Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
The history of the Dead or Alive series has been a fascinating one to see unfold in real-time. The original arcade hit was a rough draft of a concept – a 3D fighting game akin to Virtua Fighter, but with stage hazards and busty physics being standout features. It had a solid foundation, but was finer-tuned on consoles and yet still felt incomplete. Dead or Alive 2 joined Tekken 2 and Virtua Fighter 2 as being incredible leaps forward for polygonal fighting game franchises – but may be the best-aged of the bunch overall. DOA 2 was very much a game that I didn’t enjoy to its fullest in real-time, to the point where I got it on the Dreamcast and it didn’t click with me despite loving 3D fighters and it having a lot of gameplay substance.
In hindsight, I think I was focusing too much on what it wasn’t when compared to Virtua Fighter 3 and Tekken 3 at the time – and those were very different kinds of experiences within the same genre. VF 3, like DOA 2, featured sloped stages and changed up the environments a ton compared to what was seen before and VF 3 was a watershed moment for arcade graphics. Tekken 3, especially on console, was one of the most densely-packed discs on the market with so much content to enjoy from the fighting side, secondary content like Tekken Ball bringing volleyball into play or Tekken Force offering up a genuinely great beat-em-up game that could have been sold as its own game. As time would show with Tekken Bowl being DLC for Tekken 7 after being a huge hit in Tekken Tag Tournament, it most definitely would be a paid mode if fleshed out in Tekken 8.
Looking at the game through 2024 eyes, I see DOA 2 as an incredible experience that I overlooked quite a bit in real-time by focusing on what it wasn’t instead of focusing on what it was. Playing it back now, it’s remarkable just how well the core gameplay has aged and how approachable the story mode is compared to what’s out there now in Street Fighter and Tekken games. DOA 2 is most-similar to SF IV-VI with some story integration in the form of in-engine cutscenes to tell a basic story across the series of battles. Tina, pro wrestler Bass' daughter, is out to show her independence while Bass is always fighting to keep her under his thumb more than she wants. It’s not deep, but it’s an easy story to tell without voiceover work in English and using English subtitles over Japanese dialogue.
Lightning Crashing and Body-Smashing
One big part of DOA 2’s design that I appreciate now more than ever is how intuitive its 8-way character movement is. With either the d-pad or the left stick, you can move in eight directions around the fighting area and deal damage sending your foe either into walls, explosions, through glass, down a cliff off a bridge putting you next to a chipper squirrel, or even down a cliff and into a giant puddle with elephants roaming. The attempt at making the game’s world feel lived-in is higher here than in a lot of games out on the market then and even a lot of ones today too. Every stage has a larger area around it to add to that illusion and add to the feeling that you’re taking part in real-world locations.
Beauty of the World
Locales like the rooftop cityscape shine as fighting locations thanks to having to change your strategy up a bit depending on both your character size and your rival’s size due to the sloped nature of the area. If you’re on the high ground, you can’t rely on as many high attacks to deal out damage, but your opponent on the lower ground can’t throw you very well either. The bridge areas are similar, but plays out a lot like a pro wrestling scaffold match since you can’t move in every direction and have to worry about the sudden fall at the edge of the bridge.
Water Under the Bridge
Most stages have a multi-layer component to them with either drops or things like damage-inducing walls, so skillful play and avoiding stage hazards remain a key skill in every area. Some stages make better use of the hazards than others – with areas like the lab offering a lot of places to trap foes, while the snow-capped mountain stage offers perhaps the most visually-impressive area to fight in and send folks into since you can find in snow and it moves a lot in real-time. It’s also remarkable to send people right onto an ice floor and have reflections abound throughout all of the environment. The flaming opera house is another highlight as it crumbles around you during the fight and has debris falling all around the background.
Suplex City
Visually, character movement stands out with each person on the roster and the environments are incredible to look at over twenty years later. The underwater enclosure environment evokes a bit of an MMA cage if it was underwater along with the YAMMA fight pit surface. The dojo area with real-time lightning crashing helps add a sense of dread throughout it.
The flaming opera house is another highlight as it crumbles around you during the fight and has debris falling all around the background.
The cityscape area sends people off of the roof into a kanji-covered neon sign that falls to the street you then fight on and all of it looks fantastic. It’s not as pretty as what’s out there now, but the visual language in everything fits together and there’s nothing that visually clashes. Character models perfectly fit into the world, with flowing outfits looking natural and not clipping through anything with real-time engine usage allowing things like outfits to change during cutscenes in ways that can be rare even today. DOA 2 remains a stunning game thanks to the original Xbox’s Ultimate version enabling everything to play smoother at higher resolutions than ever before.
Audio-wise, the soundtrack has never hit as hard as the Tekken or VF games when it came to being memorable in-game, but DOA 2 does offer solid songs during its battles and some songs like “You Are Under My Control” are absolute bangers. I could see that one in a Tokyo Dome pro wrestling entrance and the soundtrack as a whole holds up better on its own as a playlist than it does in the game itself. In-game, you have a lot of fighting sound effects drowning things out a bit alongside voice work in the wall of sound, so some music can get lost in the shuffle more than it should. The smacks of kicks, punches and throws are great – and throws especially result in a nice woosh through the air while colliding with the environment sounds so violent. It’s a wonderful feeling to send people crashing into and through stuff and the sound design plays a key part in that.
Dead or Alive 2 benefits a lot from being designed so well in real-time because it offers a lot of value for the money. It has a lot of characters, a few modes to enjoy including tag and survival, and a ton of unlockables to encourage replaying through the quick story/arcade mode. It has been helped as well by being backwards compatible for the 360 before and then finally for the Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles. One can buy it on its own or with the DOA Ultimate version of the first game and having full HD and 4K playback available for it with internal upscaling is an outstanding value on modern hardware.
