Ninja Gaiden stories became… well, what we’d new expect out of a modern Ninja Gaiden game.
Also, the game has some questionable localization, so you’ll occasionally get a chuckle out of some badly translated line of dialogue.
Hate
Multi-hit Enemies – This game introduces lots of basic enemies who require multiple hits in order to kill. Call me old-fashioned, but this feels like it goes against the fundamental design ethos of these games. Why does some mafioso in a suit take two hits to kill, while a nearly-identical one dies in one? I don’t get it, I don’t really like it, and it just feels like an unnecessary extra step to kill an enemy who is almost-certainly dead anyway when you landed that first hit; the second hit just feels like an unnecessary formality at that point.
In spite of itself, I actually quite enjoyed Ninja Gaiden on the Master System. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the first couple games on the NES, but it’s very close, and gives us a glimpse into a potential future where these games continued into the 16-bit era. As a close to the classic era of Ninja Gaiden, it’s a pretty great time and well worth checking out!
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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Game Gear! Despite what its title would suggest, this is not a port of the NES Ninja Gaiden, nor is it a port of the arcade game, but an entirely new game that just happens to have the same name as the others (get used to this, this isn’t even the last game called Ninja Gaiden that we’re going to be covering in this series). To make matters even more confusing, it’s unclear if this game is even considered canon, having an entirely self-contained narrative that sees Ryu Hayabusa having to save the world once again. How would this portable entry on superior hardware hold up in comparison to Ninja Gaiden Shadow? Read on to find out…
Love
…nothing. For the second time in Love/Hate history, there’s nothing particular about this game that I liked, let alone would consider worth mentioning. If I had to say anything even tangentially positive: it’s got Ryu Hayabusa in it, it’s portable, and it’s on the Game Gear, I guess?
Mixed
The Graphics – The graphics in this game look like ass. Yes, they are technically more detailed than they were on the NES, but the art style looks so much worse in comparison. That said, I’d be kind of an asshole if I did not put this into perspective: this was a handheld game released in 1991 on the Game Gear. In that context, Ninja Gaiden would have looked pretty damn impressive for its time (especially compared to the Game Boy, whose significantly more limited hardware was still being used into the 2000s). Still… in a modern context where the totality of gaming history is available to us, Ninja Gaiden on the Game Gear looks very unappealing.
Hate
Game Feel – The moment you start playing Ninja Gaiden, you get the sense that something is off. Gone is the quick, precise action of the NES trilogy, replaced with a jump which goes very high and is unbelievably floaty. As a result, you’re going to overshoot nearly anything you try to jump to, and then have to wait for Ryu to float down to the enemy or orb to slash it. The pickup orbs, by the way, are tiny in this game, so you’d better hope you don’t miss your slash, or you’ll have to waste a couple more seconds trying again. It sounds really nitpicky when I describe it, but my God does this game feel terrible to play, and it largely stems from the way they’ve designed the jumping/falling mechanics.
Enemy Placements are BULLSHIT – Ninja Gaiden on Game Gear is not a particularly difficult game, especially compared to its NES counterparts. However, in an effort to make the game “difficult”, the developers have made most enemy encounters utter fucking bullshit. You will have enemies spawn in, immediately attack you, and you have a fraction of a second to register this new information and respond or you will take unavoidable damage. This happens the moment the game starts and goes on throughout the entire playthrough, it’s utter dogshit design. To get through a level unscathed, you end up needing to have the reaction time of an athlete, or you memorize the entire level and trivialize the entire thing (or, y’know, enjoy the benefits of modern emulation and get through the game stupid-easily).
The Skyscraper Level – Whoever designed the skyscraper level needs to be tried in the Hauge for crimes against humanity. What a fucking bullshit level: you’re climbing up the side of a skyscraper while it auto-scrolls upward and have to jump between two buildings to avoid falling objects and kamikaze martial artists. Not only does this mean that you have to react instantly to every incoming object, but if you get hit, you also have to immediately grab back onto the building, or you will fall to an instant death. It’s a cool concept for a level, but the execution here makes for one of the most unenjoyable sequences in the entire franchise.
Ninja Gaiden on Game Gear isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played, but it’s certainly not enjoyable either. I really was not expecting Ninja Gaiden Shadow to be the superior 8-bit handheld experience, but at least I got some fun out of that game in spite of its shortcomings. Perhaps it’s a mercy then that Ninja Gaiden is so short, clocking in at barely over thirty minutes of runtime (hence why this list is also short… there’s only so much you can say about a game that I beat in less time than it took me to write this article).
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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden Shadow, a prequel to the NES trilogy released for the Game Boy! I’m always super leery about Game Boy spin-offs of console games: the handheld was extremely under-powered, so the idea of playing an ultra-precise and difficult Ninja Gaiden game on one sounds like a nightmare. That said, how does Ninja Gaiden Shadow actually play in practice? Read on to find out…
Love
New Platforming Tricks – You’d think that Ninja Gaiden Shadow would be content to just coast of the gimmick of being a handheld Ninja Gaiden game, but it actually has a couple fantastic additions to the 2D side-scrolling formula. First of all, you can now press down + jump to hang and/or drop from the platform you’re standing on, which is super useful and opens up new platforming options. The flashiest new addition though is the grappling hook, which has a surprisingly long range that allows you to reach platforms above you that are out of your reach. I love this thing, not only is it useful for the platforming, but it’s so cool being able to dodge an enemy attack by throwing the hook and climbing to safety in the nick of time!
Reasonable Level of Difficulty – It’s no secret that I haven’t really enjoyed the extreme difficulty of these old-school Ninja Gaiden games, but I feel like Ninja Gaiden Shadow strikes a pretty reasonable level of challenge. For the most part, it’s not too bad, and there’s enough health pickups that mistakes don’t feel excessively punishing. The last couple bosses are tough, so it’s not like the game is excessively easy either!
The Wrestler Boss – Most of the 2D Ninja Gaiden bosses have been pretty forgettable, but Ninja Gaiden Shadow has a boss who is, hands-down, the best boss in the series thus far. It’s a pretty simple fight against a wrestler, which plays out like any other boss in the series… except that this guy has a little minion who you cannot damage. This little bastard will flip around the arena and grab onto you, slowing your movement and making it so you can’t get away from the boss. The resulting fight is still not particularly difficult, but it’s hilarious trying to dodge this gremlin and shake him off before the main boss beats you down!
Mixed
Strips Out Most of What Makes Ninja Gaiden Good – Ninja Gaiden Shadow has had to make some heavy compromises in order to function on Game Boy. The platforming is much less precise than on NES, you only get one ninja art that you can use, the narrative is practically non-existent, and the game’s performance is quite poor. That said… I can’t put this in “Hate”, because I got some enjoyment out of my time with Shadow, so there must be some fundamental strength here that they’ve retained which is keeping things fun.
Hate
Boss Health Feels Excessive – While Ninja Gaiden Shadow is a pretty easy experience, it does have one particularly frustrating flaw. Due to the hardware limitations, there’s no display showing how much HP a boss has remaining. This would be fine, but I swear that the bosses feel like they take more hits to kill than they did on NES. This gets particularly annoying on the last couple bosses, who require precise maneuvers to avoid getting hit, and you won’t be able to do enough damage to them without dying if you do not perfect your jumps and dodge timing. This is particularly relevant for the goddamn genie boss, who flies around out of reach for 80% of the fight. You might only manage to get in one or two hits at a time before he becomes invulnerable again, making the entire fight an absolute slog.
Ninja Gaiden Shadow makes me question how much I can take hardware limitations into account when judging a game. Taking into account the Game Boy’s limitations, this is a pretty good game. However, by the standards of the Ninja Gaiden franchise, this is a pretty lackluster experience. And, judged entirely on its own merits, Shadow is an incredibly short and mediocre curiosity. It’s a bit of a weird situation overall. I got enough fun out of Shadow that I’d at least recommend checking it out if you’re into 2D side-scrolling action-platformers, but it’s far from a must-play experience.
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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the final entry in the NES trilogy, Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom! With the NES era coming to a close, Tecmo wanted to get one last Ninja Gaiden game out. This game would have a different creative team who wanted to make changes to the formula and attempt to tell a different sort of story than its predecessors. Would these changes improve the overall experience, or would it cap off the original trilogy on a down note? Read on to find out…
For this article, I played the NES Ninja Gaiden III, as well as the re-released version of the game in Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (the reasons for this will become clear later). Having played both versions, I can confirm that the Trilogy release’s altered graphics, bizarrely, have desaturated a lot of the brighter colours for God knows what reason. This is actively detrimental to the experience: for one example, streams of molten metal in the NES version end up looking like fountains of literal shit in Trilogy. In addition, the soundtrack has been downgraded significantly, reminding me of the hack job they did on Resident Evil Director’s Cut: it’s that level of crap.
Love
Further Refines the Ninja Gaiden Formula – You’d be surprised that they could find more ways to refine Ninja Gaiden on NES hardware after the second game, but they sure managed it here. The flashiest new feature would have to be the ability to grab onto overhanging bars and then move forward while hanging, or jump up onto the platform above. This adds an entire new dimension of strategic platforming whenever it is implemented. However, I think my favourite refinement is that you can now see what power-up is inside of each orb before you smash it. This makes it a lot easier to manage your ninja art of choice and know whether it’s worth it to go out of your way for an orb in a dangerous area.
Sword Power-up – Ninja Gaiden III adds a new upgrade which extends the range of your sword swing. It should go without saying that this is extremely handy for a game of this sort, but I also like the way that they’ve executed the idea. The upgrade only lasts until you die or reach the end of the current act, whichever comes first. This seems very fair to me, whereas Ninja Gaiden II‘s shadow ninjas were a bit too good and made the game feel so much worse when you died and lost them. Plus, with the aforementioned ability to see what’s inside each orb, you really get excited when you spot one up for grabs!
Enemies Don’t Respawn! – OH MY GOD, FINALLY! No more cheesing the game by manipulating enemy spawns, and no more frustration caused by endless respawns, if an enemy is pissing you off, just swing your sword at them. This “Love” is really self-evidently great, need I say more?
Mixed
Level Gimmicks – For the most part, Ninja Gaiden III jettisons the level gimmicks which plagued Ninja Gaiden II‘s runtime, and it’s a much less frustrating experience for it. However, they do come back all at once in act six: you suddenly have slippery platforms, foreground obstructions, and quicksand. On the one hand, thank you Ninja Gaiden III for confining this to a single act. On the other hand, the execution of these level gimmicks is at its absolute worst here, with excessively-slippery platforms, foreground obstructions making it impossible to see where the platform ends, and areas where the entire ground is quicksand, forcing you to jump constantly (including after defeating a boss, you still have to remember to jump or you’ll die and get forced to replay the entire boss fight and the run-up to it)!
Hate
ABSURD Difficulty – Look, I’m sure that I’ve made it abundantly clear by this point that I do not enjoy old-school difficulty and don’t have the patience to see these games through to the end. I don’t hold that against the games too much though, because they seem like they’re reasonably achievable with patience and practice. However, Ninja Gaiden III takes this to an even more absurd level, where I feel that it’s actively detrimental to the experience. For the first two games, I was able to struggle through to the last act before the challenge just got to be too much. With Ninja Gaiden III, I made it to the start of act three before I rage-quit. This game is, without a doubt, the hardest of the trilogy for one reason: even basic enemies do an idiotic amount of damage. You need to be damn-near perfect to survive this game, because it is incredibly punishing. Making a mistake and taking a couple hits will leave you with a sliver of health, so even tanking a hit to land a jump is an incredibly costly move. Oh, and the game only gives you a limited number of lives with which to complete the game. Perhaps the biggest piss-off though? The game wasn’t even designed this way: Tecmo decided, for the North American release, to just make the game harder, so they increased the damage of enemy attacks, gave you a life limit, and removed a password system to be able to “save” your progress…
…which brings us to Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. The version of Ninja Gaiden III in this compilation is based on the original Japanese release, which features the game’s originally-intended difficulty. The differences are like night and day: I could barely get to act three in the NES version, but in Trilogy I actually reached the final boss (the only NES Ninja Gaiden game I could do that for)! So, for all its faults, at least Trilogy makes Ninja Gaiden III reasonably playable!
Narrative – Compared to the previous two games, Ninja Gaiden III‘s narrative feels like a step down in quality. While its predecessors had b-movie narratives, Ninja Gaiden III‘s story is intensely bizarre. So, for some reason, the game is an interquel between the first and second games, but it doesn’t bother to tell you this until the very end of the game… There’s a rogue US Agent, Foster, who has created these clone-mutants (called bio-noids, lol) using lingering power from the demon Ryu defeated in the first game. The bio-noids were used to kill Irene, but it turns out that she’s not actually dead, because she knew what Foster was up to and was working with the US army against him. Anyway, the bad guys have cloned Ryu, so he now has to stop this imposter and figure out who killed Irene (but actually didn’t). Got all that? Good, because I haven’t even gotten to the titular Ancient Ship of Doom, which one of the bio-noids has claimed possession of, is going to use it to destroy the world and then replace it with a new one sculpted in his image. Suffice to say, it’s utter nonsense. Worst of all though? Even with the weird things going on, the narrative is not even particularly interesting. The first couple games were pretty simple, but the characters kept things interesting and the abundance of drama made things feel like there were some actual stakes.
Ninja Gaiden III is a weird case. When I was doing well, I found the game to be pretty enjoyable. However, if I made any mistake, I was punished so hard that it made the next mistake I made near-certain death. That just… isn’t fun. I’d be remiss if I did not mention that the version of Ninja Gaiden III in Trilogy is at a level of challenge that feels reasonable, even to a modern audience, so it might be worth a look. When you can actually enjoy playing the game, Ninja Gaiden III is a pretty good time!
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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, the direct sequel to the NES Ninja Gaiden! With the revolutionary success of the NES Ninja Gaiden, Tecmo set about making a grander and even more ambitious follow-up to try to eclipse it. Could they achieve this lofty goal, or would familiarity and aging hardware result in diminishing returns? Read on to find out…
Love
More Ninja Gaiden, But Refined – For the most part, Ninja Gaiden II is more of the good stuff that we got in the original: precise controls, satisfying platforming, and fast combat. The platforming abilities especially have been improved for the better. Being able to to climb up and down any wall you grab onto is super helpful. In addition, jumps feel a tad floatier than the first game. A floaty jump can be annoying, but they’ve tuned it well here. This makes it easier to jump off of a wall and then immediately turn around to get “up” onto a platform, and can make it a easier to land a strike at the peak of your jump. If anything, combat has become even more precise. You need to time your sword strikes just right to land a hit: even a fraction of a second too early can result in you getting hit instead.
More Emphasis on Story – While the actual narrative of Ninja Gaiden II is very simple (the secret bad guy behind the first game has kidnapped Irene, go take him out), the emphasis on cinematic storytelling is even greater than it was in the first game. Cutscenes are interspersed a bit more frequently to tell the game’s story, and really do a good job of making you feel like you’re part of an epic quest. As far as NES narratives go, this is about the best you could look for outside of a JRPG.
Graphics – Ninja Gaiden was already a pretty good looking game for the NES, but the 8-bit pixel art in Ninja Gaiden II is downright gorgeous at times. In particular, the sun-soaked approach to the demon altar is jaw-dropping stuff and really gets you in the mood for an epic showdown!
Difficulty – The difficulty in the first Ninja Gaiden felt downright unfair towards the end, throwing so much at you that you had to either memorize the entire level, or manipulate the game’s hardware limitations to make it through with enough health to survive the boss encounter. Ninja Gaiden II seems to strike a somewhat fairer balance: most enemies move slower and more predictably, giving just enough time to figure out how to deal with them without feeling like you’re going to be overwhelmed. I also found that health items drop more frequently than they did in the first game (to the point where I didn’t know that the first game even had health drops at all!). Sure, this is still an old-school hard game with its own levels of bullshit, but it feels significantly more manageable than the first game or Ninja Gaiden (arcade) did… That said, I did end up giving up in the last level again, but I got a lot further and felt a hell of a lot more motivated to get better than I did playing the first game, so that’s a plus.
Mixed
Shadow Ninjas – A new feature of this game is that you can get up to two “ghosts” of Ryu which will follow you and attack whenever you do (including using your sub-weapons!), potentially killing nearby enemies or dealing bonus damage to a boss. On the one hand, I’ll welcome anything that makes these games’ difficulty a bit more manageable for me, and lining these shadow ninjas up to damage an enemy while you’re safely off to the side can be pretty satisfying. On the other hand, they feel borderline overpowered, especially since they can clone your ninja arts and just wipe the screen clean of enemies. This also results in a general sense of screen clutter. I’ve had several enemies rushing at me that I never noticed because of all the crap my shadow ninjas were doing at the same time. Finally, when you die, your shadow ninjas go away until you find more item pickups for them. This, frankly, just makes you feel like crap when it happens, leaving you significantly depowered and invariably making the run back to whatever killed you even harder than it was the first time. As cool as they can be, I’d honestly just prefer a game balanced around the player character taking on everything themselves.
Hate
Stage Gimmicks – By far the worst addition in Ninja Gaiden II is this game’s obsession with filling most of the levels with some sort of new gimmick… and they all suck.
First of all, there’s the gusts of wind that blow you around uncontrollably. You have to actively push against them, or they’ll blow you right off of platforms. This would be fine, but the main issue is that you simply cannot make a jump if the wind is against you. Winds change direction after a few seconds, so this can get you hit and/or killed if it happens at an inopportune time.
Then there’s the level where it’s pitch-black night and you can only see the path forward during the occasional lightning flash. Honestly, this gimmick was my least-hated one, despite being potentially lethal to have to make a jump while blind. I think that this frustration was mitigated by the sheer fact that Ninja Gaiden II‘s platforming controls are stellar, and this stage has been mercifully designed in a way that you aren’t dealing with this while simultaneously being overwhelmed by multiple enemies (also, y’know, emulation conveniences help too).
Then there’s the icy platforms. Is there a single person out there who loves ice levels in platformers? As you’d expect, these ice platforms cause you to slide, and standing still on one will take a couple seconds to build up momentum to be able to move again. This sort of imprecise platforming goes against the entire reason I enjoy these NES Ninja Gaiden games in the first place, why would you ruin a level like this?
