Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 3 sees the symbolic union of two of the internet’s most hated figureheads: Bill Gates and Team Ninja’s outspoken Tomonobu Itagaki. Shit, if only they’d gotten Hideaki Anno and George Lucas involved at some point as well - we’d be on our fourth or fifth internet by now.

But seeing as they didn’t, we’ll instead have to make do with what we have - that is, a gorgeous, beautifully-choreographed and often frustratingly limited fighter that tends to be unfairly criticised in some areas and forgiven too easily for others.

As a console showcase it is superlative. The game features two excellent introductory sequences, a CG one, that looks great but for some reason only features half the characters, and a real-time one, which is a truly fantastic look at just what you can do with an XBox. To the accompaniment of Aerosmith’s “NINE LIVES”, the characters fight, dodge, duck and weave as the camera spins and arcs - they fall out of windows and off of cliffs - it really gives a good long look at the (and really no other word describes it) fantastic DOA3 graphics engine.

In fact if you leave the game running - you get fights, you get intros, you get level flythroughs, all with the DOA3 logo stamped at the bottom left - it’s clear that this was a game designed to run on shop window displays and sell XBoxes by the tonne (that’s three then, hoho etc.) It is definitely a game made with hype and display value firmly in mind. Does that make it a bad game in itself?

Well…. no. However when you get over the amazing bits, the rest of the game isn’t quite such a marvel. To wit, it’s not so much a step up from DOA2 as a mincing stumble over a slight rise in the carpet.

Now we’re fighting game players and that sort of thing is par for the course. One of the things that people who don’t play fighters never seem to grasp is the concept of refining and improving a game through updates and versions, and how they come together to make something wonderful. The thing is, this isn’t DOA2: Turbo, or 99: Evolution, or even Gold. It’s the third individual entry in the series, but it doesn’t really feel like it.

There have been changes. Free walk is, well, free-er (but still not up to Soul Calibur 2 levels) - walls and wall combos play a far, far bigger part in the game - and the levels are designed with this in mind, and there are off-the-ground throws and air throws, plus the usual character move changes.

But that’s it, really. It has the same modes and options and setup, and while the characters, their stories, endings and moves may be changed to some extent - it’s not a huge leap in any direction.

Except visually.

Of course it looks gorgeous - incredibly smooth, incredibly detailed. The characters look amazing; musculature, fingers, eyes and mouths all modelled expertly. Detail and texturing on materials are extremely high-quality, and the characters themselves are solid and animate perfectly. The combat itself looks absolutely fantastic. The motion capture is phenomenal, as is the segueing of moves and the feeling of solidity (phwoarrr), impact and tactility. Only the counter-holds cause the occasional ‘jump’ in positioning. It’s two years old now, but DOA3 still has no peer in the visual details/motion department.

The female characters still all have that expressionless, doll-like appearance, which the more I think about it, the more I think is done on purpose, which worries me greatly.

The levels as I mentioned earlier are absolutely fabulous constructions, huge, intricate, with a wonderful eye for design, scale and lighting: catching the sunset on the beach level, breaking the icicles in the ice cave level - it’s all so well done.

The breakable stages from DOA2 return even more excessive than before. My favourites are the mountaintop - a small, roughly circular arena atop a thin, high mountain peak, which upon knocking a character off of will see the other character following them down, leaping hundreds of feet through the clouds (!) to another circular mountaintop below. It really is a hysterically impressive moment, one I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing. You can actually die from stage knockoffs this time round, which makes for some fun replays.

Another goodie is DOATEC HQ. A circular, donut-shaped stage set in a futuristic tower block, with glass windows on both the outside and inside rings. Kicking the other character outside sees them crashing (dramatically) through the glass, falling, smashing through a series of neon street signs, and eventually crumpling to the floor in a Chinese-themed back street. Absolutely fantastic

On the other hand, if you fall through the inner glass wall, you fall down a vertical shaft, crash through a glass ceiling and land in a decidedly creepy, green-tinted laboratory, the walls lined with big glass tubes, each one containing a wired-to-machinery clone of Kasumi (remember the infamous Kasumi goo scene from the DOA2 intro?) As if that wasn’t freaky enough, if you or the other character get kicked into one of the tubes, the clone inside will raise her arms up. Brrr.

There are other neat moments too. In fact the area that DOA3 really, truly excels in is that of the ‘neat moment’. The fight choreography, the direction, the special effects, the speed, the power that is given off in the combat, cut scenes, stage knock-offs … it’s absolutely fantastic.

