I was running through Model 2 and Naomi games in emulation the other day, and Dead or Alive 2 came to mind. DOA was never a well-respected fighting game and very rarely a tourney presence, but back in the day I gave DOA2 Ultimate (an Xbox remake of the Dreamcast title with online play) a lot of my time. It was... unique, in large part because of mechanisms the genre has rightfully abandoned.
DOA2 Ultimate was one of the very first fighting games you could play online on the consoles that wasn't a total laggy mess. It took broadband to make this genuinely feasible: stuff like Dreamcast online play or X-Band on the 16-bit consoles just wasn't suited to this genre.
Even then, it took another console generation for fighting game developers to come around and make online play a standard feature for their games. If you wanted to play a fighting game online in the early 00s, your choices were still pretty slim: fighters are mostly Japanese, and Japan cared even less about the original Xbox than the 360. The 2D fighters on Xbox Live or Kaillera just didn't play right no matter how good your connection was. DOA2 was by far the most playable game. It wasn't my first choice, but it was there!
DOA2U was never really ready for tourney prime-time, but it was pretty fun and I stuck with it. By the time I was done I was around S-rank. (The system went up to SS+, if I recall).
Back then, my first choice was Virtua Fighter 4. I was going to the arcade every week and playing hard: we had the biggest group that we've ever had for VF back then. A couple of the guys and I looked at DOA2 as a kind of "VF Junior" and dabbled in it as a sort of practice for the real game.
We called it that because it was so much simpler. In Virtua you are playing 3 or 4 different games of rock-paper scissors (attacks have many, many attributes) at once, and any one of them can break through and win. DOA is more one-dimensional and a little off-balance: the counter mechanism really dominates the game and turns it into an immediate, face-to-face guessing game where two correct, high-risk guesses on offense or defense would almost always win the match.
Counters beat specific kind of attacks, throws beat all the counters except for one, and of course attacks went through throws. Any successful throw or counter did obscene damage (50% or more), and all the good attacks would put the enemy in a stun and allow you to launch a combo (or the opponent to launch a counter). Like I said, two good guesses would usually win. Sometimes three.
It was kind of like Third Strike (if, of course, you're playing the right character in that game). Stuff like frame data really fell to the side when so little was guaranteed or safe, and random guesses (even during a combo, the defender could grab your attacks!) were so strong. Ultimately attacking was so risky that the best thing you could do in close was land a single hit, wait for the enemy to try a counter, and throw them on reaction for huge damage. The only thing that really mattered about individual hits was high, middle (for middle attacks you had to guess punch or kick) and low.
If you wanted to avoid the coin toss of instant death-- and most high level players did-- the game became a dance in circles where each player was trying to snipe at the other with a long-range attack. Most characters had long-range attacks of all types, so the guessing game was still intact. In retrospect, I suppose there was no tactical reason to be in close on an opponent at all: I just liked to be there.
This brings us to another big point about DOA2U: the game had massive, beautiful stages with all kinds of varying terrain, sub-sections, and obstacles. Both VF and Tekken experimented with varying terrain, and unfortunately it just doesn't work out. If the two players are on a different elevation, before anything has happened one player is already in a better position than the other. DOA2U is the best example of why that is that I'm aware of.
I used to play Ayane, and nobody would ever want to play the Great Wall stage against me. Other Ayane players would often pick it, and the match became an endless jockey for position. Neither player would agree to be on the "wrong side".
A certain area of the Great Wall stage had the steepest slope in the game. The left (1P) side was nearly at a 45 degree angle. When an opponent is knocked into the air for a juggle combo, this means they're way, way higher up in the air than usual. This means longer combos and higher damage. In short, the Ayane on the left side was able to do an easy 100% combo that killed instantly just because she was standing in the right place. If you didn't know this and you were standing in the wrong place, you were dead. If you did know, you just tried to get the hell out of Ayane's way. If you were both Ayane, then you were jockeying for position all day. Ayane had similar advantages on other slopes, but never anything that severe.
If your 3D fighting game has float combos and varying terrain, this will always, always happen. That's why Virtua Fighter threw this idea out after the third game, and Tekken did so after the fourth. That's why 3D fighting games all have flat floors.
There's no particular point to these stories. I was just thinking about DOA2, I figured not a lot of folks were playing it seriously back then, and in retrospect it was a really weird game. Further, some of the things that gave the game its flavor were objectively bad design decisions. I've no desire to go back to a DOA game, but it was there at the right time and it was fun. Back then, I considered my job done when I caused a major tourney champion to absolutely lose his mind, screaming "don't you know who I am?" at me over the mic for what was at least half an hour as we fought. I wasn't even winning more than he was: he was flying off the handle because I was winning any matches at all! I gotta say, pretty much all my "you did it Dave!" fighter achievements involve my opponent pitching a fit...
Is the "don't you know who I am?" incident recorded in another blog post I don't remember? :)
Posted by: rvr67michael | September 12, 2011 at 08:31 PM
Nah, I've never told that story on the blog.
Posted by: David Cabrera | September 13, 2011 at 12:36 AM
This was the game with Tengu as the final boss, right? I remember screwing around with it from time to time on my PS2 when my family first got it, as we didn't really have any other games for it.
Posted by: Joseph | October 04, 2011 at 11:43 PM