Then there’s the level where large ruins in the foreground block your view of Ryu, platforms and enemies throughout the level. What idiot thought that it would be a good idea to have an action platformer level where you can see neither the action, nor the platforming!? I don’t think I even took a hit because of this, but it’s the principle that counts!
Overall, I found Ninja Gaiden II to be a more fun experience than its predecessor. Tuning down the old-school difficulty just a smidgen makes its challenges something that I actually feel motivated to try to overcome. It’s basically just a more refined version of its predecessor, but that’s all it really needs to be!
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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going back to the “true” beginning of this franchise: the other 1988 Ninja Gaiden game released on the NES! Despite sharing a name, publisher, and a release year, the two games share nothing in common. While the arcade game was a side-scrolling beat ’em up in the vein of Double Dragon, this NES game was a side-scrolling action-platformer in the vein of the original Castlevania. That said, the arcade Ninja Gaiden didn’t exactly hold up to the test of time, would this console attempt fare any better? Read on to find out…
For this playthrough, I used the original NES Ninja Gaiden. There is also a SNES re-release of the first three games in the trilogy, fittingly-titled Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, which slightly improves/alters the graphics. However, this re-release is generally considered inferior for how it fails to translate some aspects of the original experience (eg, missing parallax scrolling, altered graphics affecting the tone of certain scenes, much worse music, etc), and the controls are noticeably less-precise, which makes it a more frustrating experience. In general, it’s considered a rushed, low-quality re-release, so most fans recommend playing the originals instead. For this Love/Hate series, I played the NES originals unless otherwise noted.
Love
Precision – If there’s one word you could use to describe Ninja Gaiden on NES, it’s “precise”. The game’s controls are immaculate, giving you very fine control over your jumps and near-immediate feedback when you attack with your weapon. This core strength just makes the rest of the gameplay feel very satisfying as you learn to expertly line up your jumps and time your attacks.
Combat – Compared to Ninja Gaiden (arcade)’s extremely sluggish combat system, Ninja Gaiden on NES is incredibly snappy. Sword strikes are fast, one-shotting all regular enemies and destroying most projectiles. Despite having only two buttons and a d-pad to work with, the game also features several special weapons and techniques that you find and equip in the overworld (again, which operate like Castlevania‘s sub-weapons). They’re mapped to up + attack, which is good enough to pull off when you need it, while not accidentally using them when you weren’t intending to.
Platforming – Ninja Gaiden is as much a platformer as it is an action game, and those precise controls really help in this regard. Jumping feels very intuitive and landing where you want to rarely presents a problem. Any deaths from falls will almost always be down to enemy attacks or your own errors rather than the game’s controls. The game’s platforming also is enhanced due to Ryu’s ability to grab onto walls, which allows him to cling to them and then jump off. This ability provides some really creative and fun platforming opportunities that you wouldn’t expect from a game this old.
Narrative Presentation – Ninja Gaiden was revolutionary at the time of its release for featuring fully-fledged, animated cutscenes. Some games had experimented with this concept, but Ninja Gaiden was one of the first on NES to showcase it and to make story presentation a core part of the experience. These animated cutscenes are actually pretty lengthy too, totaling around twenty minutes of runtime! While the story itself is still just b-movie level stuff (the bad guy steals the demon statues to summon a slumbering demon and Ryu needs to get them back), it takes this plot more seriously than its arcade contemporary and lacks that campy tone as a result. I dare say that the ambition on display here arguably makes this game’s narrative a bit more compelling than some of its 3D-era successors.
Hate
NES Difficulty – NES-era games are notorious for their ridiculous and downright unfair levels of difficulty, and Ninja Gaiden is known for being one of the toughest of the bunch. While the game’s great controls and combat mitigate the frustration, surviving in this game often comes down to a matter of luck, or memorization of enemy placements through trial and error. It gets so bad that you end up having to manipulate the game’s spawn system, moving back and forth in specific ways to de-spawning enemies to clear a path forward. Beating the game is certainly doable with practice and skill, so it is somewhat satisfying to get to grips with, but it’s asking for a lot of commitment up-front to deal with that frustration. Thankfully, modern conveniences, such as save states and rewinds, also help to mitigate this frustration, but by the time you face off with Bloody Malth and then move into act six, the game’s difficulty goes into overdrive. You’ll have to navigate an overwhelming number of enemies, make near-frame-perfect jumps to avoid certain attacks, and you don’t even have a way to heal any damage you may end up taking. As the ultimate piss-off, the game ends with a triple boss gauntlet, where you get thrown all the way back to the start of act six if you fail. It’s just punishingly difficult and merciless, demanding perfection if you want to see the end credits. Even with save states as a fallback, the frustration wasn’t worth it for me: I gave up in act six and just Youtubed the finale.
FUCKING BIIIIIIIRDS!!! – This ties into the previous section, but fuck birds. These flapping bastards will spawn in as you go to jump, nailing you mid-air when you cannot react and sending you to a cheap death. Even if you know they’re coming, they move erratically, potentially landing a hit on you that you simply cannot stop with an attack of your own. I am not exaggerating when I say that these dickheads are the most annoying basic enemy in the entire franchise.
In spite of its ridiculous level of difficulty, Ninja Gaiden is well-worth trying out, even today. Given that the NES was the most popular console of its day, Ninja Gaiden‘s narrative presentation was nothing short of revolutionary, influencing all future games that would adopt more involved and cinematic narratives. The gameplay is quite fun too, although the signature old-school difficulty means that this is a game that you’ll go in to with the understanding that you probably will not see the end.
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So, since I went through my top 100 games of all-time, I thought it might be interesting to flip the script and see what my least-favourite games ever were! Important note: I’m only covering twenty-five games on this list. Put simply, it’s a lot harder to get through bad video games as opposed to other forms of media: you either know the sorts of games you’re into, or you are so put-off by a game that you drop it immediately before you can make any impressions. As a result, I don’t have a lot of games played that are truly awful (even the first few entries on the list aren’t all that bad). And, again, these are all very subjective opinions and are based on the games I personally have played. Got it? Let’s get into it.
25. The Simpsons: Road Rage (2001, PS2)
The Simpsons do not have a good track record with video games. There are a few gems, but Road Rage is not one of them. It’s literally Crazy Taxi, but with a Simpsons skin over it. As you might expect, the entire premise is extremely thin: pickup passengers, drive them to their destination as fast as possible, get money based on how quickly you get there. The one thing that makes Road Rage sort of worth it is the quippy writing, which should give you a few laughs. However, there’s not a whole lot to do here and you’re going to hear the same lines over and over again, so it’s an experience that is going to grow dull pretty fast.
24. The Incredibles (2004, PS2)
If you grew up in the PS1 and PS2 era, you probably went through a “licensed games” phase where you were too young to realize that these games sucked. I used to play through anything back then, having not developed any standards of what proper game design was like yet. The Incredibles is the first game where I can remember myself getting close to the end, getting killed over and over by the bullshit controls and balancing, and just deciding “I’m done, this game isn’t worth it.” It’s a very simple, but poorly balanced beat ’em up. Not a game I truly hate, but one that I can’t say I ever actually enjoyed myself playing.
23. Dead Space 3 (2013, PS3)
Okay, maybe I’m being a bit harsh here, but I really do hate Dead Space 3. It killed off one of my favourite franchises, and shit all over its story and gameplay on the way out. If you think I’m just being harsh, then feel free to ignore this entry and put Turning Point: Fall of Liberty on the list… I really couldn’t justify it myself though. Turning Point left me feeling indifferent. Dead Space 3 fills me with disappointment and anger which invalidate any of its positives. As I said in my Love/Hate analysis of the game, it’s a fundamentally compromised experience, one that is worse than its predecessors in every way, and not even good compared to Uncharted and Gears of War, which it’s trying so hard to be like. Perhaps it’s for the best that Dead Space died here, I’d hate to see what would have happened if they paraded its corpse out for a fourth entry.
Oh, by the way: the remake pisses me off too. EA shuts down Visceral and then gets a new studio involved and parades Visceral’s work out when there’s greater profit potential? Fuck you, EA.
22. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (2006, PS2)
This one makes it onto the list for a very specific reason. Back when Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter came out, the gaming magazines were singing its praises, calling it the best shooter on the market and a must-play. As a fan of the genre, with that kind of endorsement, I knew I had to check it out. I bought a copy for my PS2, fired it up… and I was bored shitless. The gunplay was so mediocre, the squad controls were a lot less in-depth than I had been led to believe, and there was no cover system… What were the game journalists thinking…? It’s like they were playing a completely different game.
Well… turns out that they were. At the time of the Xbox 360 and PS3’s release, Ubisoft had a fucking scummy policy where they would release completely different versions of games on last gen consoles. The differences between the current gen versions (which got all the coverage and accolades) and the last-gen versions were barely communicated, so I (and many others) got duped with low-effort junk after being told it was gold. The fact that the next-gen version was so good makes it sting even more, I am so annoyed that I got hyped up for this experience and then bought the “wrong” game.
21. Friday the 13th: The Game (2017, PS4)
I actually Kickstarted this game back in the day and, while I didn’t have particularly high hopes, I figured it would at least be interesting. Little did I know that Friday the 13th: The Game would play out pretty similarly to the movies themselves: pretty bad in its own right, but made all the worse due to legal battles over the rights. Friday the 13th was one of the earliest asymmetrical multiplayer horror games: one player plays as Jason against a group of survivors, who need to complete objectives and survive in order to win. While the core of the experience was kind of fun (whether that be sneaking around to find a way to escape the campground, or hacking up teens with a machete), the game was buggy beyond belief. It felt awful to play: the controls were janky, the graphics and animations were very poor (it would have looked dated even on last gen consoles), and the netcode was pretty bad. It was unique enough an experience that I did forgive a lot of this for a while, but I was never under any illusions about how badly made the game was.
That was all bad enough on its own, but what really sank Friday the 13th was that the franchise became embroiled in a rights legal battle, halting any further development of the game for years. There were more game modes, characters, and cosmetics planned, but they never got the chance to implement them, and the game basically withered away on the vine. As we have seen with Dead By Daylight, there was definitely a market for this kind of game, but it’s sad to see that Friday the 13th didn’t really get a fair shake to carve out a proper place for itself.
20. Resident Evil 6 (2017, PS4)
Resident Evil 6 is an exhausting game. There’s just too much stuffed into this bloated mess of a game. In trying to appeal to everyone, it leaves nobody satisfied. There’s so much here that much of it isn’t given enough attention, leaving half-baked mechanics and level designs. Of the four campaigns, the only one that I kind of liked was Jake & Sherry’s. However, I’ve heard just as many players say that Chris or Leon’s campaign were the only one they liked, so you can see how polarizing this campaign structure is. The four campaign structure also screws over the plot (which is easily the dumbest and most over-the-top in franchise history). Then spread this out over a twenty hour playthrough, and you can see why Resident Evil 6 just generates exhaustion even thinking about it.
19. Twisted Metal 4 (2017, PS4)
I loved Twisted Metal as a kid. We had a PS1 demo disc with Twisted Metal 2 on it and my brothers and I would play split screen matches against each other in that demo, it was awesome. Unfortunately, after Twisted Metal 2, the original developers moved onto other projects and the franchise was handed over to 989 Studios. Twisted Metal 3 and 4 are both pretty notorious for how badly they screwed up the franchise’s tone. For my part, I think 4 is worse (hence why it made the list): Twisted Metal 3 feels like the previous games, just… significantly dumber. Twisted Metal 4, on the other hand, turns the franchise into a cartoonish joke. Sweet Tooth pulls off a coup and takes control of the contest, which could be a really cool concept. Unfortunately, they’ve also interpreted Sweet Tooth by putting more emphasis on the clown part, so all of his scenes have him juggling in a circus while surrounded by goofy clowns… it’s something, alright. That’s not even taking into account the actual game itself. The cars look like toys and control like ass. The only cool things are that you can create a custom car (with, like, a grand total of nine options to pick from) and Calypso enters the contest with a goddamn nuclear rocket truck (which is dumb because it makes him by far the coolest driver in the game, why the hell would you play anyone else?).
18. Star Wars: Episode I – Jedi Power Battles (2000, PS1)
You really had to be there for Star Wars: Episode I. Lucasfilm were milking the shit out of it, licensing Star Wars all over the place. The film had 5 video game tie-ins just in that first year (which isn’t even counting all the handheld ports those games got). One of these was Jedi Power Battles. My brothers and I enjoyed it as kids, largely because it was the most “violent” game we were allowed to play at the time. I enjoyed the hack ‘n slash combat for the time, and the blaster deflection parry was really cool, but even back then we had one major complaint… See, Jedi Power Battles isn’t just a hack ‘n slash like it is advertised to be. Oh no, the game is also secretly a 3D platformer… and the absolute worst 3D platformer ever made, I may add. You spend an inordinate amount of time in this game jumping over bottomless pits to land on platforms. With this game’s slippery controls and isometric camera, it’s legitimately difficult to make some of these jumps. Making matters worse are that the game has some extremely precise jumps, to the point where there are jumps in the first goddamn level that you will not make unless you start jump after you’re already off of the platform. It’s fucking ridiculous, but it reaches a zenith during the Coruscant level. You spend 99% of this level jumping on platforms… oh, and it also happens to be the longest level of the entire game. You have a limited number of lives in this game: on more than one occasion, we had to restart the entire level, because we kept falling into bottomless pits over and over again.
By the way, this wasn’t just me being a scrub as a kid. I recently fired up Jedi Power Battles on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and, as soon as I got to the platforming sections, I just kept dying. It was flabbergasting how much they were asking of you and how badly it controlled. It’s too bad, the game is pretty fun when it’s actually being a hack ‘n slash, but the platforming is such an inordinate problem that it sinks the entire experience.
17. Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 6 (2002, PC)
Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 6 is clearly a budget title. That is fine. You get a relatively large open world in which to go hunt animals (large enough that there’s an ATV you can drive), and there’s a pretty impressive number of real-life gear in the game that you can use. The problem is that the game is clearly trying to be a hunting simulation, and expects you to treat it like one: slowly, quietly sneaking up on your target to land the perfect shot.
Unfortunately, the illusion shatters as soon as you get bored. “Fuck these deer, I’ve got things to do,” you say and then you just start sprinting headlong at them. The game’s animal AI is too dumb to react appropriately to a screaming monkey with a gun blasting at them, and so they stand there dumbfounded as you close the distance with them in the blink of an eye. Then, when they do run, you’re supposed to track the blood and figure out where they went. Instead, you just sprint after them, continually blasting the poor deer in the ass with your Cabela’s-branded gun. I legitimately wish that they had put some mechanics in to prevent this from happening. A hunting sim could be pretty interesting as a unique, niche experience. However, if you have to force yourself not to play like a moron to actually get that unique experience, it kind of ruins the whole thing.
16. BloodRayne (2002, PS2)
I had always been kind of interested in BloodRayne. I was nothing if not an edgelord when this game came out and I thought that her character design was cool. Given my love for shit movies, I had also seen two of the Uwe Boll adaptations (honestly… BloodRayne 2 ain’t bad). I recently decided to try out the games to see how good they were…
This game left me infuriated. The graphics are terrible (at least, they are in the PS2 version that I played). The art design makes the whole game unpleasant to look at. The voice acting is bad. The level design sucks more than our half-vampire heroine does, especially when the game turns into a finnicky platformer. The melee combat is just the worst though. In order to make a melee attack, you have to press L1 to attack. This would be awkward enough, but there’s absolutely no tracking or enemy lock-on and the attack animations lack impact, so you might as well by attacking with a wet noodle for all the damage it’s doing to the enemy. Add this all up, and melee combat feels like you’re flailing around in thin air all over the place. This gets so much worse later in the game when enemies that are immune to your ranged weapons are everywhere, forcing you to engage with this shitty melee system.
It’s wild how far a great character design can get you. This game was shit, but it still got multiple sequels, films, and a Playboy spread, all because the main character looks fucking cool. Actually playing the game though? I forced myself to get through, but the bright spots were few and far between.
15. Shrek 2 (2004, PS2)
My youngest brother was really into Shrek as a kid. Naturally, he was given the Shrek 2 game as a gift, and it was up to my brothers and I to join him for some co-op, isometric beat ’em up… fun? Yeah… surprise, surprise, Shrek 2‘s one of those shitty licensed video games. The beat ’em up gameplay is extremely simple and tired. For a game with a fixed, third person camera, you’d think that they’d be able to keep all the players and enemies on-screen, but somehow this game struggles to even do that consistently. There’s also just too much slow, dull platforming, often tied to specific characters’ abilities (meaning that everyone else just sits around and waits until the other player does their chores).
14. Resident Evil Survivor (2000, PS1)
I hated Resident Evil Survivor when I first played it. Having played much worse Resident Evil games since (spoiler alert), my opinion has softened on it somewhat, mainly due to its ambitious branching pathways and its hilarious voice acting. However, that’s not to say that I’ve forgiven it. Survivor is still a shockingly bad game: terrible graphics, terrible gunplay, idiotic puzzles, and the lack of saves is fundamentally moronic, not to mention that it’s only like two hours long. Survivor is not this underrated, misunderstood hidden gem. It sucks. It has some cool ideas, but it fails to do them any justice. It just sucks.
13. Super Noah’s Ark 3D (1994, SNES)
Yes, this is a real game. It’s literally running on the Doom engine. It also was unlicensed, meaning that video game retailers were not allowed to stock it. It’s also just laughable on its face: you’re playing as Noah, firing sleep-inducing food at animals (mostly goats; suspiciously, there are way more than two goats on this boat). You then do the “classic” Doom thing of hunting around a maze for keys… it sucks. Like, the joke was funny, but actually having to play it for any length of time is just not worth it.
I recently covered my problems with Dead or Alive Paradise here on IC2S, but put simply: it’s the most inessential Dead or Alive game of all-time. The DOA Xtreme gameplay is severely lacking in things to do. The hardware is ill-suited to provide the sex appeal this kind of game is supposed to deliver. Worst of all though, the gameplay changes have turned this already content-thin game into a grindy slog that is just not worth the effort it asks of you. If you have to play a DOA Xtreme game, then make it literally any other one.