There’s something wonderful trying to get out of DOA3 - a film, an anime or an action game, something like that. It’s not a fighting game though, sadly. I appreciate what they’re trying to do - attempting to marry depth and playability with the sensation of near-total immersion in martial arts/fantasy film .. but the two can’t really co-exist, and at some point something has to give.

The biggest problem I have with the game is the way the ‘counter’ button has shaped the moves lists. Now this holds true for the previous game as well, but it’s only in this one, after putting in a respectable amount of hours that it really started to bother me.

Since the dawn of man all 3D fighting game characters have a couple of high/low sequences, but because so many strikes in DOA3 can be reversed, the game creators have had to increase the amount of mix-ups, as a counter to the er … countering. And this game has so many that often most of the character moves lists are just variations on string sequences, to the detriment of other, more possibly interesting moves and attack concepts. And personally I’m just not really interested in learning the audio-visual difference that separate a P,P,P,P,K from a P,P,P,D+P,K five or six different times for every single character. There’s just too much guessing, too much randomness for me this time - and it takes some of the fun and spontaneity out of the game.

Scoring a successful counter and breaking through a blocking opponent’s defences are fun, for a while, but as I got better I found less and less variation and more and more restrictions - the glass ceiling in the DOATEC HQ isn’t the only one this game contains.

On the plus side, there have been some engine improvements: the enhanced free walk does make things feel a bit more “three-dee” - going back to DOA2, where you have to hold the ‘Free’ button any time you want to free walk is annoying, and it looks a lot more natural this time around as well - most characters have a ’sidestep’ move too, things overall are a lot smoother, and with less buttons needed, more instinctive and free-flowing as well. It’s interesting to note how jumping has been all but removed from the game entirely. Characters can hop forward by tapping U/F… and that’s it. No straight-up jumps. No up/back jumps, at all. To tell the truth I didn’t miss them at all. It’s been almost ten years since the cast of the original Virtua Fighter took one giant, slow motion leap for mankind, and finally, thank Tengu, game designers are cottoning on to the fact that nobody ever uses them.

As well as an improved feel to the game engine, there are the traditional new characters to play around with. This time we have two female, a male and a boss. First of the lovely ladies is Christie, the black and white jumpsuit-clad British assassin, who proves once and for all that white hair is the premiere look for fighting game females. Alongside her we are introduced to Hitomi; ickle, precious, oozing determination - the tough, try-hard cutie who really puts the ’spunk’ in ’spunky young girl’.

On the XY chromosome side of things we have Brad Wong. I’m slightly less enthusiastic about him than I was about the girlies, because he’s a ‘drunk’ character. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate drunk characters in fighters? They’re rubbish.

Almost as rubbish as DOA bosses. While I admire the fact that Team Ninja have managed to avoid the composite character curse most games of this type usually resort to, what they’ve put in it’s place is probably even more bizarre and unpalatable.

While Story Mode end boss OMEGA looks nice, with his shiny flame-reflecting armour and double-lightsaber, the way he has actually been implemented simply boggles the mind.

For the last battle, the game adopts a ‘behind character’ perspective - you start off a distance from him and have to run ‘towards’ him, into the screen. The viewpoint may have changed but the controls remain the same, so left is now up, right is now down and left and right are left and right. And for the life of me I just can’t get used to it. Add to this his
offensive abilities - a stream of fire (has to be ducked); four energy projectiles (have to be walked around); a shockwave (blocked/jumped); a couple of standard attacks; the fact knocking him over causes a shockwave that knocks you over, plus the now-traditional mindwarp blurry screen … it’s a bit of a mess, unfortunately.

Not impossible, not all that tough if you keep your wits and react fast enough … but it’s just like the graphics teams and coders all just went “BLLLEEEEAAAAAGGGGH” late one night and this is the result.

Last boss aside, story mode is probably one of the games’ highlights. Like it was in DOA2, you select your character and fight through a series of single-round encounters, with a little dialogue/sequence after every two or three and then the boss. It adds depth to the characters, makes things interesting and some of them are just lovely.

Beating the end boss in story mode will give your characters ending, lovingly rendered in extremely high-quality CG. The endings vary wildly in tone and content. Kasumi’s is just so gorgeous. I admit that I am in love with her and so am biased, but actually getting to see her in shinobi mode; deflecting shuriken, doing the ‘Running Really Really Fast’ thing, tossing fireballs and avoiding ninja while a sad song plays in the background is just so amazing.

Zack’s ending sees him winning big in Vegas, a scenario that those of you out there with one big, muscled arm and one scrawny little arm will recognise as the basis for the proceedings of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Indeed, it plays as a kind of remixed version of the beginning of the DOAX intro.

