Dead or Alive 5 (DOA5) was first released on September 25th, 2012 for PS3 and Xbox 360. It arrived on the Vita the following March as DOA5 Plus, with inclusion of Touch Play and more Training options. DOA5 Ultimate came out a year after the original, which our own Will Johnson reviewed favorably. Ultimate expanded upon Plus with additional stages, as well as fighters Rachel and Momiji from the Ninja Gaiden universe, Leon and Ein from DOA2, and Jacky Bryant from Virtua Fighter. It also added tag multiplayer online battles. This February, DOA5 Last Round (DOA5LR) was released, bringing the game to PS4 and Xbox One for the first time. Two new characters, generic Japanese schoolgirl Honoka and a cyborg version of series boss Raidou, are added as playable characters.
I have not played a Dead or Alive game since DOA4, which was, if memory serves, a launch title for the Xbox 360. I had previously played through the other DOA games on platforms such as the PlayStation, Saturn, and Xbox. As anyone who has played the DOA games will tell you, they’re much more akin to a Virtua Fighter than a Street Fighter. Characters don’t have fireballs and teleportation special moves, DOA has always been more realistic than that. You also won’t see any high-flying juggling combos like a Marvel Vs Capcom has, although stringing together combos is key in DOA like any other fighter. DOA strikes a pleasing balance between being rooted in real martial arts styles yet still mixing in enough fantasy elements to keep it fast paced and enjoyable. The series doesn’t take itself too seriously, with plenty of tongue in cheek humor as well as goofy costumes and hairstyles available. Some of these costumes you can unlock — there are over 400 all told — but you might be floored as I was to see the price of the two costume pack DLCs that are available for purchase. These include the Fun Theme Set priced at a staggering $54.99 and a Halloween Debut Costume Set for $64.99 — or $120 for both. It seems crazy to me that anyone would purchase those. Anyway, seeing Jaan Lee in a dragon mascot costume or Leon (I think?) in a Santa outfit was smirk-worthy. You also have the infamous female characters who usually wear provocative clothing and their breasts are large and very bouncy, always a staple of the series, for better or worse. There’s even an option to toggle “Natural” or “DOA” breasts; it’s crass, and I’m not really supportive of all that, but it is what it is, I guess.
Having spent several hours with DOA5LR now on my PC, these core design elements have translated over very well. The fighting system, which is based on a triangular model that sees strikes beating throws, throws beating holds, and holds beating strikes, feels familiar and refined. Critical Bursts and Power Blows are vital aspects of the game as well that you might not even really notice or learn about until you decide to take your skills to the next level. Indeed, DOA5LR is very accessible to newcomers to not only the series, but fighting in general. You don’t have to know about Critical Burst and the like to be successful against the AI on the difficulties, but once online play is enabled (more on that soon!), you can bet the best of the best will be well versed in those mechanics.
Moving on, when you go to launch the game from Steam, a small window pops up asking if you want to go to Config or Play. Under Config, you can change up a few graphical options like toggling full screen and windowed mode, and changing your resolution. Resolution support is somewhat limited. You can actually run this is 4K, 3840×2160, which I don’t have the display to support that, but the next step down from that is 1920×1080, there’s nothing in between. I was hoping for some 2560×1080 or 1440 support, but nada. You can toggle Shadows to be either On or Off, and Shadow Resolution can be changed to be 1024×1024, 2048×2048, or 4096×4096. From what I have read, the shadows on this PC port are equivalent to the PS4 version, but the particle effects are comparable to the PS3 version, not the PS4/X1 release. That’s a disappointment given that this version of DOA5LR should have essentially been the end all, be all. Anyway, the last configurable option is Anti-Aliasing support, which can be Off, FXAA, 2x SSAA, or 4x SSAA. Given my resolution issue (I need 2560×1080 to run full screen), I ended up running this Windowed in 1920×1080 with Shadow set to On at 4096×4096 and 4x SSAA with no technical issues other than clipping during some fights. This was on a i7-4790k with a GTX970 and 16GB.
Clipping is generally not an issue but the trying to grab an opponent for a throw can lead to some pretty egregious cases in which your character reaches through the opponent and no collision is detected. I also lost of match once with Bass that came down to ‘next hit wins.’ I did Bass’ standard high boot kick, and it went right through Rig’s face, my knee was literally in his mouth with the rest of my leg protruding out from the back of his skull, but no hit was registered and instead he was unphased, and proceeded to land a quick punch and won the match. For a game that was already delayed six weeks and has been patched twice in the last three days, it’s not confidence inspiring to see things like that happen.