11. I Am Alive (2012, PS3)
This game was one of my biggest video game disappointments. I remember back when I Am Alive was first being teased, it sounded really unique: a stealth-survival game where you play a normal guy trying to make his way through a destroyed city after some sort of disaster. Having the environment be the primary antagonist rather than combat encounters was really intriguing and I waited eagerly for more info on it… Well, I was waiting a long time, because it took about four years for this game to re-emerge with a release date. I heard from the reviews that it wasn’t very good, but I had waited so long for this game that I had to try it out anyway.
Just by playing I Am Alive, you can feel the developmental struggles it faced. Everything looks and feels janky. The game was also very buggy, straight-up crashing on me on multiple occasions on PS3. It got to the point where I just had to admit it: the reviewers were right, after all the struggles that went on during development, the devs weren’t able to make the game they had wanted to. It’s too bad, I still think that the concept of I Am Alive is great, which makes what we got sting all the more.
10. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (2012, PS3)
If playing your new Resident Evil game makes me start saying nice things about Resident Evil 6, then you know that you fucked up. Slant Six Games made multiple SOCOM games, so why is the shooting in this game so bad? Guns either do piddly damage, or they do a normal amount of damage, but run out of ammo extremely fast. Gunplay is also frustratingly inaccurate, and predictably dull. Most frustratingly, enemies are absolute bullet sponges, taking a ridiculous amount of ammo to take down. It takes me three whole clips from the strongest assault rifle to down one hunter, does that not seem excessive? Don’t even get me started on Tyrants or Nemesis, who ran through max ammo at least three times for my weapon before he went down. It is just so badly designed that it is not fun to play in the slightest.
9. The Lord of the Rings: Conquest (2009, PS3)
Oh man, every time I think about my biggest gaming disappointments, I go back to this game. As you saw on my top one hundred games of all-time list, I loved the original Star Wars: Battlefront games. At the time, the only thing I loved more than Star Wars was The Lord of the Rings, so naturally I thought that The Lord of the Rings: Battlefront would be an awesome idea. Lo and behold, a couple years later they announced that this idea was actually going to happen, and that the original developers of Battlefront, Pandemic Studios, were going to be the ones to make it. This was incredible news, as Pandemic were renowned for making good games, so there was pretty much no way this could get screwed up. At this point in time, I was usually reading reviews before buying new games, but this game was such a slam-dunk that I ignored the nagging doubts and paid sixty dollars up-front for it.
So… turns out that I overlooked a key difference between Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings in video games: Star Wars: Battlefront is pretty easy to pull off as a large-scale shooter. Conquest, on the other hand, is mostly melee-based, with archers and mages there to provide some ranged attacks, while being annoying as fuck. Melee combat was not implemented well, making the entire core gameplay a slog. The game was also far buggier and unpolished than Battlefront, making it feel very last-gen. Not even the alternate history campaign, where you play as Sauron clubbing hobbits to death, was interesting enough to warrant a look. This game absolutely broke my faith in the games industry, and I am extremely judicious about buying games after doing some research about them now.
8. Godzilla (1990, GB)
If you buy a Godzilla video game, you have some pretty basic expectations for what that is going to entail: either something like Rampage where you smash a city, or a fighting game where you beat the shit out of other kaiju, like Primal Rage. What you do not expect is a cartoony puzzle game where you climb vines, push a bunch of rocks around a maze so that you can smash all of them against another solid object, while occasionally swatting away other cartoony kaiju that wander too close. Oh, and if you take too long, King Ghidorah shows up and will instantly kill you. This is a baffling game on so many levels, I am not sure what the hell they were thinking. Surely the Godzilla license was just slapped onto some random video game to make it sell more? This was such a weird game, it was one of the first games I had for our Gameboy (which my brothers and I traded some other kid at school for), and I distinctly remember playing it and getting to a point where I had to question what I was doing with my life.
7. Bible Adventures (1991, NES)
Oh look, another Wisdom Tree game! Growing up in an evangelical household which was pretty strict about the sorts of games were were allowed to play, I actually had a copy of this game back in the day. The game plays a lot like Super Mario Bros. 2, acting as a 2D side-scroller where you pickup objects and avoid enemies. The game consists of three parts, the first of which is Noah’s Ark, which tasks you with grabbing animals and bringing them back to the ark. This game is full of frustration due to the shit controls and how easy it is to get damaged, causing all the animals to get scattered and run off, forcing you to chase them back down. It’s mired in frustration, and that’s the best game in the collection. Baby Moses tasks you with babysitting the titular Moses, with controls which are just as bad and gameplay just as frustrating as in Noah’s Ark. While you will accidentally cause Moses to get killed over and over, you can choose to chuck him in the river if you want to, inadvertently making it one of the few games where you can straight-up murder a baby (Grant Theft Auto would never). Then there’s David and Goliath, which just fucking sucks.
6. Revolution X (1994, Arcade)
Revolution X has to be the cringiest game ever made. It’s an arcade light gun shooter, and in that regard it’s pretty bog-standard. What makes the game so bad though is that it takes place in a world where the New World Order has taken over and hate youth culture, so they ban music, movies, and games. The only way to fight back is through the power or rock ‘n roll! And, to make things even more cynical, it features the likenesses and music of Aerosmith. Yeah, this game is basically wearing the corpse of revolution in order to advertise for a rock band which sold-out decades earlier. While the game itself plays… fine, I guess, the entire premise is so lame that it ruins anything it might have been going for. The sort of game you only play for a joke or if there’s literally nothing else available.
5. Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation (2017, PC)
Writing the Love/Hate entry for this game literally made me angry. This game represents everything that I hate about the modern gaming industry (games designed to be addictive and predatory rather than fun), but it is so much worse due to how this game has supplanted the mainline Dead or Alive fighting games in Tecmo-Koei’s eyes. Worst of all? The predatory shit works. I hate the game and I have not picked it up since I finished the article, but goddamn if I do not see it in my Steam library and get that compulsion: “Oh, I am missing out on using some of my limited energy points for the day, it will only take a few minutes to use them all…” And, for what? To unlock some more worthless swimsuits in hopes of getting a low drop-rate swimsuit that doesn’t even look good? Nah, fuck this shitty fucking game.
4. The Simpsons Wrestling (2001, PS1)
The Simpsons Wrestling was a game I rented for a laugh back in the day. I was aware of its reputation, but I was a dumb kid and didn’t think it would be that bad. Hoo boy, was I wrong. For one thing, the game is wildly unbalanced, making the main Simpsons family get outshone in their own game by fucking Bumblebee Man of all characters. On top of that, Ned Flanders is apparently considered to be one of the most broken fighting game characters of all-time (although at least in his case I can understand it, stupid, sexy Flanders…). The controls feel like ass; you’re flailing around for the entire fight. The graphics and camera are awful, even by PS1 standards (the fact that this released late in the PS1 lifecycle makes this even more egregious, but it would have no better in 1995). The only nice thing I can say is that at least I didn’t buy the damn game myself, which is more than I can say for most of the games on this list.
3. NPPL Championship Paintball 2009 (2009, PS3)
Around the time I played this game, my brothers and I were really into paintball. We would take part in large-scale mil-sim events with hundreds of people on each side blasting away at each other. One of my brothers was also on a speedball team, so I was also fairly familiar with the more competitive side of the sport. NPPL Championship Paintball 2009 is based around the competitive speedball side of things, but it ultimately just seems kind of pointless. Paintball is cool, because it lets you simulate video game-like combat scenarios in real life (without having to worry about serious injury, death, or police response). However, when you turn this back around and translate paintball into a video game, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially when the translation is incredibly janky, cheap, and broken. Much like Cabela’s Big Game Hunter 6, the enemy AI is only programmed to deal with you playing the “right” way: if you just charge straight down the middle and shoot everyone you come across, you’ll end every match consistently in less than ten seconds, breaking the entire experience. I promise you, if you tried this in real-life paintball, you would be downed immediately, but here the enemy AI is so bad that they do not know how to deal with it. At that point, just play a competitive shooter, you’ll have a way better time.
Resident Evil Survivor 2 left me shocked at how bad it was. I wasn’t expecting much after slogging through its predecessor, but Survivor 2 makes that game look like a masterpiece. It’s the cheapest, laziest game imaginable, made up of 99.9% reused assets. I mentioned this in my Love/Hate entry, but I really need to reiterate that this is a shooter whose maps and assets are literally ripped right from a survival-horror game. They’re completely different genres, so these maps make no sense for a run ‘n gun experience, and the graphics look really bad, because they weren’t supposed to be seen up close. Hell, even the “new” stuff in this game is just assets ripped from the Dreamcast ports of Resident Evil 2 and 3 (and you can tell, because they look worse than the CODE: Veronica assets). Add in that somehow this game is even shorter than its predecessor, and this isn’t even a dumpster fire: it’s just a travesty.
1. Umbrella Corps (2015, PS4)
Umbrella Corps is the worst game I’ve ever played, in part because it should know better. This game came out at the end of Capcom’s half-decade of bed-shitting, with one final shart as they tried, once again, to make Resident Evil into Call of Duty. The game has aspirations of being a highly-competitive, esports shooter, but it just plays like ass. The UI is cluttered to hell, with all sorts of messages and redundant notifications telling you that you can move into cover or do a melee attack, which make it hard to actually see what’s happening on-screen. Of course, this part of the game was dead within a week or two of release, and at this point, Umbrella Corps as it has existed for most of its awful life is an over-glorified series of spec ops missions chores. These missions are tedious, dull, and infuriating – easy to cheese, but if you do, they take forever to complete, so you risk losing just to not have to play this game anymore. I bought this game on sale for six dollars, and I still feel like I got ripped off. I don’t understand how a major publisher releases a game like Umbrella Corps in 2015. We had long figured out shooters by this point, which just makes it so much more egregious than anything else on this list.
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A childhood classic, Demolition Racer is what it sounds like: combine demolition derby destruction with a high-octane racing game. The results are, predictably, catastrophic, with cars slamming into each other at high speeds, vehicles sent flying everywhere, catching fire, and exploding. This isn’t just nostalgia talking either, I’ve gone back and replayed this game multiple times in the past few years and it is always a blast.
49. Gravity Rush 2 (2017, PS4)
Gravity Rush 2, and its predecessor, are joyous games. Their plots are uplifting, full of positivity in the face of danger. Their characters are charming and unique. Most importantly though, the central mechanic reminds you of the simple joy of play. Too many games have movement and traversal as a lengthy chore that you have to manage in order to get from point A to point B, and you spend more time bored and annoyed getting to your destination than you actually do enjoying yourself (looking at you Witcher 3…). Gravity Rush flips the script on this: being able to shift gravity at will to fall towards your chosen destination is as breath-taking at minute one as it is at hour fifteen. It matters less that combat is a bit finnicky when the moment-to-moment gameplay is this fun and the writing is this charming. Gravity Rush 2 is pure joy and the industry needs more games like this in it.
48. Twisted Metal: Black (2001, PS2)
While Twisted Metal 2 is probably the best-playing Twisted Metal game, I’ve reiterated over and over here that gameplay isn’t everything, and Twisted Metal: Black is one of the best examples of this. The game is bloody difficult, perhaps too much so at times and the game can feel downright unfair. However, where Black really stands out is in its presentation and story. Black is easily one of the darkest video games ever released. Its cast are a bunch of psychopaths let loose from an insane asylum, all doing battle with each other and tearing across the city of Midtown in order to be granted a wish of their choice. You’ve got such colourful figures as No-Face (a professional boxer who lost a fight, causing a doctor who had bet on him to remove his eyes and tongue and then stitch them shut), Mr. Grimm (a Vietnam vet and former POW who is wracked with PTSD and a craving for human flesh), Preacher (a delusional pastor who downed a goddamn baby because he thought it was possessed), Warthog (a serial killer whose wish is to remove the part of the brain that makes him feel remorse when he kills), and of course Sweet Tooth (an unrepentant, murder-obsessed serial killer who wears a clown mask). Each character has a very dark and disturbing story that plays out over the course of the game, and the game’s world is suitably gloomy and depressing. It’s so over-the-top grimdark that it’s cartoonish, but then loops right back around to being properly dark stuff due to how hard it commits to the whole thing.
47. Resident Evil 2 (2019, PS4)
Resident Evil 2 remake was a lightning rod moment for the gaming industry, kicking off the remake craze we find ourselves knee-deep in. The game is just a bloody good, tense thrill-ride. Zombies have not been this threatening in decades, taking tons of ammunition to put down for good, which incentivizes you to conserve your resources and avoid them where ever possible. The design of the RPD is also still one of the most memorable environments in gaming and it’s just as compelling here in full 3D as it was on PS1. While it does stumble a bit towards the latter-half and the story isn’t all that interesting, Resident Evil 2 is one of those games that you cannot stop thinking about once you pick it up.
46. The Movies (2005, PC)
Peter Molyneux is notorious for over-hyping his games, but the one time he actually struck pure gold has to be The Movies. As a business management sim, it’s pretty cool: you manage a movie studio, building sets, hiring star directors and actors (and keeping them happy), managing crew, and developing technology from the silent era up to the modern day. All this is decent enough for a game in its own right, but what catapults The Movies to the stratosphere is the in-game machinima tools that give you a lot of freedom to create your very own movies. I’m talking dozens and dozens of scenes (each with variants and customization options), systems to allow the characters to lip synch with any recorded audio, special effects, and a basic video editor. It’s a mind-blowing amount of freedom, to the point where I made a feature-length spy movie back in high school using The Movies.
45. Blasphemous (2019, Switch)
Sometimes a video game comes out which is just made for me. Blasphemous scratches so many of my itches: Metroidvania, Souls-inspirations, religious fanaticism, dark fantasy, blood, penitence… I picked it up in a sale a few years ago and I was glued to my Switch for a week straight, obsessed with journeying through this nightmarish civilization to prove my devotion to the faith. It isn’t doing much different than your average Metroidvania game, but it hits so many of my interests that I can’t help but adore it.
44. RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999, PC)
Like many other 90s kids, I got this game for free in a box of cereal. The game itself is the pinnacle of management sims, with a simple premise: build the amusement park of your dreams. Build attractions, setup decorations to make things more aesthetically pleasing, landscape to your liking, optimize your pathways, and design your very own rollercoasters (which, inevitably, will be too intense for the guests)! Each guest also has their own name, amount of money they’ll spend, and likes and dislikes which can help you tailor the park to maximize returns.
Of course, that’s all good if you’re playing the game as designed. You can easily turn RollerCoaster Tycoon into a psychopath simulation as well. Make vomit-inducing rides and then charge your guests to use the bathroom. Are guests mad that you charge them $5 to go for a piss? Grab ’em and throw them on punishment island, where they’ll angrily run in circles until you send the island into the ocean and drown everyone. Or, the classic option: build an unsafe rollercoaster and watch it crash and explode, killing everyone on board. You don’t have to be a dick in RollerCoaster Tycoon, but it’s a lot of fun that the game gives you the freedom to do so.
43. The Walking Dead (2012, PS3)
Telltale had been making narrative, episodic games since the mid-2000s, but they never really had any major hits, and their biggest swings (looking at you Jurassic Park) were considered fairly poor and did not make a splash. So, for a while, Quantic Dream’s games were the gold standard for narrative games, with Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain being quite notable titles of their eras. However, even back then, the writing of those games was heavily criticized, but I (and many others) excused it, because we couldn’t really get these kinds of cinematic, narrative-based experiences elsewhere.
Then Telltale’s The Walking Dead came out, and Quantic Dream were obsolete overnight. The Walking Dead established a formula of narrative, choice-based games that Telltale would milk dry over the next few years, but The Walking Dead stands tall amongst them just due to the strength of the writing here. The tale of Lee and Clementine is unforgettable: an escaped convict stumbles across a little girl whose babysitter has been killed during a zombie apocalypse and takes her under his wing. The illusion of choice is very much a thing here, but it doesn’t really matter that much when the journey itself is so good. What makes it so good are not the big choices anyway, it’s the little ones – do you go all-out to protect Clementine, or do you try to preserve her innocence as best you can? No other video game has managed to make me cry like this one, and I imagine if I were to replay it now, after becoming a father, it would leave me absolutely devastated.
42. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (2004, PC)
I’ve been a Warhammer 40k fan for most of my life, and I can say with confidence that the original Dawn of War is still unsurpassed as far as 40k games go. An old-school RTS which innovated by putting the focus directly on getting you into combat, Dawn of War lets you engage in visceral, bloody, large-scale war with friends or AI opponents. Several factions were added in expansions, meaning that it is absolutely packed with content to try out. The game is still fully playable online to this day as well, and I’ve had the pleasure of getting together with friends recently to try to hold the line against high-level CPU teams hell-bent on annihilating us. It results in glorious carnage as your units rain gunfire and artillery down and chainswords rip through flesh. The modding community is also great, bringing in an entirely new, playable faction and removing the game’s unit cap for ultimate apocalypse mode.
41. Dynasty Warriors 4: Empires (2004, PS2)
I am not exaggerating when I say that I loveDynasty Warriors 4: Empires. I have poured countless hours into this game as I gleefully hack and slash my way through ancient China to reunite the land under my banner. Empires specifically is great, because it adds a level of grand strategy to Dynasty Warriors‘ usual formula, as each battle captures territory, makes new items available, allows you to recruit and capture officers, and gets you one step closer to conquering the nation. This change takes the rather repetitive combat of Dynasty Warriors and gives each battle a level of importance and resonance that it may otherwise lack, since each action you do is building towards a grander goal. The nature of the world map also means that no two campaigns will play out the same: you’re always going to have different enemy factions, different officers fighting with you, different territories to attack and defend at any given time, etc. I actually replayed the game on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro a few months ago, and it was like cuddling in a warm, familiar blanket again. Later games may have expanded the political gameplay, but this version of Empires will always have a special place in my heart.
40. Resident Evil 3 (2020, PS4)
My go-to answer for “most over-hated game of all-time”, I legitimately enjoy Resident Evil 3 remake more than Resident Evil 2 remake. This, once again, comes down to the non-gameplay aspects: the story in Resident Evil 3 is easily the best in the entire franchise. Jill is a fucking badass, Carlos is cool, Nikolai is a great secondary antagonist, and Nemesis is a terrifying, relentless monster. Resident Evil 3 plays like a PS3-era, cinematic action game in the vein of Dead Space 2, the sort of experience we rarely get these days when every game has to be open world and dozens of hours in length or it’s not worth gamers’ time. The runtime is fine for this sort of experience: the six-to-eight hours you spend are maximized for fun and spectacle, and I got significantly more enjoyment out of this than I did out of the bloated, two hundred hours spent toiling away in Fallout 4 (and I call bullshit on anyone who claims to have beat it in three hours unless they were specifically running through it as fast as possible). Plus it’s on sale all the time now, so price isn’t even a problem. Sure, it cuts some content from the original, but the original still exists: play ’em both, I say.
39. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege (2015, PS4)
While the game has expanded in some wild directions since release, the core gameplay of Rainbow Six: Siege is one of the best multiplayer shooters I’ve ever experienced. I got in early, a few weeks after launch when the game was in a very rough state, and I was hooked due to how intense it was. As a defender, having to fortify your position while you can hear attackers breaching to get to you makes your heart beat fast and your palms sweat in anticipation of what’s to come. As an attacker, you have to watch every step you take as you try to get in as safely as possible. Each encounter is life-or-death, with instant kills coming frequently. The operators’ unique weapons and equipment fundamentally affect how this plays out and creates a mix-and-match system that makes every game unique. While I don’t really play competitive shooters much anymore and, as a result, I’ve effectively retired from Siege for good, my time with the game was easily some of the best experiences I’ve ever had in an online game.
38. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015, PS4)
With the glut of open world games we’ve gotten in the past decade, my opinions on The Phantom Pain have softened somewhat. Traversal quickly becomes a pain in the ass, as starting any mission will require you to get past multiple guard checkpoints, you always feel obligated to look for new soldiers to recruit for your base, and the side ops get extremely repetitive. That said, The Phantom Pain still stands out thanks to its fundamental gameplay systems. Stealth remains incredibly fun, all the wild and wacky gadgets at your disposal give you so many ways to mess with guards, and the guards actually learn and start to counter your tricks, forcing you to change things up regularly. In spite of its problems, it’s still a great sandbox experience and a solid send-off to the greatest saga in gaming.
37. Mass Effect 2 (2011, PS3)
While Mass Effect 3‘s ending soured the entire franchise, Mass Effect 2 at least remains one of the best action RPGs on consoles thanks to its fairly self-contained story. You’re basically tasked with putting together a team of specialists to go on a suicide mission. The first twenty or so hours are just you recruiting your team, getting to know them, preparing your ship and equipment, and (most importantly) growing emotional connections to your entire crew. We then get one of the best finales in gaming as your team plunges into the gauntlet and your decisions over the course of the game come to fruition. Depending on what you’ve done, one or more of your crew can die executing the mission, which is about as emotionally impactful as you would expect.
36. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999, PS1)
Shock! Horror! I liked both versions of Resident Evil 3! While I certainly have some issues with it compared to its predecessor, Nemesis is such a unique and ambitious game for its time period. Its scope is significantly wider than any previous Resident Evil game, allowing you to freely traverse an entire section of Raccoon City. The titular Nemesis is also downright scary here, barely operating within the limits of what you can reasonably deal with in Resident Evil‘s tank control scheme. The freedom and sense of risk/reward that this gives you is great – you can avoid fights with him if you want to, but if you choose to tough it out, you’ll be handsomely rewarded for your efforts. I remember when this game was considered the dark horse of the franchise, so seeing it get all the love after all this time is great to see.
35. Dead or Alive 2 (1999, PS2)
A couple months ago, I would have said that I liked Dead or Alive as a franchise, but I wouldn’t have had any of the games in my top fifty. Dead or Alive 2 changed that for me. The game is a massive improvement on its predecessor, adding in new characters, fun new mechanics, stage hazards and multi-level stages which wildly change how a battle looks and feels. The game is also simply packed to the brim with content, to a degree that we just do not get out of games anymore. It’s a simple enough game that anyone can pick it up, but deep enough that there’s a lot to learn and come to grips with if you really want to dedicate yourself to learning. Like I said in my recent Love/Hate series, I’m so glad that I decided to check the older games in this franchise out, because they were a real joy to get to experience.
34. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015, PS Vita)
Hotline Miami 2 is largely more of the same from its predecessor, but when that game had one of the most addictive and replayable gameplay loops of any game, that’s nothing to sniff at. Hotline Miami 2 is hypnotic: an acid trip of colour, blood, ultraviolence, synthwave, and pure focus. You will die over, and over, and over again as you try to perfect your killing spree and get through each area unscathed. This results in a ballet of bullets as you mow down enemy gangsters with dual SMGs, throw your empty gun to stun a guy, then slash their jugular open with a blade you picked up, then throw that blade into another guy’s head, grab another weapon to keep going, etc. All this coming as you die, hone your approach, die again, and so on until you have it down perfectly.
33. This War of Mine (2014, PC)
This War of Mine threads the extremely delicate line between entertainment and art with a serious message and, in my opinion, the results are poignant. Meant to act as a commentary on international conflicts and of the military shooters of the day, you play as a small group of survivors caught in an active warzone trying to survive to see peace return once more. You have to balance your survivors’ sleep, hunger, and morale, and developing your safehouse to be able to produce heating, supplies, and to be able to defend against looters. Then, at night time, it’s safe enough to sneak out and try to scavenge for supplies… but be careful, because you’re not the only one trying to survive…
Then there’s the heavy choices. Supplies are going to start drying up real quickly. Do you risk confronting other scavengers who may be hostile? Do you enter an area with ongoing exchanges of gunfire to risk getting to supplies that haven’t been picked over yet? Do you try to break into a gang’s well-stocked safehouse to steal their supplies? Or do you break into a defenseless old couple’s home and steal their supplies to keep yourself alive? If neighbours ask for help, will you give up some of your rations and medicine to help them? And, if you have children in your safehouse, how do you keep them safe and innocent in the face of all this? This War of Mine leaves these choices up to you, and only makes them harder as disease and winter set in, making you really test the limits of your morals. It’s a one-of-a-kind survival experience, and I implore you to check it out.
32. Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (2001, PS2)
Shattered Skies is a special game for me. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a pilot instructor. One of my earliest memories was flying with my grandfather in his two seater airplane and looking down at the world below us. Probably due to this connection, my aunt bought me a copy of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies as a gift. I wasn’t particularly interested at the time, but eventually decided to give it a try, and quickly became mesmerized.
On the gameplay front, Shattered Skies is an arcadey military air combat game where you’ll be dogfighting, shooting and bombing ground targets, and sometimes flying dangerously low to avoid radar and airburst artillery. The gameplay is actually way more varied than you’d expect for this kind of game and makes for a game that never gets old. You also get access to dozens of airplanes, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and customization options, which let you tailor them to each mission you find yourself in.
What really makes Shattered Skies so good though is its shockingly mature story – and I don’t mean that in the “rated M for mature” sense, I mean that this is some legitimately great stuff. The story is told from three perspectives: 1) the big picture, war room briefing perspective, which tells you about the progress of the war between ISAF and Erusea; 2) the in-game story of Mobius 1, who you control and turn into a legendary fighter ace over the course of the game; 3) the story of a grown man recounting his experience as a boy growing up in occupied San Salvacion. This third story is where the real emotional punch of Shattered Skies comes in, as we see his family killed as collateral damage in the war after the Erusean Yellow Squadron shoots down a plane, which crashes into their house. Despite hating the occupiers, he grows to have a strained relationship with some of the fighter aces in Yellow Squadron who are based in the city. While Yellow Squadron clearly have empathy for the boy and want to be seen as more than just occupiers, you get the sense that they are legitimately saddened when he has to stand up to them in order to protect a friend in the resistance. This more personal perspective of your enemies makes it a bittersweet moment when we have to face Yellow Squadron in battle as Mobius 1 and shoot them down one-by-one. It’s a shockingly clever and tragic way to lend emotional stakes to what would otherwise be standard air combat gameplay. This whole story makes Shattered Skies so much more than the sum of its parts, and is easily one of the best-written stories in video games.
31. Resident Evil 2 (1998, PS1)
I knew that Resident Evil 2 was celebrated back in the day, but I didn’t really realize just how good it was until I finally played it earlier this year. Given its placement here on the list, I also clearly liked it quite a bit more than its more polished and popular remake. I just love the way that Resident Evil 2 feels and plays: nearly everything good about the remake is intact here, and in some ways (such as the story and branching playthroughs) it’s even better. It’s incredibly impressive for a PS1 game and by far the most fun entry in the “classic” era of Resident Evil.
30. Resident Evil (2002, GC)
While Resident Evil 2 is the best of the classic era, the remake of the original Resident Evil is arguably the best distillation of the Resident Evil formula we’ve ever gotten, largely thanks to the changes and improvements it brought after six years of iteration. The original Resident Evil was a very rough and unrefined game: full of cool ideas, but lacking in the execution. REmake realizes that potential and then some, with graphics that still look fantastic today that help bring the oppressive atmosphere of the Spencer Mansion to life. The remake also makes several changes to the original game which keep things surprising to veterans and improve the overall layout of the mansion in the process. The Crimson Heads are the most notorious example of this, providing a nasty surprise to new players who are too liberal with their firearms usage, and adding a whole other layer of strategy as you have to figure out which bodies to burn before they reanimate as even more dangerous enemies.
29. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2010, PS3)
If you’re unfamiliar with the series, it may seem kind of weird to rank a Battlefield game so highly, because a Battlefield game is just another Battlefield, right? Bad Company 2 was special. Like Battlefield 3, this game was really designed for rush, and charging in with your teammates to take the MCOM stations was as intense as it was fun. Bad Company 2 also featured a level of destruction that no Battlefield game since has dared attempt to replicate: nearly every building can be blown apart or leveled entirely. While some argue that this makes the map kind of boring once all the buildings are gone, I call those people cowards: flushing defenders out of Arica Harbour with a series of tank shell strikes was a literal blast. The game also had some fantastic maps which, when they’ve shown up in subsequent Battlefield titles, have given me a rush of nostalgia that I’ve rarely felt for anything else. It’s a shame that the game was shut down for good last year, but the memories live on forever.
28. Dead Space (2008, PS3)
Dead Space is the best franchise to arise from the glut of Resident Evil 4 clones, and it’s not even close. A mixture of Event Horizon, The Thing, and Alien, this first game brings terror to the corridors of the Ishimura as you try to stay alive against hordes of necromorphs and find out what happened to your girlfriend, who was stationed on the ship. The core gameplay gimmick is inspired for a horror game of this nature: simply shooting a necromorph is insufficient to kill it, you need to blast their limbs off to immobilize them. Combined with limited resource survival gameplay, stasis blasts to slow enemies, kinesis to throw objects at your foes, and a good ol’ fashioned curb stomp when all else fails, the core gameplay of Dead Space is rock solid.
27. Fire Emblem: Awakening (2012, 3DS)
Fire Emblem: Awakening came out at a difficult time for the long-running franchise. Sales for the last couple entries had been underwhelming, so Intelligent Systems had one last chance to right the ship before the series went on ice for good. With this in mind, the developers threw the kitchen sink at Awakening, trying to make the biggest, best Fire Emblem of all-time, if only to give it a proper swan song. Luckily, their efforts paid off and Awakening gave the franchise a second life. While it largely plays like any other Fire Emblem game (turn-based tactics gameplay, RPG elements, perma-death, etc), Awakening‘s big new feature was an expansion of the relationship system to allow two of your soldiers to have children, who will inherit traits from both of them. This allows for some really fun and unique combinations, which work just as much for roleplayers as they do for min-maxers. While some fans have bemoaned this addition, claiming it turned Fire Emblem into a waifu simulator, I think that that opinion is fucking dumb. Awakening is a great game and, in my opinion, the most fun Fire Emblem I’ve played thus far.
26. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009, PS3)
I really enjoyed the original Uncharted when it came out, a lot more than most people who played it in fact. I loved the characters, the gameplay, and the story, so I was excited to see how Naughty Dog would up their game for the follow-up. What I was not expecting was for Uncharted 2 to absolutely blow everyone’s expectations out of the water and be widely considered the game of the year for 2009.
Uncharted 2 plays like its predecessor, but with some key refinements. The game is overall just bigger: more grand spectacle, bigger set-piece moments, more characters, more complex story. As much as I liked Nathan Drake and Elena Fisher in the first game, they really come into their own here, and I love that Naughty Dog didn’t take the easy route of having their pulp hero have a new love interest in every game.
And that’s it for part two. If you’re reading this the day it came out, then the final part will be up tomorrow!
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Lately, I’ve been seeing people on social media posting Topsters lists of their favourite video games, which has gotten me thinking about the topic. It got to the point where I put together my own quick-and-dirty list on Bluesky, but that didn’t really leave me all that satisfied. You see, for about twenty years now I’ve been using IMDb to track and rate every movie I’ve seen in that time. It’s actually been pretty useful for me, and I can easily look back and get a rough idea of what movies I’ve seen and what my thoughts were on them. This put me on a journey to try to do the same for every video game I’ve ever owned and/or played, which led me to a site called Backloggd. Having spent a couple weeks recounting every game I can remember playing, I’ve now got a big list of nearly four hundred games I’ve played (four hundred!? GOOD GOD). That’s a big enough library that I can legitimately put together a top one hundred games of all time list… so why not do just that?
A few notes before we start: first, I’m not going to include compilations here (so no Master Chief Collection, Tetris & Dr. Mario, Super Mario All-Stars, Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, etc). The upper-echelons of the list would probably be dominated by compilations, and that just doesn’t feel fair to the legacies of the individual games. Secondly, I’m not going to make this “one game per franchise” like I would if this were, say, a top twenty-five. If your franchise is good enough to get multiple entries, then you’ll get that representation (although a sequel that basically invalidates its predecessor’s existence will likely push prior entries off the list entirely). Thirdly, this is wildly subjective and, by its nature, only based on the games that I’ve actually played. As a result, I guarantee you that I have not played some all-time classic that you love. Please tell me how much you hate me for not including it down in the comments below.
Got it? Let’s get onto the list then…
100. Echochrome (2008, PSP)
A fun, quirky, minimalist little puzzle game on PSP where you have to rotate a 3D maze in order to change perspectives and allow a mannequin to reach the exit. Can be a bit finnicky with its controls, but it’s such a unique and striking premise that I can’t help but love it.
99. Theme Hospital (1997, PC)
This business simulation game was a blast back in the day, but what really made it stand out from the crowd was the various wacky ailments your hospital would have to treat.
98. Peter Jackon’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (2005, PS2)
In the annals of licensed video games, King Kong was easily one of the best. 90% of the time it’s a tense, immersive first person shooter where you struggle to survive against the monsters of Skull Island. For a glorious 10% of the time, you turn the tables and become Kong, beating the ever-living crap out of every monster that had been harassing you up to that point. The game was also just legitimately revolutionary, pushing the boundaries of immersion, with no HUD to speak of and direct involvement from Peter Jackson himself.
97. Guacamelee! (2013, PS Vita)
A joyous, lucha libre-themed Metroidvania. I remember trying a demo of the game when I was on a vacation in Atlanta and immediately deciding that I was going to buy this game when I got back.
The fourth generation of Pokemon is probably my favourite of them all (and I say this as someone who stopped at gen two and came back for gen six, so this isn’t nostalgia speaking). The physical/special split was revolutionary for the gameplay and the difficulty was legitimately challenging. Granted, Diamond makes the list largely because I have not gotten around to playing Pokemon Platinum yet. When that happens, I expect Diamond to drop off and Platinum to move higher up, as it’s generally considered vastly superior to the other two Sinnoh games.
95. Vigilante 8: Second Offense (1999, PS1)
Car combat is one of those genres which are dominated by one big franchise (Twisted Metal), and the rest are a bunch of forgettable rip-offs. Vigilante 8: Second Offense is the closest anyone ever came to stealing the crown, with its significantly better graphics and interesting innovations. Who cares about any of that though: on the Arizona stage, you can cause a meteor to strike the arena, which will send any nearby cars flying and then a giant ant comes out which attacks everyone on sight. Entire evenings were spent in our household on this one level as we blasted each other and this giant, fuck-off ant over and over again.
94. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003, PS2)
Another Peter Jackson licensed game makes my top one hundred! The Return of the King game is a fairly simple hack ‘n slash by modern standards, but it sure is fun and miles better than it had any right being.
93. Assassin’s Creed 2 (2009, PS3)
At the time of its release, Assassin’s Creed 2 was a revolutionary experience, perfecting the half-baked formula of its predecessor, and featuring an interesting narrative with a protagonist who was surprisingly endearing. At the time, I would have easily put Assassin’s Creed 2 much higher on this list. However, only one game later, I was halfway through Brotherhood, when I suddenly found myself completely done with this series’ structure of “travel halfway across the city to your mission, then travel halfway across the city to complete the objective”. I still think Assassin’s Creed 2 is good enough to warrant a spot in the list, but oh how the mighty have fallen.
92. Freedom Fighters (2003, PS2)
Freedom Fighters is a legitimately revolutionary game for its time. It starts out as a pretty terrible third person shooter due to its wildly inaccurate weapons. However, it soon evolves into something special, as you start being able to command an ever-growing number of squadmates, until you’re eventually commanding a dozen guys into massive battles against tanks and helicopters as you attempt to liberate an occupied USA.
91. The Sims 3 (2009, PC)
I wasted way too many hours in university playing The Sims 3 that I should have been spending on homework and socializing. Oh well, it’s not like I wasn’t enjoying myself.
90. Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015, PS4)
I reviewed the first Tomb Raider reboot game back when it came out and, as much as I enjoyed it, it clearly was a bit rough around the edges. Rise of the Tomb Raider largely smoothed off the rough edges and made for a much more refined and enjoyable experience overall.
89. Bioshock Infinite (2013, PS3)
Another one of those games that probably would have ranked a lot higher at one point, Bioshock Infinite still impresses due to its amazingly-realized world and mind-bending story. Hell, the game spends a lot of time just being a walking simulator and, honestly, that’s when it’s at its best. The shooting gameplay’s pretty rough, which does lower its overall quality somewhat, but Booker and Elizabeth’s adventure remains as unforgettable as ever.
88. James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (2004, PS2)
Everyone’s got a favourite James Bond video game, but for my money, Everything or Nothing is the GOAT. An early third-person cover shooter, this game was hard as nails back in the day. Its plot was pretty over-the-top, but considering it was coming out after Die Another Day, I guess that was just par for the course for Pierce Brosnan’s Bond. Honestly, the craziest thing about it was probably that Shannon Elizabeth was a Bond girl, but then again, so was Denise Richards during the Brosnan era, so what do I know?