Ayane’s is tremendously well-done, almost moving; Helena’s disappointingly ditches the ‘assassin/Douglas’ plot of previous cutscenes in favour of her swimming with Dolphins, and Christies’ is really just soft porn.

There’s a pretty great credits sequence in there too (another Aerosmith song!) although you have to beat the game with every character (even the men) before you can see it.

Tag mode is another highlight, and a chance to see some of those nifty tag stages from the Playstation2 DOA2 drawn properly. It’s fast and fun … but it’s not really anything new - an unfortunately common motif in this game.

Take the music; it’s typically DOA-ish - that mix of jazzy electronica and pop, and that mix of mostly average tunes with a couple of standout decent ones. This time I am particularly loving Hitomi’s dreamy 80’s vocal haze, and even more so, Helena’s super-confrontational violin piece that just screams FIGHT! NOW! ETC! Aerosmith’s contributions are fantastic as well. You wouldn’t think they’d work, but they do!

The menu music really has to go though. Terrible, terrible shit.

But while the music is “DOA-ish” to the extreme, other things that we’ve all come to expect from the series are in disturbingly short supply.

Take the lack of costumes. Next to huge watermelon tits, the next thing DOA is famous for is the variety of different clothes the characters can obtain. I remember with great fondness the huge array of outfits you could get in the first game - especially in the PSX and Saturn ports. Swimsuits, bunny outfits, dungarees, waitress outfits, pink … things … it was so great. Now think of the sort of goodies you could create with today’s technology. Have they done just that?

No.

The selection of costumes is poor at best. DOA2 had a lot more. DOA1 had ten times as many. Three or four per character simply does not cut it. Kasumi has her two normal outfits and then THREE school uniforms, and that’s it! Tina has the usual two and a cowgirl/thong getup … but that’s all. In general the imagination, humour and sheer amount of EXPOSED FLESH is well, well down on the last game. It’s disgraceful. The guys have as many as they’ve always done, but nobody cares about those, other than Teletubby Zack.

What’s worse is the way you unlock them. You actually have to work this time! No longer a case of merely beating the game over and over, now you have to complete some really quite tough missions to get your lithe form into some of these fashionable garments. Getting 20 wins in survival, beating tag mode with a total throw/hold/strike accuracy ratio of more than 70% … picking up rare items in survival more (i.e a probability of 11/512) … there are quite a few I haven’t got yet, and am not sure I ever will.

Even more bizarre and offensive - especially considering DOA’s most famous asset is the female players’ tied zeppelin races - DOA3 has made the unusual (and quite saddening) move of further decreasing the women’s breast sizes as well as the amount of bounce present. It’s almost … respectable now - Tina can probably see her feet. It’s disgusting and I won’t stand for it.

On a slightly more serious note, there’s the odd saga of the regional version differences. The US version was released, and then later on a ‘Booster disk’ was released, which added a couple of further costumes. In the PAL version these extra costumes are there anyway, but as well as that there are around 50 new moves, exclusive only to the European version. What in god’s name prompted them to do it I have no idea, but I guess we should be thankful there are no international DOA3 tournaments.

Dead or Alive 3’s tagline should really be ‘just not enough’. Because there isn’t. Not enough secrets, not enough outfits. Not enough characters, not enough extras. Not enough gameplay variation, not enough of a change from the last game.

What you actually end up with is a game that anyone picking it up for the stereotypical reasons - tonnes of costumes, secrets and huge bouncing bosoms - will come away from distinctly disappointed. I don’t know whether it’s Microsoft’s glaring, censorial eye, or an attempt by Team Ninja to be a bit more ‘respectable’ - but it is a letdown, especially as one who remembers Tina’s policewoman costume in the first game.

Now I’ve mentioned once or twice, this game is not a huge development over the second one. It is however DOA2 redone to perfection, or, as perfect as this form of fighter could possibly be. All the faults and annoyances I find the second game has are fixed, or changed, and wrapped in a gorgeous looking giant yellow bow.

As a big fan of the series in general, and a fighting game player well versed in the hilarity of the “super turbo hyper EX plus second impact” - I accept DOA3 for what it is, and although it has a lot of problems and a good deal of unfulfilled promise - it’s still a game I’m glad I’ve bought, played and even written about, and I still think anyone out there in the same position should do the same.

However I do feel that if Dead or Alive 4 continues this trend, if all it has to offer is a couple of new characters, some new levels, and “a bit of a change to the free walk system” - then I think a lot of people will be mad. I know I’ll be mad, and not even the huge-breasted millionaire Jar-Jar Ikari will change my mind.

• Developer: Team Ninja
• Publisher: Tecmo
• Score: 84%