Baud Attitude

Occasionally, I find a move in a fighting game or brawler that is so insanely silly that I can’t help but try to use it at every opportunity, even if it makes little to no sense.

For example, in the second “Darkstalkers” game, there’s a Yeti character.  He has a special move where he swallows his opponent, chews a couple of times, and spits them out.  I am very bad at pulling this move off, but I can not help occasionally putting in the disc and trying to beat computer opponents by doing nothing but eating them.

I have found, in Dead or Alive 5, the latest move to make me giggle – and, true to form, I’ve been trying to use it in online matches, failing miserably, and usually getting locked into a long stun / juggle combo that winds up with me crying on the floor in defeat.

Basically, Marie Rose can, if you roll towards your opponent AND chain it into a throw at just the right time, AND he or she doesn’t swat you away like a fly, you jump onto them, wrap her legs around his or her waist, and use their chest like a pair of speed bags.

This motivated me to make another animated gif to highlight the insanity:

Side note: DoA may get a lot of flack for focusing on bounce and jiggle simulation, but that is some surprisingly neat hair physics.

Lot of Dead or Alive posts recently, sorry about that.

I could talk about The Familiar of Zero instead, since that’s the show I’m currently using as a distraction from spending 90 minutes a day on the exercise bike. I don’t know if I’d ever sit down and binge on it, but I’m a fan of the comedic light-fantasy genre and it features Kugimiya Rie getting her tsundere on. If I had any complaints, it’d be that it tends to go a little heavy on the panty gags and that the main male character is changed to pump up the lech factor between seasons 1 and 2.

That wasn’t a lot of words. So, back to Dead or Alive.

I haven’t been doing any more online matches yet, because I decided that I’d sit down and play through the story mode. It’s something of a novelty to me to have a fighting game with a story mode, to be honest – I’m used to the old-school thing where you pick a character, they fight between 8 and 12 other characters including a hopelessly cheap final boss, and then you get a single screen which explains how winning this fighting tournament has helped them grow as a person.

Dead or Alive 5’s story mode, by contrast, is 71 chapters, some of which are just cutscenes but most of which feature at least a couple of fights, and it took a solid hunk of time over three nights to finish. It’s an interleaved story, where the main story deals with the wacky ninja family fighting the Big Bad of the series and trying to foil his attempt to, once again, take over the world by cloning Kasumi and making an army of unstoppable ninja warrior assassins. The rest of it is all about the characters who are NOT part of the wacky ninja family (and, thus, generally secondary to the actual plot) as they enter the most recent iteration of the Dead or Alive tournament for a variety of personal reasons. I mostly tried to ignore the tournament bits, to be honest, because I can only stomach SO much “I wanna be the strongest in the world!” and “I wish Hayate-sempai would notice me!” before I want to turn the console off.

The wacky ninja family bits were OK. There’s one particular bit which I won’t spoil but which features Ayane getting out a good 17-years-worth of frustrations re: her half sister, so Ayane fans will probably get extra enjoyment from it.

During all of this, you spend an AWFUL lot of time playing as the male characters, which was a novelty. Not a particularly welcome novelty, mind you, because it’s very weird when you’re used to picking the smallest, fastest characters in any fighting game and suddenly you’re made to play the lumbering brutes.

Still, I guess Team Ninja puts guys in the game and wants to make it so they’re not completely ignored, and making those characters a mandatory part of the story mode accomplishes that.

Oh, and it does have a fantastically cheap final boss, so that part is true to form.

Next up, I’m going to take a crack at some of the tutorials and try to get some online time in this weekend.

So, there’s apparently a bit of a kerfluffle going on right now in the competitive fighting “scene”, as it were, where fans of the Dead or Alive series are concerned that their punching simulator of choice is not taken seriously by, well, anyone.

I can’t fathom why.

Anyway, one of the proposed ways to make other people take DoA5 more seriously as a game and not, you know, as a waifu simulator, is to disallow certain costumes from being used during tournaments.

While I don’t have any stake in either side of the argument, this made me go through the lists of banned and approved costumes, and I fell head-over-heels in love with this one:

And I figured, well, it’s about Y200, I will pay that to beat people up dressed as a witch.

I could not buy this from the PS4 store.  Where there would normally be a price, it just said “not buyable”

It had a link to an explanation.  When I clicked the link, it said “You can’t buy this, because you can’t buy the following content: Marie Rose Halloween Costume”

…this seemed circular.

I also tried the web store and was met with the same “you can’t buy this”

Finally, I tried the PS3 store, and found that it actually had a price link and that it would let me give them virtual Yen in exchange for virtual clothes and all was well.  I was even able to download it when I went back to my PS4!

…and then it wouldn’t show up in the list of costumes, which had me fuming just a touch.

It turned out that, if I downloaded the free-to-play version of DOA5, the costume WOULD show up in the full paid version.  I’m not going to try to figure this out, and I’m not going to fuss too much about needing to have two copies of a game installed, but for a game that’s sold at a decreased price with the intent of nickle-and-diming the player to death with DLC, it made it annoyingly hard to get nickled-and-dimed.

Oh, and now I can have epic faceoffs:

It turns out that playing through DoA: Dimension’s tutorial has boosted my confidence enough that I’ve decided that I’m actually going to try playing a fighting game online, and I had a bunch of PSN credit left in my Japanese account so I bought DoA5: Last Round and I’ve been trying to pick a character to play as.

I usually like playing Kasumi, because, well, really fast and a huge reach and all that, but she’s also part of the F2P set of fighters so I figure there are going to be about a zillion Kasumis out there.

Instead, I figured I’d practice some with Marie Rose, under the assumption that people might actually hesitate to go TOO hard on a super-cute little girl character.  Anyway, it seemed to work when I tried playing Tera on a PVP server a few years ago – I was actively trying to get ganked and instead got left mostly alone until the point at which I logged off in disgust.

But I digress.

Anyway, so I was playing as Marie Rose against random opponents when I had this fight with an surprisingly vicious ending.  Keep in mind that Christie here, my opponent, is an internationally-feared trained killer and Marie Rose is, well, a maidservant.  I’m going to blame the school swimsuit on having had random costumes on, it’s a little too fetishy for me.

It’s the crunchy sound of the neck snapping that really makes the entire thing just that much more cringeworthy.

Oh, as a follow up: Did go online and look for matches.  Surprisingly hard to get a match, eventually wound up losing 2 and winning 1 which I am going to chalk up to an amazing spot of luck.