87. Future Cop: LAPD (1998, PS1)
Future Cop‘s single-player gameplay is fun enough – blast away violent criminals, gangs, and cultists from the comfort of your transforming mech. However, what really pushes it over the top is its multiplayer mode, Precinct Assault, which is basically a proto-MOBA: get points for killing enemies and capturing neutral territory, use these points to buy bases, defensive units, and offensive units, which will attempt to enter your opponent’s home base. First side to get an offensive unit inside the enemy’s home base wins. It makes for an endlessly addicting, back-and-forth struggle to come out on top.
86. EarthBound (1994, SNES)
This cult classic is largely memorable for its quirky humour and writing, which does away with the JRPG conventions of the time, instead featuring a bunch of psychic children fighting gangs of weirdos in the 1990s.
85. Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (1999, PC)
Man, you had to be there back in 1999, chopping down trees, mining stone and iron, and then marching out your massive armies to go obliterate your opponents’ base while the horns of war sound.
84. Total War: Warhammer III (2022, PC)
…and then we have the ultimate evolution of the epic RTS, Total War: Warhammer III. Total War has been producing jaw-dropping battles for decades, but the Warhammer games unshackled that formula from the limits of history and into glorious dark fantasy. Warhammer III gets the placement here by default since it allows you to bring in all previous factions and DLCs into one enormous world map to conquer. It’s a staggering amount of content on offer and makes for an overwhelmingly massive sandbox to play in.
83. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (2018, Switch)
And speaking of overwhelmingly massive, Smash Ultimate is probably never going to be surpassed in the fighting genre in terms of sheer roster size and content on offer. The core gameplay is as simple and fun as ever, making for a great pick-up and play experience with your friends and enemies.
82. XCOM 2 (2016, PC)
Confession: I kind of hated XCOM 2 on launch. I had loved XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but the guerilla ops of vanilla XCOM 2 just didn’t jive with me and the RNG felt way off. However, after War of the Chosen released, I decided to give it another look, and it sank its hooks into me deep, to the point where I can’t really see myself going back to the original game anymore. The modding scene is also pretty incredible, allowing you to deck out your soldiers as Space Marines, Solid Snake, and even Helena Douglas and Hitomi from Dead or Alive.
81. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001, PS2)
I have my issues with Metal Gear Solid 2, but in the eight years since I wrote about it, the game has only managed to become even more relevant. Even if it’s not a game I’d particularly want to go back and play at a moment’s notice, I find myself thinking about it all the time, which is a level of longevity you really can’t say about a lot of media two decades from release.
80. Bully (2006, PS2)
Billed as “Grand Theft Auto in a school” at a time when anti-bullying campaigns and the Grant Theft Auto moral panic were at their height, Bully is nowhere near as controversial as it may sound. In fact, you’re the one bringing down the bullies (although you can wedgie the nerds if you want to be a dick).
79. Death Road to Canada (2016, Switch)
A hilarious and addictive zombie survival roguelike, Death Road to Canada is the definition of a “just one more run” game.
78. Journey (2012, PS3)
One of the early, undeniable examples of “games as art”, Journey is a short, thoughtful, gorgeous experience.
77. Super Mario Bros. (1985, NES)
The quintessential 2D platformer, Super Mario Bros. is still a great game even today. Hell, its plethora of secrets are so well-ingrained in the collective conscious, that it’s easy to forget how truly mind-blowing all the hidden blocks and warp pipes really are for a forty year old game.
76. Dead or Alive 3 (2001, XB)
Oh hai, Ayane! Dead or Alive 3 is a gorgeous, spectacular, and downright fun fighting game, which really stands out due to its awesome stage designs.
75. Minecraft (2011, PC)
You don’t need me to explain what Minecraft is, right? I actually only started playing it this year as a bonding activity with my son. As cool as it is to see our world get built piece-by-piece, it’s even more exciting getting to see him learn and get to grips with how to play games in the process.
74. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009, PS3)
Very few games reach the level of blockbuster hype that Modern Warfare 2 achieved, and it lived up to that hype and then some. The campaign is explosive and exciting. The notorious “No Russian” mission is still referenced today, fifteen years later. The multiplayer was also a massive evolution, bringing in dual-wielding and even faster gameplay than its predecessor.
73. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998, N64)
Whenever we’d visit my cousins, the first thing we’d do is fire up their N64 and play a few levels of Rogue Squadron. Flying around in various Star Wars vehicles and dogfighting Tie Fighters is a joy, and it’s still just as fun today.
72. Lollipop Chainsaw (2012, PS3)
A perfect example of how gameplay isn’t everything, Lollipop Chainsaw demonstrates the power of leaning into style. The combat is kind of janky and overly-simplistic, and the enemies are downright rude, but when you’re bopping to pop hits while chopping zombies to bits and the entire screen is turning rainbow, it’s hard to not have a great time.
71. Among Us (2018, PC)
It can be easy to forget due to all the memes and merch which have flooded the public conscious, but at its core, Among Us is a fun social deduction game. Seeing how your friends react under pressure is fascinating, and trying to off them as an imposter gets you sweating like no other game can when your friends are trying to figure out who did it.
70. Life Is Strange (2015, PS4)
At a time when the market was saturated with Telltale narrative games, Life Is Strange stood out with its unique time travel powers and bold writing choices.
I will never stop banging the drum that Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is an underrated masterpiece. Many of the things Metal Gear Solid was hailed for were present here in their infancy eight years earlier.
67. Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005, PS2)
Star Wars: Battlefront II was a wild game, especially considering it came out only a year after its predecessor. It adds more maps. It has a progression system to upgrade your weapons. It makes heroes playable, and adds significantly more. It completely overhauls the flight system from the previous game, adding full-on space battles where you can dogfight, blow up critical ship systems, or board the enemy ship and cripple it from the inside. It was just a massive game with a scope and scale beyond many modern games that I sank countless hours into back in the day.
Left 4 Dead 2 was controversial prior to launch, due to releasing only a year after its predecessor. However, as soon as it arrived, all complaints were washed away in a sea of undead. Left 4 Dead 2 is a fun co-op action experience, made all the better due to its AI director who makes every playthrough unique and tense.
64. Halo 3 (2007, XB360)
Halo 3 is a damn good time, with the best gunplay of the original trilogy. If not for some personal gripes about the story, I’d probably rank this significantly higher.
63. Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (2002, GBA)
The last Fire Emblem game to not get an international release, The Binding Blade has some fan translations which are easily accessible and which help make the game playable for English-speakers. Its sequel would be fairly dumbed-down for the western audience who weren’t used to the series’ gameplay, but for those itching for a larger, more challenging experience, The Binding Blade is just what you asked for.
62. Civilization IV (2005, PC)
The last Civilization to retain the series’ “classic” structure, Civilization IV is possibly my favourite single entry in the franchise. However, its successors have taken the overall experience so far that I am not sure if I could ever actually go back to this game. This made it a bit hard to rank for me as a result, but I think that its more classic Civ gameplay gives it a somewhat unique place and its legacy deserves some recognition.
61. Battlefield 3 (2011, PS3)
While there’s a palpable sense that Battlefield 3 was taking a bit too much influence from Call of Duty, this game was an incredible experience back in the day. This was also the last time that DICE prioritized my favourite game mode, rush, and some of the rush maps here were incredible.
Whenever I bring up memorable video games, I always go back to Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey. To some degree, this game is kind of crappy… there’s basically no explanation of its mechanics, extremely repetitive gameplay, and very simple combat. You will struggle to make it more than a few hundred meters from your home without your ape having a panic attack (oh hey, just like real life!). You will be killed by predators out of nowhere and you will miss multiple jumps and fall to your death. These deaths are permanent, mean one less ape in your colony, which is already teetering on the edge of extinction.
However, you will eventually begin to get to grips with the mechanics. You’ll learn how to move around so as to avoid danger. You’ll learn how to make tools to make things easier for yourself and to fight back against the predators. You’ll start trekking out further and further from your home. You’ll learn to communicate with your troupe and start forming armed, roving gangs for safety. Soon, this massive jungle you’ve been exploring won’t seem so massive.
What really cemented the game for me was when I decided to climb the father tree, the largest tree in the jungle. I was carefully making my way up this massive trunk, climbing into the clouds, giving myself literal vertigo due to the sheer height. I reached the top and the entire world stretched out before me. There were so many more places left to explore, and I’d barely scratched the surface of it all…
…oh, and then I had to figure out how to climb back down. Truly an unforgettable game, far more than the sum of its parts, even if it takes a lot of patience to find the gold within.
58. Battlefield 4 (2013, PS4)
While the first six months were unacceptably bad, Battlefield 4 is now arguably the best Battlefield game on the market. Packed with tons of weapons and maps to engage in large-scale war on, I poured hundreds of hours into this game at the peak of my obsession with online shooters.
57. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (1991, SNES)
Turtles in Time is a great beat ’em up, but it’s one of those games that cements its legacy with one simple mechanic: you can grab enemy Foot soldiers and throw them at the camera. This would be cool enough as-is, but the cherry on top is that this is how you have to damage multiple bosses. Fuck yeah.
56. Fallout 3 (2008, PS3)
Fallout 3 came out at the perfect time, back when the open world game was still special, and when the Fallout universe hadn’t been explored in a decade. It made for a really evocative and unique experience that can’t really be recaptured now that everyone knows what Fallout looks and sounds like.
55. Twisted Metal 2 (1996, PS1)
In terms of pure gameplay, Twisted Metal 2 may just be the pinnacle of the series, with some iconic maps, lots of fun characters to play, and entertaining weapons to blast your friends to smithereens.
54. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017, PS4)
I really love RE7. I love how it mixes the long-forgotten, classic Resident Evil gameplay with modern horror conventions to create a truly fresh, terrifying experience. This is easily the scariest Resident Evil has ever been.
53. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (2004, PS2)
Pandora Tomorrow was my first Splinter Cell game and it immediately cemented my love for this franchise and stealth games in general. Shooting out lights, hiding in shadows, using gadgets, and generally just fucking around with your enemies is as fun as ever.
52. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell (2002, PS2)
Oh hey, remember how I said we’d get multiple games from the same franchises on this list? Well, I had a really hard time picking between Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow, but I had to give the original game the slight edge, due to preferring its story campaign just a tad more (sadly, I never got to play the multiplayer in Pandora Tomorrow, so I can’t comment on that).
51. Hitman 2 (2018, PS4)
IO Interactive’s modern Hitman trilogy is a stunning accomplishment. Create a vibrant, expansive, multi-level open sandbox, throw at least two targets into it, then set you loose to figure out how to kill them in a manner that suits you best. The sheer level of freedom is jaw-dropping and the ways that the world will react to your actions is remarkable to see. I’ve only played the first two of these games, but Hitman 2 gets the edge for me due to its more creative scenarios.
And that’s it for part one. If you’re reading this the day it came out, then part two will be up tomorrow!
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Whoo, that was quite the journey I just went through. Dead or Alive is such a weird fixation for me. I got into it through its shared universe with Ninja Gaiden and really got into it after falling in love with the shockingly fun movie adaptation. After that, it started turning into a meme on this blog and now I’ve gone and played every game in the franchise and bought copies of most of them. Oh yeah, that happened over the course of writing this Love/Hate series: I had a couple Dead or Alive games already, but I had so much fun that I went and purchased a whole Xbox One and all the mainline Dead or Alive games just to make them mine forever.
So yeah. I was fond of Dead or Alive when I started this journey. Now, I legitimately and proudly love this series. I still am not very good at fighting games, but I feel satisfied that I now understand how these games play. Hell, I’ll even say there’s a Dead or Alive in my all-time favourite games now. I’m so glad that I got to experience these games for myself, because it’s been an absolute blast. Of course, there’s only so much I can cover in a Love/Hate series, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts that fall outside of the purview of that format that I need to talk about.
Favourite DOA Ladies
I mean, this is a discussion about Dead or Alive, I obviously have to give my ranking of the ladies!
S-tier: Hitomi, Momiji.
Hitomi’s pretty obvious: she’s my main and I love her look and feisty, playful personality.
Momiji is gorgeous and from Ninja Gaiden, so she’s got a pretty big leg up on the competition.
A-tier: Ayane, Helena, Kasumi.
I LOVE Ayane, so the fact that she’s in A-tier should show just how much I love the S-tiers. Ayane’s just the best-written character in Dead or Alive, full-stop. The way that her tragic backstory resonates through her actions, character, and sense of duty is clear, but not shoved in your face constantly. Seeing that sense of duty force her to put down her own adopted father was tragic. Seeing her take down DOATEC with Ryu and Hayate was badass. She’s just the coolest.
Helena’s over-the-top French accent is cute, she’s easy on the eyes, and she has a pretty cool fighting style, but the most interesting part about her is her place in the story. Seeing how she plotted against Victor Donovan’s faction over the course of three games was cool to piece together. This is especially true for DOA4, where finding out Helena’s role in the story was the big reward for beating all the other campaigns.
Kasumi is not a particularly well-developed character across the course of this series, but I really have to appreciate how well she has held up as the face of this franchise. Her unwavering resolve and skill are admirable after all the shit she’s been through.
B-tier: Tina, Mila, Christie, Lisa, Misaki
Tina’s the series’ most overt sex symbol, and I really appreciate that they just committed to it. She also seems like just the sweetest person in these games, telling her father that she’s glad that he still has dreams and ambitions, and encouraging Mila to pursue her own goals. Meanwhile, Tina’s just being the world’s best self-marketer, launching careers for herself in Hollywood, music, and modeling. And, again: communist.
Mila is just so down to earth. She works in a diner, trains at a run-down gym, and dreams of being the best if she works hard enough.
Christie is the series’ other overt sex symbol. She is a cold-hearted bitch who would kill you in a moment’s notice. Did I ever mention that I love bad women…?
Lisa was a big surprise for me during this Love/Hate series. Before I started this, I found Lisa very dull. However, having played all the games, she’s actually really interesting. Her fighting style is really fun, her role in the story actually develops and gets intriguing, and she’s got some of the most over-the-top fanservice outfits in multiple games. It’s also just cool that one of the more important characters in this profoundly Japanese series is a black woman.
Misaki’s just really cute. Not much else I can say.
C-tier: Nyotengu, Leifang, Honoka, Marie Rose
Nyotengu is pretty alluring (again, I like bad women), but not enough to make it into a higher tier.
Leifang I’ve always found kind of bland and forgettable.
Honoka is so egregiously over-the-top that I kind of have to begrudgingly hand it to Team Ninja.
Marie Rose’s overall design is very cute, I just wish that they weren’t clearly trying to evoke Lolita fetishists with it.
D-tier: Kokoro, Rachel, Rio, NiCO
Before I started writing this Love/Hate series, I probably would have put Kokoro above Leifang in C-tier, as she was similarly bland to me. However, actually playing as her in these games has really made me dislike her. I just cannot get to grips with her fighting style, and got stuck on her campaign in Dead or Alive 4 for nearly forty minutes as a result. And then she’d show up in another fighter’s campaign and kick my ass over and over. Oh, and having basically no development or importance to these games’ narratives since her introduction makes her feel pointless. She’s just the blandest and most forgettable of the cast, only here because they wanted a geisha character, but forgot to make her do anything else.
Rachel is just embarrassing. Why is this giant titty demon hunter woman fighting in bondage gear? It was dumb in Ninja Gaiden, and it’s still dumb here. Such an unsubtle attempt to be sexy that it loops back to being uninteresting.
Rio’s so inessential and forgettable that I barely even consider her worth thinking about. It doesn’t help either that she doesn’t even look like she matches the art style of the other characters, which makes her feel entirely out of place.
NiCO is an even-more egregious attempt to appeal to Lolita fetishists than Marie Rose. She looks like a literal child. Her overly-serious and sassy characterization make it seem like you’re getting lectured by a kid. Like, move over little girl, an adult’s coming through.
Favourite DOA Characters
Next we’ll look at all the Dead or Alive characters and rank them from most-to-least favourite. I think this one’s pretty self-explanatory:
Dead or Alive Games Ranked
Over the course of this Love/Hate series, I’ve definitely enjoyed some experiences more than others. Here’s how I would rank the series from best to worst:
S-tier: Dead or Alive 2
Dead or Alive 2 was a blast even now. It would have been mind-blowing back in 1999. And the fact that Team Ninja immediately honed in on the triangle system: a way to make their fighting system unique and strategic. This has gone largely unchanged over the course of a quarter century, which is pretty wild to think. The Hardcore version in particular is jam-packed with content. This game has legitimately made a spot in my top twenty five video games of all-time list.
A-tier: Dead or Alive 3
I did really quite like Dead or Alive 3. Its stages are so well-designed, that it’s a crime that none of its successors have even come close to matching it. Oh, and Hitomi was introduced here.
B-tier: Dead or Alive 5, Dead or Alive Dimensions
I really like how Dead or Alive 5 modernized this series’ art style, gameplay, and presentation. I hate its DLC practices and how they infested the series from that point onwards.
Dimensions was just fun and really remarkable for how well it played on a 3DS! Made it very easy to just laze around and get in a quick match.
C-tier: Dead or Alive 4, Dead or Alive 6
Dead or Alive 4 is just… underwhelming to me. The story is really interesting. The gameplay just doesn’t feel as good as the previous two games, and the difficulty is borderline unfair at times.
Dead or Alive 6 is fine. It’s the newest and flashiest game in the franchise currently, so that gives it a bit of an edge. However, its even more egregious DLC practices, its awful story, and its changes to the core gameplay make it fairly disappointing.
D-tier: Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, Dead or Alive Xtreme 2
Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball doesn’t have a whole lot to do, but that’s kind of why it works better than its follow-ups. The whole thing feels a lot more relaxing – the game isn’t prodding you to accomplish some particular activity, or disincentivizing you from indulging in the more voyeuristic aspects of the game. You get to choose when you want to have a break in the core gameplay, and that’s pretty cool. Also, it really has to be said that this game’s sexy content is legitimately kind of wholesome. It feels a lot less leery or straight-up problematic like the later sequels would become.
