I never thought a portable game system would be a good home for fighters, but here we are. It’s only been about two months since the release of Nintendo’s new handheld and we already have three high profile fighting franchises to choose from: Street Fighter, BlazBlue, and Dead or Alive.

Dead or Alive Dimensions is a sort of collection in a way. It covers the story of all four of the previous games and the 25 character roster boasts the largest in the series, while at the same time not adding any new characters (completely missing the opportunity for a playable Samus). You could call it the definitive Dead or Alive experience, yet the single player modes are unfortunately littered with problems.

Chronicle Mode is the game’s story mode and wow, there is a lot of story for a fighting game. Long cutscenes are aplenty as you make your way through the mode’s five chapters. Some scenes are prerendered in high quality CG while others use the in-game models to act out scenes. What’s completely bizarre is the third type of cutscene.

Often times, the story is told through statues. They aren’t still frame images. They are frozen in-game models with camera rotation and an occasional limited animation (like a piece of clothing in the wind). Characters talk with closed or constantly opened mouths as you’re left to wonder why everybody suddenly became mannequins. It wouldn’t be so unsettling if there weren’t already other scenes that fully animated the in-game models. It’s downright baffling.

The story itself jumps around all over the place while occasional info boxes on the bottom screen attempt to explain what the crap everybody is talking about. At least twice I watched a scene involving two characters only to be put in control of a completely different third character that was previously not pictured while one of the first two characters had seemingly disappeared.

But I have to hand it to Chronicle Mode for its very effective teaching tools. Before certain battles, the core fighting mechanics are explained to you through snappy tutorials that are skippable if you don’t need them. They never throw you too many concepts at once, and it ends up being a pretty effective teaching tool. It’s just a shame that Chronicle Mode is permanently set on Easy.

Most of Chronicle Mode can be beaten by button mashing and there’s no way to adjust the difficulty. Similarly, the other single player modes present very little challenge. Even Arcade Mode puts you through selectable preset courses with assigned difficulties instead of just letting you pick.

The only real difficulty comes from Tag Challenge Mode, but it’s a frustrating type. This is because your partner in Tag Challenge is controlled by AI rather than you. The only person who can control when a tag happens is the one not currently fighting. That means your AI partner will tag you out whether you want them to or not. Couple this with some extremely unbalanced boss fights involving enemies that can hit you for almost your entire health bar and your 3DS suddenly runs the risk of being thrown out a window.

And yet, in spite of all of these glaring problems, the actual fighting mechanics are rock solid. Dead or Alive‘s rock-paper-scissors style of throws, holds, and strikes is incredibly satisfying. Anytime you pull off a counter, especially online, you will feel awesome. Every character is easy to pick up and play (with a surprising amount of different throws), and has their own feel, while the combat is consistently fast and fluid.

Dynamic stages are back in full force including a new stage modeled after Team Ninja’s own Metroid: Other M. It’s nice to play a fighting game where stages actually matter. Knocking somebody through a glass window, off a cliff, or down a flight of stairs takes you to a new area while delivering some devastating damage to your opponent.

Because it is in fact a 3D fighter, the 3D effect gets a lot more mileage than in Street Fighter. You’ll get a really cool sense of space, especially when fighting atop a certain rope bridge crossing a cliff. But you’ll enjoy this at the cost of that silky smooth 60 frames per second that the 2D mode offers. The frame rate doesn’t look bad in 3D and certainly doesn’t hinder play, but you will definitely notice a difference between the two. Personally, I found myself playing with 3D on about half the time.

In streetpass I managed to exchange a few throwdowns. These are matches with AI supposedly based on the play style of the person you passed. I can’t say how accurate these ghost fighters are to their human counterparts since I didn’t know the people I happen to pass, but I will say their AI ghosts seemed dumb as bricks. The throwdown challenge I downloaded via spotpass, however, was a different story (a story that ended in me losing). Spotpass is also being utilized to download exclusive costumes.

Dead or Alive Dimensions is tricky to recommend. If you have friends that will play it with you or plan to spend a lot of time playing random opponents from around the world online, I’d say go for it. The fighting is incredibly solid and satisfying and you probably won’t regret it. But if you are interested in solo play, the single player modes suffer from a completely broken difficulty curve and a curious lack of options.

This review is based on a copy of Dead or Alive Dimensions purchased by the reviewer.

Tags: 3D Fighter, 3DS, Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive Dimensions, DOA, fighting games, Team Ninja, Tecmo Koei

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 10:50 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.