Game #948: Dead or Alive 5 - Last Round

  This is me putting my money were my mouth is.

 Last year I wrapped up my opinion on DOA 6 by wondering why I'd want to play 6 when I could just as easily get Dead or Alive 5: Last Round and get more bang for my buck, so me, being a man of my word, decided it was the right time to delve back into the world of Dead or Alive 5. Also, I just checked, and it seems I played 6 back in 2019... dang, how time flies by!

 I'll start with the roster, as this game features a whopping 34 characters, opposed to 6's 24. If you were to delve into DLC you could get another 2 characters, but DLC is for suckers. Not only do we get 34 characters, but most characters have at least 10 costumes. And getting them is quite easy, just finish Arcade, either single or tag, with the characters you want to unlock costumes for. Easy as pie, no hassle, no drag. And hey, if you are a pervert you are in luck, as girls get tons of dumb bikini costumes. Speaking of perverts, this is the game in which Marie Rose originated from, and boy does she make me uncomfortable, she's clearly designed as a teen, her proportions are clearly much smaller than the other characters, yet she is supposedly 18 years old, that way they can sexualize her as hard. I won't lie, she makes me a biiiit uncomfortable. But, even assuming she wasn't sexualized so badly, she is still a child character in a fighting game, and these characters are insufferable. The one thing I'll complain about, content-wise, is that the game still lets you know you are missing costumes and that they must be 'downloaded', just to try to trick you into wasting money into more fetishistic costumes. But hey, to each their own.

 I know I harp very hard on DoA's overly sexualized content, but it's only because I think the game is really fun. DoA has some of the fastest and most fluid looking attack strings in the genre, and the counter-move is pure genius, letting newcomers and experts have fun, look flashy and look stylish. It's an incredibly fun series of fighters that has such a low entry-barrier that you can pop in the disc and have fun right away, even if it's your first time playing the game. I'll defend DoA's gameplay to the very end, this is a hill I'm willing to die on.

 The game crashed on me more times than I would've liked, which wasn't very fun, but I never lost any progress and the game loads so quickly that it was barely an issue, but it's still worth mentioning.

 Well... I was right. DoA 5 is a much better product than DoA 6, and a much better game too. I promise, there's a very fun fighting game hidden beneath all the smut.

 8.5