The original Dead or Alive is okay at best. It’s so archaic and indistinct that there isn’t a whole lot of appeal. Add in that the enemy AI cheats like mad, making winning an exercise in frustration, and this is definitely one of the hardest Dead or Alive games to go back to.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is here almost entirely for being available on handheld. This makes the game so much easier to stay relaxed and invested in. That said, the game is still pretty poor and content-bereft…
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (and, by extension, Paradise) just gets the short end of the stick due to its grindy, tedious changes to the first Xtreme game’s formula. Could have potentially moved up for its more expansive activity roster (which has yet to be matched), but not being available on handhelds really makes this a tough sell.
F-tier: Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation
Fuck this “game”.
How Would I Direct Dead or Alive 7?
Now this is a fun question! First-off, I’m going to be somewhat realistic here: a mainline Dead or Alive game is not a priority to Tecmo-Koei. They are not going to give a Dead or Alive game a high-tier AAA budget. An expansive, Street Fighter 6 story campaign is probably not on the cards. Nor are its graphics likely to be top of the industry again. And there’s no way that they’re going to allow you to scrap DLCs entirely. So, with a relatively realistic set of limitations in mind, here’s what I’d like to see in a new Dead or Alive game:
How would it play?
I think I would be happiest if Dead or Alive 7 played a bit more like Dead or Alive 3, or maybe 5 too. Gameplay-wise, DOA3 was probably the most fun I had, largely because it played pretty much identically to 2 and had the best, most unique stages. That said, Dead or Alive 3 might feel a bit slow compared to a modern fighter, so Dead or Alive 5 might be a little more to their taste. I think that the recent games’ attempts at making the fighting system accessible have been a good move, and are worth looking into further.
In addition, since Street Fighter 6‘s massive success, there’s the question of entire control shake-ups. It would be pretty cool if Dead or Alive 7 took this same approach, allowing an option to control your fighter more like an action game than a fighting game. I’m not certain how well this would work though – the balance of DOA‘s signature 4-point holds could get knocked out of whack if you could more easily predict what standard combo string would be coming next.
What about the break gauge?
I struggle with this one. I’m a bit meh on the break gauge in Dead or Alive 6, but does that mean it should be scrapped entirely, or can it be improved instead? After some deliberation, I think I’d say that scrapping it is for the best. It does add a bit more strategy in a match, but it can just take over the game, as it invalidates the triangle system entirely when used. More realistically, it just functions as a way to both introduce and balance the break holds system. I appreciate the attempt to innovate, but I just do not think it worked this time.
How much fanservice are we talkin’ here?
Having played through almost every game in this franchise, I think I can say with confidence that Team Ninja might have been onto something with Dead or Alive 6 when they decided to start toning down the sexy costumes.
Don’t crucify me yet!
I don’t want to see a Dead or Alive game remove all the suggestive content: it’s part of the series’ DNA at this point. However, looking back, mainline Dead or Alive games overtly embracing sexual content in-game wasn’t even a thing until after the Xtreme games came out. Since then, it’s generally been used as a way to sell cosmetics. I think that Dead or Alive 3 struck a good balance, but I wouldn’t be opposed to pushing even further than that either. That said, let Xtreme be where you push the envelope. You could legitimately make mainline Dead or Alive more appealing to non-fans and convince more people to check things out – you just have to be careful not to alienate the core fans in the process by playing it up in the marketing.
DLC plans?
While I obviously would like this game to just have everything being unlockable in-game, I’m gonna have to include some sort of DLC. Obviously, we scrap the scummy shit from DOA6 and VV. If we have to have DLC, then the costume DLC from DOA5 was at least fair: see costume you like, buy costume you like. Its only problem was the ridiculous price they demanded. After Core Fighters released, this also made the DLC stores an unnavigable nightmare.
Simply put, I would lower the price of the cosmetics drastically. Maybe even give a way to buy DLC costumes in game – at least that way you’re getting people invested and I find it actually kind of encourages spending some money for a costume you like. As far as DLC goes, I’d probably add a few characters, preferably guest characters rather than original characters. It always feels bad when you get a new character in DLC, then know very little about their personality or story until the next game comes along and shatters your interpretations. Guest characters would at least prevent this from happening. I’m also fine with the sort of costume bundles they released, so if people kept buying them, I’d keep offering them. That’s about the extent of the monetization for me.
If they forced me to do Core Fighters as well, then I’d be a hell of a lot less stingy. Bundle characters, stages, etc together a bit more and, obviously, more reasonably-priced.
What’s the story?
Dead or Alive 6 ended with a pretty heavy implication that Helena’s mother, Maria, had been resurrected. Because of this, I only have two reasonable choices: ignore it entirely, or make the next game’s narrative revolve around this plot point. I think it’s a really fitting development for the series. One of the big, unresolved plot points in the overarching Dead or Alive narrative is that Kokoro’s mother, Miyako, has some sort of relationship with MIST. However, we do not know the nature of this relationship, so there has been a lot of suspicion directed her way by Helena. Miyako is head of DOATEC Japan, so being associated with the villains of the series could have some pretty major implications.
So, all that said, what does Miyako have to do with Maria? Well, this is relevant to me, because it gives us an the emotional core you build the entire narrative around. We’ve got a story of two mothers and two daughters, who you can compare and contrast for stronger thematic and emotional resonance. You could probably work in other parent-child relationships into this narrative to make this even stronger (Hitomi and her father, Eliot and Gen Fu, Ayane and Honoka grappling with the knowledge of who their father was, etc), but I want Helena and Kokoro to be the main focus.
In regards to this A-plot, I would indeed have Maria be the unseen observer at the end of Dead or Alive 6. However, I want this to be a tragedy: Maria’s resurrection is everything that Helena has wished for, so it needs to be bittersweet when she gets it. Maria’s back, but she’s quickly losing herself. NiCO experimented significantly on Raidou, so it seems reasonable that she would do the same to Maria. I would imagine her having a procedure to make her like Alpha-152 (Kasumi’s super-powered clone from Dead or Alive 4). Over the course of the game, she is losing control, on the verge of losing herself forever and becoming an unknowable, angry energy entity. Shortly after the end of Dead or Alive 6, she is discovered by Miyako, who reaches out to Maria and tells her that she has the means to cure her affliction. Maria doesn’t particularly trust Miyako, but is desperate enough to accept her help…
I’m not going to get into all the plot details, but we’re going to make this take place about six months after Dead or Alive 6. Like Dead or Alive 5, the first half of the narrative will revolve around the tournament. I considered weaving the tournament and conspiracy plots together more directly, but I ultimately decided against it. I actually kind of like that the tournament gets to be its own thing in these narratives. It lets the tournament be one narrative arc with its own heroes and champions, while the conspiracy plot can have its own separate important characters. This ultimately means that you can have more central characters doing things without having to spread them all thin across a narrative trying to find something for them to do. I like how they handled this in DOA5 and 6, where you get a fair amount of build-up from the characters to show their motivations going into the tournament. In particular, I have some ideas to develop certain characters:
Tina’s thing in these games is that she always has a new venture she wants to launch using her appearance in the tournament to drum up interest. In Dead or Alive 6, it was a dream to become governor, until she found out that she’s too young to run. However… I want her to pursue this. Tina doesn’t seem like the sort to just give up. I want her to knuckle-down and say “No, I actually want this dream to come true” and start putting in the groundwork to win an election in five years. Her goal in the tournament will be to make people aware of the initiatives she’s taking to help people in her state.
Leon’s been absent from the narrative since DOA3, but I’d like to have him come back. Considering that his entire backstory and motivation revolve around his dead partner’s belief that Leon was the world’s strongest man, it kind of feels shitty if he’s not even participating anymore. I’d like him to be back, but it’s straight-up acknowledged that he has been training like a madman for the last couple years and is now a dark-horse favourite to win the whole thing.
The tournament itself is played out by the bracket so that we can get a clear picture of who participated and won or lost each fight. Participants and brackets in this tournament are:
And here’s how the tournament will play out:
Yup, an Eliot win! The kid’s been training for years and his entire storyline so far has been him uncertain if he’s good enough to complete. Let’s change that! Jann Lee’s on a two-tournament winning streak, and Diego’s the one guy who gave him a challenge last time. They’re clearly the two favourites, so I want them to both lose unexpectedly in the early rounds. This will open up the field for a character like Eliot to make it to the finals. By a similar token, Mila reaches the climax of her current arc by making it to the finals of the tournament against Eliot. Two games earlier, she was giddy and excited to be getting brought into the Dead or Alive community. Now, she’s the second-best amongst them all. Leon also does quite respectably for his big return.
Kokoro’s exit in the 3rd round would mark the continuation of the conspiracy plot, where her and Helena get mixed up with Miyako and Maria. Helena would be overwhelmed by this revelation, but quickly find that her mother’s mind is rapidly leaving her as MIST’s experiments take hold. The ninjas would also become involved at this point to try to thwart MIST’s newest activities. Basically, the story would have Helena have to defeat Maria and put her to rest, while Kokoro discovers that her mother is not a good person, but ultimately saves her life.
Who are the new characters?
So… I know I previously said “Hot DOA MILF, when?”, and Miyako and Maria are seemingly perfect for that… but I don’t really want to make them new staples on the roster. Miyako doesn’t strike me as a fighter if she hasn’t been involved in the past six tournaments already. Plus she doesn’t really approve of Kokoro’s involvement, so it just doesn’t fit the character for me. Maria also doesn’t really make sense as a fighter, but she’ll be the final boss when she turns into a being of pure energy like Alpha-152… so not really “hot DOA MILF” at that point, but she’d be unlockable. Dead or Alive games will typically include two new characters, one male and one female… I don’t really want this article to turn into “look at my OCs!” though, so we’re not going to get too far into the weeds.
Aaaand that about does it for my thoughts on Dead or Alive (for now). That said… I’m approaching 400 blog posts on IC2S… god fucking dammit, I’m going to be buying Venus Vacation Prism for a big, 400th blog post spectacular review, aren’t I…? It just went up for pre-order at the time of writing… God dammit. I legitimately have no interest in the game and hadn’t planned on playing it… but I feel like I have to for the memes once more?
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Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! For this final entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation. Remember how I said that there was a free to play version of Xtreme 3 on PC which evolved into something else? This is that “something else”. You can still see some of the bones of DOAX3 here (some assets, cutscenes, etc are pulled wholesale from it), but the game plays entirely differently and there has been significantly more content added. Being somewhat active in the DOA fan community, I’ve been aware of this game for a long time, but never had any desire to check it for a variety of reasons out until starting this Love/Hate series. What sorts of changes can we expect from a free-to-play version of Xtreme…? Read on to find out…
Despite being a free-to-play PC exclusive which has only released in Asian territories, there are (somehow) still two releases of Venus Vacation. The main version of the game is available through DMM Game Player, and there’s also a version available on Steam in Asian territories. Despite being the same game, each version has pretty substantial differences in content, with it being said that the Steam version is generally a year behind the DMM version. Confusingly, the game might also be in different languages, depending on where you set your VPN downloaded the game. There might be a version with English translated menus, but I played using a Steam version which was like 99% Japanese, so I was relying on fan guides and general fucking around to figure out what to do. For what it is though, I think I can give a fair opinion about my impressions after spending several hours on the game.
Love
Graphics – Might as well say it one last time: once again, the graphics for a Dead or Alive game are great. Moreso than any other game in the franchise, Venus Vacation‘s entire appeal revolves around its visuals, so it’s good to see that they nailed this aspect of the experience, since you’re going to be doing a lot of ogling.
Chibi Avatars!!!!! – One of the first things you see when you start this game is a big booba chibi Honoka bouncing on a volleyball. At first my reaction was “oh Team Ninja, never change”, but it was pretty cute. However, when you get into the game properly, all the girls have a few different chibi arts, and they are adorable. I’m not exaggerating when I say that these were far and away my favourite part of the entire game, to the point where I want to get stickers printed for all the mainline Dead or Alive girls.
Mixed
Gravure Videos – I’ve always complained that gravure videos are at odds with the design of the Xtreme games. They give you a very limited number of activities that you can complete in a single vacation and only some of these activities give you any incentive (ie, Zack dollars) to complete them. Gravure videos are the worst of all worlds by being barely interactive, short, and providing no incentive other than just letting you ogle the girls for a few seconds. Venus Vacation provides probably the best execution of the idea that I’ve seen thus far though, by making gravure videos unlockable rewards that you get for completing volleyball matches. Turning these into bonus rewards is such an obvious move that I have no idea why they didn’t do this earlier (actually, I do know why: because there’s already barely any content in the other Xtreme games). That said, this goes into mixed simply because it takes FOREVER to unlock them. After five hours of play, I had just unlocked my second gravure video, which is kind of nuts. The only reason I can see for this ridiculous grind is that you would unlock all the videos for all the girls in a week or two if you earned them at a reasonable rate, but that’s not really an excuse, is it? That’s just fucking the customer so you can keep making them run on the content treadmill forever.
Hate
Region-locked – Okay, at this point, there’s zero reason for Tecmo-Koei to be pulling this bullshit. Why is this only available in Asian markets? This is a free-to-play, digital download only, gatcha game. There’s no physical release that they need to pay up-front for production and distribution world-wide. As far as I can see, they would only need to pay localization costs for whatever regions they release the game in (and this is Tecmo-Koei, so that would just be for the menus, they have never given a shit about localizing the voice acting). And don’t give me shit about the “woke mob” freaking out and censoring the game: no one fucking cares about your titty appreciation game and we all know that this is true, because full-on porn games dominate Steam’s new releases. Venus Vacation isn’t even all that objectionable in terms of content (other than the fact that you can still poke the girls, and they respond negatively, but can’t do anything to stop you and get over it in a matter of seconds). I have a lot of negative thoughts about this game, but I think that there’s no reason why this game can’t be available worldwide. This is 100% on Tecmo-Koei being a bunch of morons.
Now, this is just me speculating, but the only justifiable reason I can see for Venus Vacation to be region-locked at this point is possibly a strategic move on Tecmo-Koei’s part. As we’ve seen, the Xtreme games affected Dead or Alive‘s perception in the west. They did not sell very well here, and they had the knock-on effect of making the mainline fighting games sell worse too. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tecmo-Koei are trying to manage that perception in case they decide to release another mainline game in the future. Meanwhile, the hardcore gooner audience will import or use a VPN to access the games which had primarily appealed to an eastern audience anyway. Tecmo-Koei still makes their money one way or another and only end up needing to focus on a smaller market in the process.
Basically No Gameplay – Here’s the biggest difference between Venus Vacation and any other Xtreme game… there’s basically no gameplay. Even Xtreme Beach Volleyball at least had people saying “cum for the boobs, stay for the volleyball”, but you can’t even say that here. Volleyball matches are played out automatically, so you just sit there watching the girls play. You’re basically trapped in DOAX3‘s owner mode the entire time, clicking through menus and watching everyone else getting to have fun. The only real influence you have over the match is getting your girls’ stats up, which is done by dressing them up in swimsuits with a higher rating. It’s the “gear level” bullshit you’ve seen in a thousand live service games, and it’s the entire game here. It makes every match basically pre-determined: you either have higher stats and win, or you have lower stats and lose. Which brings us to…
The Absolute Worst Games Industry Bullshit – To the surprise of no one, Venus Vacation is a full-on gatcha game, and the entire experience has been warped around that. You play volleyball matches to get crystals, which you then spend to spin the wheel and see if you get a better swimsuit to dress your chosen girl in, so that she can win more games of volleyball. Rinse and repeat. This props up several predatory systems:
An energy bar which limits how many matches you can play without waiting for it to recharge (or paying to fill it back up instantly, of course). Energy is ridiculously stingy here: you initially get showered in it, but it very quickly slows to a crawl and lets you play a max of three-to-four matches in a single session before having to wait several hours to recharge.
Crystals, which you use to roll for swimsuits. You get showered with them early, but the number you get dry up fast as you go (or, y’know, you can buy more…).
Daily and weekly challenges and login bonuses to keep you on the grind treadmill and to encourage turning the game into a habitual activity.
Blatantly overpowered swimsuits with awful drop rates in the low single-digit percentile. Power creep which has rendered older suits worthless, meaning that you have to bee-line the newest events and get their SSR suits in order to stay competitive.
This is just the stuff I came across in my time playing, I’m sure there’s even more bullshit in play that I just never got a chance to interact with (and I know I got the “use your credit card to buy this digital currency!” pop-up more times than I can list). As a result of all this, you might notice that…
It’s Not About Having Fun, It’s About Compulsion – Like so many shitty fucking games of the last decade and a half, Venus Vacation isn’t a game about having fun, it’s a game that tries to get you addicted to its systems to get you paying money. Let me illustrate how ridiculous this gets here: you can fast-forward through the volleyball matches. Yes, the entire point of the previous games is just an obstacle to completing the grind for more gatcha spins, so you can (and will) skip as much as you can to avoid wasting more time. As bad as that is, then there’s the swimsuits. You’re gonna spin the wheel over and over again, getting swimsuits which are aesthetically pleasing, but completely worthless because they are not an SSR pull. If you play the game long enough, you just save up as many crystals as you can, because everything you can do is worthless outside of special events which drop the new SSR suits. You can’t even enjoy dressing your girls up in whatever suits you like most, because the gear-grind means that they’ve syphoned the fun out of goddamn dress-up. The worst part? I can feel the fucking hooks in me while playing. I wasn’t playing because I was enjoying myself. I was actively bored and getting more and more pissed off at the predatory systems in the game. And yet, I kept playing and skipping through everything, because I had a bunch of energy and didn’t want to waste it, because then I’d get less spins and have less chances to get a good suit. Again, none of this was designed to make you enjoy the game, it has been refined and engineered to make you keep playing. I fucking loathe this kind of design, so Venus Vacation would already be on my shit-list, but it gets an extra twist of the knife in, because…
This Isn’t Even Dead or Alive Anymore – There’s a lot of discontent in the Dead or Alive fan community towards Venus Vacation, because the mainline series has been basically abandoned in favour of this game:
For one thing, after all the content which has been added, Venus Vacation doesn’t even feel like it’s a Dead or Alive game anymore. All the attention from Team Ninja has gone into original characters, to the point where there are eleven girls from the mainline games, versus twenty original characters. This gets worse when you consider that there are multiple, major characters from the mainline games still missing from the roster here (most notably, Lisa and Christie, although it’s also pretty bad that Mila is missing too… NiCO and Rachel, I care less about). That said… most of the new characters just do not interest me in the slightest. Their designs can largely be boiled down to anime tropes and/or fetish bait and, without a story campaign to really explore their character, we don’t get a whole lot of personality to explore.
