Though I don’t often write about it, the Dead or Alive series of fighting games remains my favorite beat-em-up and Barbie-simulator series – and, given that I am rubbish at the actual fighting part of the game, the part where I collect pretty dresses for my digital combatants represents, by far, the more important part of the package.

So, when I heard that some outfits were being pulled off of PSN due to rights expiring, I figured that I should see about getting them while I still could.

Keep in mind that I bought the game off the Japanese store, so DLC is always a little tricky because it’s being bought with a secondary PSN account.  DoA5 checks your licenses when you start the game, but once activated the content is available to all users of the console.  So, if I get the urge to buy a premium outfit, I need to buy it off the Japanese PSN, start DoA5 while logged into the Japanese account, wait for it to check my licenses, close DoA5, log in to my US account and run it, at which point the costumes are available to me and I can put an adorable purple witch costume on Marie Rose and go online for my regular dose of being humiliated by people who can actually play.

But look cute while I’m doing it, is the important point.

I may have gone off on a tangent there, and I apologize.

Anyway.  All of the costumes being pulled were part of Season Pass 4, so I exchanged some yen for that and the PS4 dutifully reported that I had exchanged money for virtual goods and now owned them.

But, as usual, the costumes weren’t actually available in-game. I don’t often actually buy costumes and I never remember the process that I need to go through, so this is half a rant and half something I can look back on later to remind myself of the process.

First, I needed to download costume “catalogs” – these are the actual DLC packs that contain the outfits. You can download them even if you don’t own the costumes, which is critical – how else will you SEE the adorable purple witch outfit on the Marie Rose you are currently shaming if you don’t have the costume data?

There are over 40 costume catalogs, as an aside.

Downloading the catalogs still didn’t unlock the costumes, so I fumed a bit.

Then I remembered that the “Season Pass” wasn’t actually a license for the costumes.  Rather, buying the Season Pass sets the price of the DLC packages bundled in the Season Pass to “free”.  So, I had to look up which packages were included in the Season Pass, find them in the store (where they were, correctly, marked free), “buy” those packages and suddenly I had all of my outfits.

In an ideal world, costume catalogs would just be part of the game data so they were automatically installed as part of the update process, and the act of buying a Season Pass would automatically license your account for all of the included content and automatically start any required downloads. As it is, it’s a lot of extra steps, and it means that my Japanese PSN download list is ridiculously full of DoA5 costume catalogs and it’s hard to find anything else sometimes.

Of all the first world problems I have ranted about on this site, a rant about the difficulty of playing virtual dress up on my virtual harem is possibly the most first-worldy ever, but… well, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read more than a couple of posts, now that I think about it.  I am not a deep man, I do not explore particularly deep topics.