Dead or alive 2 stands as a testament to my experience with the Dreamcast. I didn't have a lot of games but I can honestly see why the 14 year old me loved this one so much. It's easy to pick up and feel like an expert, the gameplay is fast and frantic, it felt very Japanese (no English V/O), and the character design… well… I was a teenage boy at the time…
DOA 2 to this day is a fun and fluid fighter. The system is a very simple punch/kick/counter which I enjoy greatly. I haven't played a Dead or Alive games since this, which is surprising considering how much I liked it. DOA 2 Hardcore came out on the PS2 and I wouldn't mind picking it up now, but back then I couldn't justify $50 for a game I already had. Then there was the sad story that DOA 3 was an xbox exclusive…
The fighters are all varied and each technique has a slight learning curve. I tend toward the faster, lighter characters like Kasumi. One thing I liked as a kid was that the difficulty is mild for a fighter. I managed to beat the single player "campaign" in about 10 minutes, and that includes the fairly difficult final boss who will block and/or counter every move you throw at him. I believe my fastest run through was somewhere around 5 minutes. It's a 3D fighter so you have full movement and this game relished in that freedom. The counter system is absolutely fantastic and even a noob like me was able to time my blocks to quickly snag an opponents leg and lay down a counter.
The "story" in DOA 2 is laughable at best. Some of this can probably be blamed on bad translations for the subtitles. There are sometimes brief cutscenes before a fight in which the two combatants interact, say something non-sensical, then fight. Relationships are established in just a few sentences without any prerequisites to hilarious results. For instance, a girl is fighting a girl:
Girl A (Player): "Gasp! Girl B!"
Girl B: "you were always better than me"
Girl A: "no!"
Girl B: "Not Anymore!"
Fight Ensues
Or this gem
Girl A (Player): "Boy A!"
Boy A: "Do I know you?"
Girl A: "Aren't you my Brother?"
Boy A: shrugs
Fight Ensues
These scraps of story elements just don't suffice. Granted, this is how fighting games tend to be, I've played some that still manage to squeeze in some story. Even "Evil Zone" had better dialogue then DOA 2… that's just sad. Luckily the gameplay of DOA2 is fun enough to save it and make it a wholly worth while title to invest some time in.
"Profoundly Immoral Zone" would have worked too
Dead or Alive 2 will always have a special place in my because it is one of the few fighters I actually invested some time into. I don't seem to get into fighter games very often and the genre is somewhat foreign to me (*ahem* mostly because I suck). I tend to agree with Yahtzee in his opinion that its pretty mind numbing to know you would have to practice a game day in and day out for years on end learning every characters subtle nuances just to be able to not get beat by a person banging the controller against their forehead.
My friend pointed out that the same four people have consistently been the world champions of games like Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter and so on, so obviously Yahtzee was wrong in his opinion of fighting games. My friend both proves and disproves Yahtzee's point. Yes you can be good enough to beat anyone, but you have to put in such an ungodly amount of time playing as every character learning every move to get that good.
The video above is a prime example of Pwning at a fighting game. The player using Ken, Daigo (also known as the beast) is able to press back at precisely the right time on each impact to perform a perfect block. It's incredible to behold. Needing to obtaining this level of skill isn't a flaw in how fighting games are made, but it is their plight. People just aren't that hardcore (read: Obsessive Compulsive), that's why only 4 people are consistently world champions.
I think it's the idea of the genre that appeals to me. Fighting games are very much like a real fight. It's not just about what you do, but what your opponent does. Unfortunately I've never found the time or patience to invest in a good fighting game and I highly doubt I ever will. Plus, I have been burned by the genre before, I'm looking at you Super Smash Brothers Brawl. That said, I still love fighters and I will keep playing them. I won't ever be as good as Daigo, but I still think it's a fun genre and I only harp on it out of love. I suppose I need to make a Mid Years resolution to just play fighting games more. I plan on getting Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 when that comes out, and BlazBlu: Continuum Shift is on my wishlist. I won't spend hours and hours mastering my technique, but a little friendly competition every now and then is nice, perhaps determining who does the dishes that night.
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