Making matters worse is the pure numbers here. Xtreme games have always been pretty cheap, utilizing the same, OG Xbox-era design with little in the way of improvement or ambition. Compare that to Dead or Alive 5 and 6, which clearly cost a lot of money to make and were actually aiming for a global market, meaning they had much higher distribution costs. From a purely-financial standpoint, can you blame Team Ninja for prioritizing this game over a much riskier mainline entry? No, but from the perspective of a fan of the franchise, it’s frankly disgusting that we’re probably not getting a new, mainline Dead or Alive game any time soon, all because this predatory game prints money at a fraction of the cost. Hell, I have my problems with the Xtreme games in general, but at least they succeeded at being very relaxing, chill experiences with enough gameplay to keep you entertained in short burst. Venus Vacation strips that all out in the name of squeezing money from you.
Frankly, I despise Venus Vacation. That’s mostly due to it representing the absolute worst of the modern gaming industry, but the fact that it has fucked the mainline Dead or Alive games just makes it all the more insulting (and just illustrates further how shit the games industry is in general). And, to illustrate this further, we recently got the announcement of Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme, a new game which is going to be a dating sim (oh yay, my favourite part about Xtreme)… and, as of the time of this writing, it’s looking very likely that none of the mainline girls are going to be in the game at all (edit: as expected, Honoka was the only character from the fighting games that made the cast, but she’s arguably more of an Xtreme character anyway). It’s also quite telling that “Venus Vacation” is getting top billing here – this is basically its own little franchise now. As a fan of Dead or Alive, I hate that this is where we’re at now. Through the course of this Love/Hate series, I genuinely came to love this world, its characters, and their relationships. It’s fucking trash, but it’s my trash, goddammit. Seeing it shunted away due to financial considerations is heart-breaking.
Man… I was not expecting this to make me so depressed. Fuck… can you cheer me up, Chibi Hitomi?
I knew I could count on you… *sniffle* Thanks…
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Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry we’ll be looking at the most recent mainline game in the franchise, Dead or Alive 6. This game has had a bit of a contentious history, largely due to its pre-release controversies. During the previews of the game, the fanbase damn near rioted, because they believed that Team Ninja were toning down the suggestive content (less skimpy outfits, no boob physics when it was first previewed, etc). Meanwhile, Team Ninja’s attempts to placate the core fans ended up pissing off the esports crowd they were trying to pander to in the first place with the infamous “core values” scandal. We’re now five years from release, how does this game, the current standard-bearer for Dead or Alive as a fighting franchise, hold up in 2024? Read on to find out…
Dead or Alive 6 has a pretty straightforward release history by this franchise’s standards. There was just one release, that being on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. For this analysis I purchased the PC version… mostly because it was absolute hell trying to find a physical copy of the game in 2024 for a reasonable price. The closest Game Stop with a used copy was two hours away. Getting it on ebay would cost me $40+. No game stores or flea markets in a one hour radius had a copy. No one on Facebook marketplace within five hours had a copy for sale. It’s nuts that a game that came out relatively recently is that scarce. For the record, this also applies to Dead or Alive 5: Last Round. I was trying to find a copy to replace the one I sold, and it is simply impossible to find. Tecmo-Koei must have made some really small production runs of the game, or they destroyed a lot of unsold copies or something, because I had a way easier time finding copies of the first four games that came out twenty years ago than I did for games that came out less than ten.
Love
New Costumes – Presumably, because Dead or Alive 6 was courting the esports scene, they chose to tone down the sexuality of most of the female characters’ default costumes. Fret not – most of the “classic” outfits are still in the game, and there’s still plenty of sexy costumes here (Tina’s default costume is proof enough of that… and if that’s not enough for you, you can unlock Christie’s bondage gear outfit too). That said: I actually really like most of the new default costumes they’ve introduced. In particular: the new ninja bodysuits for Kasumi and Ayane, and Helena’s dress? These are fucking hot without having to take the path of least resistance by showing a bunch of cleavage. I also quite like Kokoro and Leifang’s new costumes.
Tina is a Lefty – After using Dead or Alive as a springboard to a career as a model, movie star, and rock star, Tina sets her sights on becoming governor (it is left unclear which state she would be governor of). While training with Zack, she tells him, completely unprompted: “When I become the Governor, I wanna give the young ones more hope in the future! Welfare is also important. We have to make the lives of the children better!” C-comrade Armstrong!? Tina is actually based as fuck!? I think my heart just skipped a beat. Legitimately: I already liked Tina before this game, but that one moment made her so much more attractive to me.
Mixed
The Graphics – I wasn’t really expecting this, but the more I played of DOA6, the more I came to feel that this game’s graphics are a bit of a mixed bag. Dead or Alive has had the best graphics of any fighter for most of its history, but by the time DOA6 released, the AAA fighting competition had really stepped up their game. Mortal Kombat X and 11, Soulcalibur VI, Tekken 7… the competition of “best looking fighter” hasn’t been stiffer for Dead or Alive, and I don’t think Team Ninja have really managed to keep up with them. On the one hand, the character models do look quite nice and I appreciate the more saturated colours compared to DOA5. However, the characters have this soft, almost plasticky look to them which I find off-putting. In addition, while the character models look pretty good, the environments, NPCs, etc are noticeably worse, especially in the story cutscenes. I’m talking models and textures that are reminiscent of PS3-era games in some cases; it reminds me of Resident Evil 6‘s mish-mash of art styles and effort.
Break Gauge – I haven’t really mentioned any gameplay changes since Dead or Alive 2, because there either were none, or they were very minor (ie, DOA5‘s power blows). DOA6 is the first time since DOA2 that we’ve had a fundamental shakeup to the core gameplay, with the addition of the break gauge. This is a bar which fills up as you fight and allows you to spend charges to perform special moves: break blows (a single, super powerful strike that uses the entire bar), side attacks (a side-step that chains into a quick attack), break holds (a single-button press hold that will counter any kind of strike for half of your bar), and fatal rush (a series of attacks that can only be stopped with a break hold and ends with a break blow). I’m pretty mixed on their inclusion here. Fatal strikes and break blows are pretty flashy and easy to execute, which can make them feel like a noob crutch. I’d argue that break holds are fundamentally broken though – the ability to break any combo without having to make a proper call is game-changing and breaks some of the fundamental balance of the triangle system. It’s one of those systems that really makes-or-breaks the experience for you, and I’m not convinced that it really adds anything of substance to the franchise’s core gameplay.
Oh and I think I should note something: back in 2018 when the game was being previewed, I had mused that the more visceral violence from break blows could potentially clash with the sexy aspects of these games and make the game feel kind of uncomfortable. I’m happy to confirm that they seem to have struck a good balance, because I was never really bothered by it. Break blows look like they fucking hurt, but it comes across as cartoonish, over-the-top slapstick, and is clearly separated from any sexualized elements of the game.
Hate
Story – Hoo boy, we’ve really run the gamut of story modes through this franchise, but I was not expecting Dead or Alive 6 to have the absolute worst narrative campaign of them all. DOA6 does a lot of what I liked about DOA5‘s story: we get a whole bunch of scenes of the characters interacting and palling around outside of the confines of the tournament, while also seeking out new blood to test themselves against. However, the execution here is fucked beyond belief, to the point where I prefer Dead or Alive 2’s primitive approach to storytelling to what we got here:
First of all, the narrative itself is awful. Most of the A-plot revolves around Marie Rose hanging out with Honoka, who we come to discover is a bastard daughter of Raidou, the villain of the first game (and also the biological father of Ayane). MIST (a new organization which has formed from the remnants of the evil faction within DOATEC) end up capturing Honoka and Ayane in order to resurrect Raidou, which leads to a big showdown between the ninjas and their evil uncle/father once more. This story just kinda sucks. It meanders way too much, and then is way too rushed at the end (seriously, Raidou comes back, gets into one unceremonious fight, and then is dead again). The tournament itself is also an absolute joke once again, having a grand total of five fights for its entirety, and then moving on to more important stuff. To put that into context, we’ve got more sequences of Nyotengu fucking around with the fighters than we do actual tournament storylines here.
Then there’s all the side stories, which are a bunch of cartoonish nonsense. Sure, Dead or Alive hasn’t really taken itself all that seriously, but it feels like a bit too much here. A lot of this is laid on the shoulders of Nyotengu, whose popularity has caused her to be shoved into so many characters’ plots for no real reason. She’s just going around trolling everyone with no narrative payoff to speak of for it. I guess all the tengu flying around and krakens just showing up fill out some of the more bizarre aspects of the DOA universe, but it comes across less as worldbuilding and more like they just wanted to shove the new/popular character in your face as much as possible.
Then we’ve got the terrible voice acting. This would normally be its own separate bullet-point, but in this case, the voice acting is actively detrimental to the narrative presentation here. Admittedly, there are a few solid story beats: Helena breaking her aloof façade as she begs Kokoro to stay out of danger because she’s the only family she has left. Jann Lee becoming bored now that he’s the world’s strongest fighter and desperately seeking someone who can challenge him. Ayane, Hayate, and Kasumi reunited in order to face off against Raidou once again. Unfortunately, the wretched voice acting takes 99% of the writing and makes it utterly laughable. I don’t get why this is so bad. DOA5‘s voice acting was fine and most of that cast have returned here, so I don’t blame them. Maybe it’s on the vocal direction? It’s pretty clear that Tecmo-Koei have cheaped out on the localization (the lip sync is also no where near matching what is being said), so I wouldn’t be surprised if their penny-pinching compromised this game’s voice acting too.
I think it also needs to be emphasized that DOA6 is actually making a serious effort to be good. They’ve even tried working themes into this story. Everything revolves around family here: NiCO wants to bring back her dead father. Kokoro is mad because Helena didn’t tell her that they had the same father. Ayane finds out that Raidou is her father. It’s played so dramatically, that it’s all the more worse that the execution is so laughable.
Oh, and to top it all off, DOA6 has perhaps the most baffling chapter select screen I’ve ever seen. DOA5 had an elegant solution: each character was lined up from left to right, then each character had a few chapters which you would pick from a vertical list. You then complete those chapters before moving onto the next character. Chapters were also numbered and you could see all the chapters at once, so you would easily be able to tell what you were supposed to play next. DOA6 has a similar idea, but throws all structure out the window. Chapters unlock non-chronologically, so you end up having to jump back and forth through the timeline to see if you’ve missed any chapters that just unlocked. Just advancing the story is like playing hide-and-go-seek, which is a lot harder than it sounds due to the weirdly-zoomed in camera. All that work, just so you can experience DOA6‘s garbage narrative, the joy!
Honoka and Marie Rose – HOO BOY. I know that there was some discontent in the Dead or Alive fandom about Marie Rose and Honoka being turned into the new mascots of the franchise after their introduction in DOA5. I never really minded this too much: sure, they’re clearly fetish-bait and didn’t have much personality to latch onto, but they have cute, appealing character designs, so I accept them. However, now that I have actually played a story about them, I lost a lot of love for these two characters. Firstly, due to their popularity, they’re pushed to the forefront of the narrative, side-lining a lot of the more “major” legacy cast members. Secondly, they don’t really have much personality to speak of: Marie Rose is uptight and dutiful, while Honoka is an airhead who likes to fight people in order to learn their fighting styles. Seriously, that’s about it, the only development they get is that they become friends over the course of the game (not that we’re shown them actually enjoying each others’ company, they just are friends because they have to be). Thirdly, their narrative sections are cringeworthy. They basically amount to watching the two of them dick about at the tournament, getting into fights as they go, until MIST thankfully shunt them out of the narrative for good. Fourthly, their voice acting is atrocious, like nails on chalkboard (note: I do not blame the VAs for this). Every scene they’re in is them speaking in the most sickly-sweet, cutesy way possible, while even the background music changes to make the scene feel like something from a high school comedy anime. I truly wanted to die any time I had to play a new Honoka/Marie Rose chapter.
NiCO – Ugh. I hate everything about this character’s design. Not only is she way too “anime” for me, but she’s egregiously pushing the same Lolita design as Marie Rose, despite being “officially” eighteen. And this is actually a problem, because NiCO is (arguably) the main villain of the game. She’s a head researcher for MIST who is trying to resurrect Raidou in order to figure out how to revive her own father. I even think that her voice actress puts in the best performance of the entire cast, and her fighting style is pretty cool too. None of it matters, because she’s this bright-blue coloured hair child that I’m supposed to take seriously? Why is the fate of the world being decided by three school girls in a world where goddamn Ryu Hayabusa exists (not to mention all the other capable heroes in these games)? But… keep everything the same and then age her up ten years…? We’d have a Dead or Alive character for the fucking ages, my friend! Late twenties, serious, evil, blue-haired, anime science woman who wants to kick my ass?
No Tag Mode – For some reason, Team Ninja were not able to get a tag mode running in this game’s engine in time for launch, so they scrapped it. Unfortunately, no tag mode has been patched in since, meaning that my favourite way to play Dead or Alive is not even an option here. That sucks, straight-up. Not much more I can say than that.
Unrewarding Unlocks – Up to this point, Dead or Alive games will unlock costumes whenever you complete a character’s campaign and the various game modes. It’s always been a solid and rewarding way to incentivize the player to try out all the game modes. DOA6 seemingly modernizes this by giving you fighter coins which you can spend to unlock whatever costume you want. How progressive! However, it turns out that they really “modernized” it: coins drop slowly and incentivize you to play online to get more (where players will be showing off their purchased cosmetics). Costumes also unlock randomly, so you can’t even work towards one that you like best, which goes against the entire point of giving us the freedom to purchase costumes in the first place. With this system, you’re basically taking a lot longer to get the same things that you could get in prior Dead or Alive games, all in an effort to frustrate you towards paid cosmetics.
More Games Industry Bullshit – Anyone could have told you that DOA6 would carry on the monetization practices of DOA5, but I don’t think many would have expected them to get so much more egregious with it:
First of all, it has to be said: there’s a lot of DLC available for this game. I can’t even get Steam to display all the DLCs with a total price, because there’s just too many of them for Steam to handle listing everything in one place. That’s just crazy, and navigating the DLC shop is a nightmare. This also makes this game’s Core Fighters version even more annoying, since I can’t tell what is bundled and what isn’t.
DOA6 also had one of the most egregious microtransaction scandals in history with its hair colour customization system. The game would charge fighter coins or real-world currency every time you changed a character’s hair colour, including changing it back to default. You weren’t even buying a new hair colour to have available (which would be bad enough), but you were being forced to pay for a basic customization option. In response to the backlash, this was changed (although they’ll still totally charge you for hair colour), but it still goes to show how egregiously this game was designed to fleece the player.
This game also shoves its monetization in your face. DLC characters will show up in character selection with nothing to show that they are not owned. If you try to pick one of them, the game will then tell you that you do not own a license for that character, intending to disappoint you and push you to buy them. Then, in the story mode, DLC characters’ chapters show up, but if you select them it will prompt you to buy the license. However, what makes this bad are that they will forever show up as “unread” chapters, with no way to unmark them without buying. This makes navigating the story menu even more confusing and frustrating, since they will show up if you try to navigate to “next chapter”. Some real scummy shit.
It probably looks like I hated Dead or Alive 6, but I honestly didn’t. Most of its best parts are just carried over from all the previous Dead or Alive games. There’s just not much new that’s worthy of note, and that which is here leaves me with mixed feelings. It would be fine taken on its own, but compared to nearly any previous Dead or Alive game, it’s a clear step down in quality.
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Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive Xtreme 3. For my 200th Blog Post celebration, I reviewed this game for the memes. I was pretty low on it at the time… and yet, this has been the one cartridge in my PS Vita for several years now. Have my thoughts changed then…? Read on to find out…
Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 has got to have the most confusing set of re-releases in the entire franchise (which is saying something). For one thing, there’s no game just called “Dead or Alive Xtreme 3“. The initial two games were subtitled Fortune (on PS4) and Venus (on PS Vita). An free-to-play PC version would be released shortly thereafter, but that ended up evolving into a completely different game, so I’ll cover it later. However, some content from the PC version ended up being incorporated into a re-released version called Scarlet, which would release on PS4 and Switch. However, even this re-release wasn’t identical, because the PS4 version had some censorship (to the point where things which were in Fortune ended up being removed in the re-release), whereas the Switch version is fully unchanged. As a result, the Switch version is easily the definitive version in terms of content, and also for being handheld (as previously stated, Xtreme games play best on portable systems). For my part, I bought Venus for my 200th blog post special, and I still own it to this day. While not as “definitive” as Scarlet, it’s still a very worthy way to check this game out if you’re interested (and, honestly, there’s very little changed between the two versions). That said, I did try out the Switch version of Scarlet as well for reference for this Love/Hate series.
Love
Graphics – Good graphics are par for the course for Dead or Alive, but it’s especially worth noting in an Xtreme game where you’re meant to be lustfully staring at the character models for a hefty chunk of the runtime. The new art style from DOA5 really works in this regard, leaving a lot less to the imagination compared to its more stylized predecessors. The PS Vita and Switch ports are especially impressive in this regard, holding up flawlessly compared to their console counterparts.
The Ultimate Handheld Experience – This only really applies to the PS Vita and Switch versions of the game, but the more laid-back handheld experience really does make this the best way to play any Xtreme game. The technology has advanced far enough that the compromises of Paradise are no longer a mitigating factor; this is a fully-featured version of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3. Being able to play in short bursts also really helps keep the game relaxing and cuts down on any tedium from the limited number of activities available. While I have my issues with the game, by virtue of being on a handheld, this makes DOAX3 probably the best way to experience an Xtreme game that we’ve ever gotten.
Mixed
Missions – One of the new features of DOAX3 is a mission structure. These are basically what you’d expect from a game released in the last ten years: a little pop-up that says “perform X task to get a reward”. These can be an easy way to get a small amount of Zack dollars and gives you something to work towards. I didn’t really give them much notice at the time, but we’ve been so inundated with daily/weekly challenges in games that I kind of hate it now. The tasks are so arbitrary, some are way more trouble than they’re worth, and they ultimately don’t make the game more fun: you’re just doing some chore because the game told you to in order to get a tiny dopamine hit, instead of enjoying your vacation by doing what you want to. Look… the issue with previous Xtreme games wasn’t that there was no direction, it was that the content on offer was way too thin and shallow. Constantly prodding me to do things isn’t content, it’s just preying on people addicted to checking off boxes.
