Hitting Above the Belt: DOA 5

I’ll admit, I’m not good at fighting games. Whenever there’s an arcade fighting game cabinet, I would be the person watching people play for hours. I love that I can get a fighting game a playing at home. Even though I’m not great at fighting games, I do love playing them. There’s something about being able to take out all aggressions on someone digitally. It helps me feel less angry and I can unleash my anger in a way that is certainly more productive and less destructive to the outside world.

I’m also a huge fan of DOA. I grew up largely with Street Fighter. Then there was Mortal Kombat and their usage of copious amounts of blood. And while that was fun at first, it was the constant evolution of fighting games that was more interesting. While Mortal Kombat will always have a nostalgia place in my heart, the movement doesn’t quite look natural either. It looks blocky. Then I started playing DOA. The movement looked fluid. It looked like you would expect to see people doing. There was a marked difference in movement.

So, when I heard that DOA 5 was coming out on the PS3, I was all over that. It originally came out in September of last year. I was interested in some of the new aspects of the game. Something that was completely new. They added action buttons to certain events as you’re knocking someone off from one platform. It added a certain degree of greater interactivity to the game. I was super excited to get it.

In December of last year, I finally got a copy in my hot, little hands.

I loved it. I did. I still do. When my stuff was stolen the night before last, I went right to playing DOA 5.

The biggest change I noticed was in the story mode. The story mode in DOA 3 wasn’t as in-depth. I wish I could comment on DOA 4, but unfortunately I don’t have an Xbox 360.

I liked that you really got a better idea of what was going on. There was a sense of what was going on and that there was a greater plot outside of the actual DOA tournament. That’s something I really enjoyed. I almost want to play through the story mode again because I enjoyed it so much. You also got a chance to explore each character as you were going through the story mode.

I won’t go into the game play dynamics because I would really have to have played DOA 4 to be able to speak in greater length about it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what all the changes are between DOA 3 to DOA 4 and DOA 4 to DOA 5.

I will talk about characters though. They took out two old characters and replaced them with new ones. They got rid of Ein and Leon. They were replaced with Rig a Canadian Taekwondo fighter who also the boss of the oil rig that Bass works on. They also added Mila, a MMA fighter. I liked Ein and I was sorry to see him go. I’m not sure how I feel about Rig and Mila. I think I would need to play them more (and probably will) to see if I like they’re fighting dynamics.

They also added characters that were in Virtua Fighter, namely Akira Yuki, Sarah Bryant and Pai Chan. All three of which are playable in other portions of the game, but not in the story mode.

The same old fighting modes are available outside of the story mode. And completing them unlock different outfits for the characters. I enjoy that there is a lot more flexibility to the costuming of the game. I’m still holding out for Helena’s costume from DOA 3, but I’ll have to wait and see.

There are, of course, unlockable characters. The Virtua Fighter characters I named above are all unlockable (and I have managed to unlock all but Pai Chan). Gen Fu and Alpha-152 are also unlockable characters as well. Out of all of those unlockables all that I have left are Pai Chan and Alpha-152. I hope to have them unlocked sometime soon.

Then there’s the one thing that I wanted to see changed after DOA Extreme Volleyball 2, Team Ninja’s breast physics. The boobs that seem to move like magnets of opposite poles. It looked uncomfortable, especially as a woman with larger breasts. I can’t say that even when I ran that my boobs moved up and down independently. They don’t. Even without a bra, they still move mostly together.

Thankfully, in DOA 5, they seem to have largely fixed their breast dynamics. There are certain instances that make me go WTF. Tina wearing a bustier shouldn’t have breasts moving up and down independently. But they still do. Not as crazy as they did in Extreme Volleyball 2, but it’s still there. I’m glad that they did manage to ratchet it down a level or two. I would like to see more organic breast movement, and I’m sure that Team Ninja will spend even more time working on their breast physics. As far as I’m concerned, as long as it doesn’t harm the fighting dynamics and moves, than have at it.

For me, DOA 5 was a great fighting game experience. I enjoyed playing it. I loved playing the story. More importantly, I enjoyed playing a majority of the characters that I have loved playing in the past. It’s still one of the few games that has a great drunken boxing characters. I highly recommend this fighting game.