The Soft Engine that was used in the PS4/X1 version is also strangely absent in the PC release. The Soft Engine was used to make skin look and animate more naturally. It also makes the costumes show damage during the course of a fight, which is a really cool visual effect; seeing that removed here is puzzling and a letdown. Astute players might also notice (or you know, just read about ahead of time) that the PC version does not have The Crimson nor The Danger Zone stages included — why is that? Steam-specific features that you might expect but are not to be found (at least right now, maybe with another patch) are cloud saves, Trading Cards, and Achievements. If Achievements ever do get added, I hope they do not include one for getting every possible Title — there are 833 of these!
But the biggest missing component right now is online play. You can play with up to three other friends in local tag versus, but multiplayer is not an option. It’s apparently due out in around three months, which is a long time for such a core component to a fighting game. Players might have already moved on by then, or hopefully a whole new batch of players are likely to take interest in DOA5LR once online play is enabled. It’s actually listed a mode in the main menu, but it has a line through it, so it does truly seem to be in the works, it just didn’t make it at launch. Hopefully it will be fully functional at launch and not require patches, but you never really know. Until the patch becomes available, the game will list at $35.99 instead of $39.99, although a Steam sale between now and then might take it further.
Although online player is missing, the appreciably lengthy story mode (lengthy for a fighting game at least) is intact. It’s a great way to sample a lot of the roster for a few matches; some characters might surprise you in how much you like them, others might just confirm why you never use them in the first place, but it all takes place in the context of telling the story of DOATEC and its new leader, Helena, starting up the fifth DOA tournament. Many cutscenes, or movies, are shown in between battles, which can be skipped or watched again from the main menu. Honestly, the story and its characters are not that captivating, although I’m not sure any fighting game has made a really engrossing story anyway. I appreciate Team Ninja’s efforts here, but for me the public spectacle that is the DOA tournament as it’s presented in-game and the steady stream of antics and goofy nature of the characters does more to make it easy to dismiss than to immerse yourself in. As out of this world (quite literally) as they can be, the Mortal Kombat storylines and character bios are generally fairly interesting as far as “fighting game” stories go, but DOA5LR’s story wasn’t quite up to that level.
So to play DOA5LR, I used a wired Xbox 360 controller, although the Xbox One gamepad is also supported. Strangely, controller vibration is not supported. You can choose between a few controller profiles to arrange your button layout, and at the start of every versus match you have to confirm if you want sidestep to be done with an awkward button combo or by simply tapping up, up or down, down twice (I always chose this as I use the d-pad instead of the analog stick in DOA). An option to speed up match setup would have been great. Every time you go to start a versus match, let’s say, you have to go into Versus, select your character, maybe change your costume, confirm your sidestep control, pick your opponent, their costume, then pick a stage, confirm your controller type, etc., it’s like a dozen or more taps of ‘A’ to get the fight going. That does not include going into the other options like adjusting Com Level (eight different difficulty settings, which kinda seems like too much), Max Health, Time Limit, and Number of Rounds. Fortunately, load times are next to nothing but in the interest of just speeding up play even further, it would be ideal if you did not have to step through these settings every time. On a similar rant, being able to do a quick restart during Story or Arcade play would be nice; you can do this in Training, but say you start off a match poorly or just want to restart a match for whatever reason, there’s not a quick way to do this. There are also several wasted seconds in between rounds or continues whereby you have to wait for the brief in-game scenes to play before getting back to a menu. Minor gripes to be sure, but if these were something that could be sped up, I feel like it would be more efficient.
Being an efficient fighting machine is what DOA mastery is all about, and to that end I’m impressed with the Training mode that has several categories to take you from beginner towards mastery. You can learn the mechanics from the most basic to the most detailed. You can take on the Combo Challenges which teach you the more intricate combos the game offers, many of which I struggle mightily to pull off. Command Training includes forty-two lessons, too. Also during any match, you can toggle on screen info, the most detailed of which takes up the lower third of the screen and provides you with a near overwhelming amount of realtime statistics. Raidou perhaps said it best:
With that, let’s head to the summary…