Hate
Owner Mode – The big, marquee new feature of DOAX3 is owner mode. This mode allows you to… oh goddammit. It’s a full-fledged, goddamn dating sim mode. Given how much I hated the dating sim elements in the previous Xtreme games, you can imagine my feelings about owner mode. It plays out as a second layer for the main game, with your own inventory and money, and you can even switch between girl mode and owner mode on the fly. The main difference is that owner mode doesn’t allow you to play as any particular girl, so you can only really sit and watch everyone else vacationing, while managing their happiness with gifts and trying to get the girls to try on skimpier swimsuits. There’s not a whole lot to it to be honest, and it’s about as dull and tedious as the dating sim elements from the previous games. About the only thing it adds to the formula is that the girls are now doting on you, the player, instead of having fun interacting with the other girls the whole time, but that opens up some issues…
Envelope Pushing – Look, by this point in the franchise, Dead or Alive is no stranger to racy content. Frankly, as much as I may roll my eyes at some of this stuff, none of it has been truly objectionable up to this point (other than the sexualization of minors in the first few entries, because Japan). DOAX3 has about as much sexuality as you’d expect, but it pushes the boundaries of taste moreso than any other game in the franchise thus far, to the point where even I have to admit that it gets downright creepy:
Sure, all the girls are officially over eighteen now, hooray. However, this is also the proper debut of Marie Rose, who initially appears to buck DOA design trends by having a very slight figure. However, this seems less of a character diversity decision, and more that she’s clearly been designed to appeal to lolita fetishists. There’s also her foil, Honoka, who is also designed to look like a schoolgirl, while also having the biggest knockers in the entire franchise, and the contrast between the two characters is clearly intentional.
In their efforts to play up the dev’s lascivious fantasies, the game can turn into a sexual harassment/assault simulator. If you give a girl a new swimsuit, she can choose to try it on in front of you if you agree to close your eyes. The game then gives you the option to peek, which causes the girl to freak out and cover herself up (there’s no nudity regardless, but it’s clearly about the voyeurism and humiliation fantasy). There’s no real incentive to do it… but, then again, there’s no in-game incentive not to do it (other than affecting their happiness), and the devs have clearly put it in there to be used. Same goes for the VR mode. Now, I do not have a PS VR, so I can’t verify this myself, but the VR mode allows you to poke and prod the girls and cause them to get audibly uncomfortable. However, no matter how far you go and how much they say “No!”, they’ll get over it and be back to doting on you soon enough. Team Ninja, I implore you: consent is fucking hot. There’s nothing hotter than an experienced woman who wants to ride your dick to oblivion because she’s obsessed with you. This game portrays its girls as a bunch of naïve, innocent angels who don’t realize how hot they are, and then allows you to take advantage of them. It makes everything feel way creepier than it needs to, all because it might appeal more to some degenerates.
More Games Industry Bullshit – To the surprise of no one, DOAX3 continues the games industry bullshit that really started in DOA5, only this time it’s more predatory. Sure, there’s less DLC overall here, but the way that DOAX3 goes about it is more objectionable. Swimsuits can be bought with real-money premium tickets. There’s a swimsuit shop with random suits which rotates items daily, so you’re pressured into buying what you want now, because you don’t know when it will be back. Oh, and missions often will require you to buy a particular swimsuit from the owner shop, which further pushes you to make a purchase now, because the suit may not be there if you wait to grind some in-game currency first. Several swimsuits are also premium-only and it can cost $10 Canadian or more to purchase a single one, which is egregious, even compared to DOA5.
Missing Characters – For the first time in an Xtreme game, there are female characters from the main cast missing from this game. These aren’t minor characters missing either: we’re talking Leifang, Tina, Christie, Lisa, and Mila. This is especially baffling for Tina and Christie, who are the most sexually-liberal characters in the franchise, and for Lisa, who was literally introduced in the original DOAXBV. Given that Marie Rose and Honoka take center stage in this game’s marketing, you can’t help but feel like more “important” DOA characters got bumped off the cast for either being too “old” (early-to-mid 20s for Tina and Christie? Not in my masturbation-fantasy, thank you very much!), or because racism (…c’mon, we all know that’s a big factor in why Lisa, the only black woman in the franchise, isn’t here. Even if you wanna say “well the game was released in Asia only and they don’t have black people there!”… that’s still racism, my dude, sorry to break it to you).
Culture War Bullshit – To the outrage of fans, DOAX3 was never released outside of Asian territories. An official explanation wasn’t really elaborated on, but there are a few prominent theories:
Amongst dumbasses, the narrative is that SJWs (which is what they called “woke” at the time) whined too much and caused Tecmo-Koei to prevent the game from being released worldwide. While there were some game journalists reporting on the game at the time, generally people just didn’t give a shit about Dead or Alive anymore by the time this game released. That, and the game was announced to be an Asia-only release before any theoretical outrage could happen anyway.
According to Team Ninja themselves, the reasoning seems to boil down to “western retailers would not stock the game“. That was a pretty claim dubious at the time (you’re telling me that they couldn’t do a digital-only release at least to get some more money…?), but I can kind of understand it. I can see a big retailer like Walmart refusing to carry the game… but that’s because Team Ninja have spent so much effort marketing the Xtreme games as porn that of course Walmart doesn’t want to deal with Karen getting mad that Little Timmy was exposed to big booba from the box art he saw at the store.
The truth of the matter, as far as I’m concerned? Dead or Alive Xtreme games have never sold particularly well in the west. Manufacturing and distributing all the discs required for an international release is not going to have the kind of return on investment that Tecmo-Koei need to justify an international release. It’s ultimately more sensible for them to release it in Asia, drum up some controversy, and then have interested gamers import it. I wouldn’t even be surprised if we found out that Tecmo-Koei had some sort of deal with PlayAsia to split on the added import fees.
No Innovation – When it comes down to it, this is still the exact same game we got on the original Xbox thirteen years earlier, just with a couple more features awkwardly bolted on. We’re still going on a fourteen day vacation with a morning/afternoon/evening/night activity cycle and doing the same activities that we did in the last game (less, actually, since marine race and water slide are still missing). The menus are basically identical. Art assets and animations have been reused wholesale. I complained about it at the time, but it still holds true: DOAX3 is the sort of game that would actually benefit from being open world and letting you actually explore a little bit instead of being on a strictly scheduled timeframe. But, of course, that would cost money to implement, and there’s no way Tecmo-Koei were going to greenlight that. So, instead, we basically just get more of the same, but in a prettier package.
For the most part, my original review of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 holds true today. However, when I wrote that review, I underestimated just how compelling the “relaxing” part of the game was. It was so easy to destress by firing the game up for a twenty-or-thirty minute fantasy vacation. As a result, a lot of the game’s most serious faults are mitigated, while its qualities are enhanced. That said, the game is still definitely very niche and not particularly good, but I don’t want that to come across like I think the game is irredeemable garbage. It’s fine to find some enjoyment in something that is imperfect.
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Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Dead or Alive 5. This was my first DOA game: having played all the Ninja Gaiden games on PS Vita, I decided to check out this game’s Vita port since Ryu Hayabusa was also in it. And thus, this whole journey and obsession with this franchise began… I recall enjoying it at the time, but it has been probably around eight years since I last played it.
First off, a bit of history is worth mentioning before we get into the Love/Hate properly. Dead or Alive 5 represents something of an identity crisis for Team Ninja. Long-time studio leader, Tomonobu Itagaki, left Team Ninja and the series’ Xbox exclusivity ended with the franchise in a shaky position. Dead or Alive needed to figure out its place in the gaming market and evolve if it was going to stay viable. Could they pull together and accomplish this? Read on to find out…
Dead or Alive 5 has a lot of different releases: the game originally released on PS3 and Xbox 360, and then they released Dead or Alive 5+ on PS Vita. Then there was an Ultimate version which was released on PS3 and Xbox 360, and finally Last Round, which released on PS4, Xbox One, and PC (although the PC port was actually based on the last-gen versions, so it doesn’t look quite as good). I had Last Round on PS4, although I apparently sold my copy at some point years ago. As a result, for this replay I used the PS Vita version, but between the PS4 version and the PC port (which I have tried out), I can say that they all play pretty similarly, with each re-release primarily adding more content.
Love
Story Mode – I’ve been pretty harsh on Dead or Alive games’ stories throughout this Love/Hate series, but that’s largely down to them being really dumb, or poorly told (or both). Dead or Alive 5 tries to modernize the series to match the sort of cinematic, western-led experiences we were getting in the late PS3/Xbox 360-era. The result is a story mode which dispenses with the “pick a fighter, play through a few matches with the occasional cutscene in-between, fight a boss, get a unique, character-specific ending when you’re done” structure and instead follows a more expansive, linear narrative that covers the entire cast by the end. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the old structure well enough, and Dead or Alive 5‘s narrative is still dumb, but I really like how this game presents its story and world. For the first time in the series’ history, we get to see how all these characters live, interact with each other, and the world that they inhabit. We get to see them interacting casually, like there’s this tight-knit community of Dead or Alive tournament fighters who stay in touch with each other and seek out new contenders to bring into the fold. The linear structure also helps the tournament to not feel completely superfluous: more than half of the narrative is dominated by the tournament, so we have some actual stakes and escalation and we excitedly wait and see who the winners and losers are. Then the last third of the narrative concerns the on-going DOATEC conspiracy narrative, providing a fitting conclusion for the game. I can see some people getting pissed off that they undid the climactic events of Dead or Alive 4 here, but I didn’t mind too much. I thoroughly enjoyed Dead or Alive 5‘s story campaign, it was nice to see a more cinematic take on these characters and this world and it helped me appreciate them all the more for it.
The Characters (New and Old!) – Springing off of the last point, the more fleshed out story mode means that we also get more layers to all of the characters than we have been able to get up to this point.
Starting with the existing characters, I want to give a special shout-out to Eliot. I didn’t really care about him in Dead or Alive 4, but here I found him very endearing. As one of the younger cast members, he is insecure about his abilities, eager to learn from others (including a fun pairing with Brad Wong), and constantly training to become the best. There’s also a rather cute scene where he is crushing hard on Christie (poor boy, she would annihilate you), but is too inexperienced to know what to do about it. It’s refreshing, because we rarely see anyone (other than Zack) acknowledge how hot the characters of these games are, so it gives him some humanizing in the process. Bayman also gets some much-needed characterization. He was always such a boring, generic strong-guy mercenary character in the previous games, but here we get to see him as a consummate professional, a soldier, and a leader who tries to keep his comrades safe. It’s not a massive leap, but it’s enough to at least make him more interesting.
Of the new characters, by far the best is Mila. She’s just great all-round: she’s an employee at a diner whose hobby is MMA, which causes her to catch the eye of the Dead or Alive fighter community. She’s a big fangirl for Bass Armstrong, and it’s very cute getting to see her freaking out about getting close to these characters she’s idolized for years now. She also just has a cool, down-to-earth design, and plays well to boot.
I also have to shout-out some pretty major guest and DLC characters for this game. We’ve got four characters from Virtua Fighter (Akira Yuki, Sarah Bryant, Jacky Bryant, and Pai Chan), some of whom actually make cameos in the story mode. DLC/re-releases would eventually bring in Ninja Gaiden characters Rachel and Momiji (who is a god-tier DOA waifu), as well as King of Fighters‘ Mai Shiranui, and even Naotora Ii from Samurai Warriors. Some other major characters were added via DLC, but I’m going to hold off on mentioning them further until the next couple games where they got their proper introductions…
New Art Style – The anime-like aesthetic from the first four games served them well and has helped those games still look pretty impressive today, but it was reaching its limits by the time of DOA4. A full visual overhaul was implemented for DOA5, adopting a more detailed and realistic art style, although it does maintain some more subtle stylization. All-in-all, I quite like the change, although the colours are a bit washed out (this was pretty typical of games of the era, and would get a lot more saturation in subsequent entries). It’s not going to have quite the same staying power as the earlier games’ style, but it was easily the best-looking 3D fighter of its era and still holds up today.
Mixed
More Overt Sexual Content – In the wake of Dead or Alive 4 and Xtreme 2, I think that Team Ninja had a sit-down where they were trying to figure out the future for the franchise. Xtreme 2 sold very poorly in the west, and there was clearly a sense that they needed to appeal more to western gamers with the new art style, full English voice acting, cinematic production values, etc. Hell, they literally made the tagline for this game “I’m a fighter”, as if to remind you that this game isn’t just about hot women in skimpy outfits. In spite of this, Team Ninja continued pushing the Xtreme aspects further into the mainline games:
The main example of this is that every fight ends with you being able to control the camera as you focus in on whatever parts of your fighter you want, for as long as you want, whether they’re in a victorious win condition, or an exhausted and vulnerable crumple on the ground… which, I shouldn’t need to clarify, is clearly intended to invoke some rather lascivious fantasies…
Whatever the original intent for DOA5 was, they would lean harder into the suggestive aspects as the game went on: not only did we get hundreds of swimsuits and various other lewd costumes, but they also introduced full-on gravure videos straight out of the Xtreme games.
One indication of how focused this game is on pushing sex over its predecessors is what I call “breast inflation”. For four games, Tina had the biggest rack, and it kind of legitimately made sense for her character: she’s the ideal, hot, wild, freedom-loving American girl and, as a professional wrestler, it actually made sense for her to have some of the more revealing outfits in the series. However, come DOA5, we got not one, but two characters with bigger boobs than her. One was Rachel from Ninja Gaiden, which you could argue was just Team Ninja following that character’s established look. However, brand new DLC character Honoka doesn’t really have an excuse: she’s a school girl with boobs so big that you could suffocate between them. She’s clearly intended to be fetish bait, something that Team Ninja would continue indulging going forward…
One big positive I’ll say for this game’s sexual content though: at least everyone in the cast is of-age now!
By the way, that’s not to say that any of this sexual/suggestive content is bad, per se. However, this was my first DOA game: I had no idea that, only a couple games earlier, the sexy stuff was all in the marketing and the games themselves were focused on the fighting. The Xtreme-ification of the mainline entries only accelerated the notion that these games were made for “gamer weirdos”, furthered the punch-line that this series was not to be taken seriously, and made it so that these elements could not be separated or toned down without provoking backlash. If Xtreme had never happened and the games didn’t push the envelope each time, I doubt that the series would have declined as badly as it did. It’s unfortunate that that’s the case, but that’s just the reality of marketing a game to the sexually-conservative western audience.
Hate
DLC Overload – Dead or Alive 5‘s DLC model really set the tone for the kind of bullshit which has infected the fighting game genre in the past couple generations. I get that it’s all cosmetic stuff, but it’s still scummy for several reasons:
First of all, the price of these sets is simply ludicrous. This game had seven season passes during its lifetime, each of which cost more than the entire game itself. For costumes! Just looking at Steam, where I know for a fact that some items have been removed, all DLC for this game currently totals up to a whopping $1,184.68 (Canadian)!!! That is, frankly, a ridiculous price to charge to get the “full” Dead or Alive 5 experience. Like… what experience can they possibly offer which is worth the price of fourteen full-priced AAA games!?
Secondly, it’s not exactly subtle that Team Ninja are monetizing the gooners in the audience. Most of the DLC packs are for swimsuits and other skimpy outfits, and there are also some DLCs for “private paradise” scenes (literally just the characters frolicking in the sand for like thirty seconds). It’s not an exaggeration to say that the horniness of the audience is being exploited here for a dirty buck (especially when the in-game unlockable outfits are far tamer in comparison to the stuff you have to pay for).
Thirdly, I feel like I really have to reiterate just how much DLC there is for this game, to the point where it’s straight-up confusing to navigate. The DOA wiki tells me that, just for Last Round, there were at least 952 costumes for sale across 43 costume bundle packs, some of which were included in the seven season passes, and some of which were not. I get that this was their way of monetizing the game and continuing to justify supporting the series, but it sets an awful precedent for the franchise: you’re producing a cosmetic cash shop with a fighting game stapled onto it, and every subsequent release needs to escalate this until the entire edifice implodes in on itself and the fighting game part becomes unviable to continue. Given how the series has advanced since DOA5, my fears at the time were well-founded…
Core Fighters Is a Scam – Oh and exacerbating all the DLC issues is the Core Fighters release of the game. In theory, it sounds like a good idea: release a free-to-play version of the game where you can just pay to get the parts you want. Of course, like every other “only pay for what you want!” service, it ends up being a massive scam where you pay significantly more for everything in the end. Everything that could be monetized here is, including freaking stage music. Tecmo-Koei seem to have been pleased with the results though, because Core Fighters is the only way to get Dead or Alive 5: Last Round digitally now (you have to buy a bundle to get all the “base game” content, but it doesn’t make navigating everything less of a headache, and the fact that it’s an extra step to pull it off clearly shows that they don’t intend for you to take this route).
Rig – Unfortunately, the other new character introduced in Dead or Alive 5 is Rig, who is one of the dullest characters imaginable. He very clearly is intended to “appeal to western audiences”, which is probably why his face looks identical to Jake Mueller from Resident Evil 6. He’s got a mysterious past, his own unique fighting style he developed, and he is literally named after the oil rig he works at and has spent his entire life on. Oh, and for some reason, he ends up being the big bad of the game with zero warning. Wow, so much information for me to latch onto. Is it any wonder that the female characters are the most popular in these games when the male characters get this much to work with?
Dead or Alive 5 is a pretty good time. I love the change in production values and how it makes this world and characters so much more believable. However, the ways in which it transformed the series into a DLC-factory sucked at the time of release, and have proven to be even worse than we imagined in hindsight. It’s unfortunate that that leaves a stain on this game’s legacy, because it’s otherwise a pretty great reimagining of the series’ formula.
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I hate ads. You hate ads. In order to stop polluting my site with obtrusive and annoying ads, I’ve elected to turn them off on IC2S. That said, writing still takes time and effort. If you enjoyed what you read here today and want to give a token of appreciation, I’ve set up a tip jar. Feel free to donate if you feel compelled to and I hope you enjoyed the article! 🙂
