Instead the arcade, survival and tag match modes offer a number of courses, each with their own difficulty level, but of course the game forces you through the laughably easy stages in order to unlock the “hard” ones. Worst of all, with the exception of Free Play you’ll find no difficulty setting in the options. The additional playing modes are the usual deal, but each brings new annoying issues. The storytelling is more elaborate than ever. Cheap counter abuse is as present as ever, together with the extreme disadvantage when being bounced against a wall. No experiments have been made with the fighting engine, which is closest to Dead or Alive 3, ditching the stiff controls from Dead or Alive 4 and the arbitrary input exception for mid-kick counters. A teaser had hinted at the possible inclusion of Samus Aran as a fighter as well, but she’s not in the game at all. As a nod to Other M, there’s also a Metroid stage.

Backdrops that go crazy with many animated or breakable objects, like the aquarium, the safari or the seaside market, are generally avoided, though. A couple of them are new, but most are carried over from previous games. There’s also a rather high number of stages. Even the encounter with Genra is turned into a normal fight and much less annoying in consequence. While the game contains only one (hidden) new character with ninja-boss Shiden, it features the biggest roster in the series yet, as every character from the series (with the understandable exception of the Halo guest character) is playable, including the bosses. That said, after taking the focus off from her, the third and fourth chapters are actually tolerable. You’d assume the opposite after Tomonobu “she’s my daughter” Itagaki took his leave, but apparently the new Team Ninja desired to prove once more that they’re still really bad at storytelling without him (see Metroid: Other M). Especially the first two chapters are mostly concerned with turning Kasumi into an even more of a Mary Sue than before. The story should be either called fleshed out or just drawn out, though. After all, the story ark of the big feud between the Mugen-Tenshin ninja clan and DOATEC came to an end after the fourth tournament, although you are not to blame if you didn’t notice it.ĭimensions sets out to fill all the gaping holes in the series’ formerly extremely thin narration by leading players through a “Chronicle” mode, which covers all four tournaments, with extensive cutscenes and fixed character selections for each episode. Dead or Alive Dimensions is not an entirely new episode, but rather a retelling of the story so far. After a long vacation on Zack Island, the Dead or Alive series finally went back to fighting games in 2011.

Dead or alive 3ds