Baud Attitude

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.

The Oneechanbara series aren’t exactly art games.  Really, they’re a raised middle finger in the direction of every well-meaning crusader, from Fredric Wertham to Tipper Gore to Jack Thompson, who has ever tried to SAVE THE CHILDREN from the evils of popular entertainment.  They’re games that understand that sometimes you just need a healthy dose of violent stress relief and a black-and-white, good-vs-evil story to make you feel OK about it.  Pretty much every entry has zombies roaming the streets because Evil Organization Secret Plot Thing is happening, and those zombies (and assorted bosses) need killing lest the Evil Organization take over the world, or something.

Of course, the only people who can kill the zombies and save the world just happen to be cute girls who have made very poor fashion decisions (Cowboy hat, feather boa, bikini and cowboy boots?  A school uniform and bright red cestus?) and who tend to, well, bounce a lot.

BECAUSE REASONS.

Not that I am objecting, because I am firmly in the target audience of Everyone With A Y Chromosome Ever.

OneeChanbaraZ2 Chaos is the… sixth? entry in the main series.  There have been a bunch of side games, mind you, so I’m not 100% on that, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done the math right.  2 on the PS2, which never came to the US, 1 Xbox360 games, 1 Wii game (With, I will say as an aside, some of my favorite motion controls ever), one game released first for the Xbox360 and then ported to the PS3 with an added character, and now a PS4 game which is pretty much a love letter to everyone who has ever followed the series since its VERY low-budget beginnings.

I wouldn’t exactly call it an AAA title – it still suffers from MASSIVE asset re-use, to the point of re-using several locations from the PS3 game, but it runs in 1080P and at least claims to run at a consistent 60FPS.  It looks really good, even if it’s sometimes hard to see much of the actual game because the gore effects have covered the entire screen with a hazy red filter.

Without going too much into the history, the first four games had more-or-less the same cast.  You had a cool-headed swordswoman named Aya and her more… impulsive little sister Saki, both of whom suffered from “cursed blood” which gave them superhuman powers.  The fifth game swapped in another pair of sisters, who were vampires with all the associated blood sucking and strength etc but with no apparent issues with sunlight.  To shake things up a bit, the elder vampire sister is the crazy one with the younger sister being the more thoughtful.

I say “more thoughtful” and must qualify that by pointing out that she runs around chopping up masses of the undead with a chainsaw.

Z2 puts all four of them together, and some of the character interactions are simply delightful, especially when the two pairs have to switch partners or when they are snarking at each other during cutscenes and level transitions.  It also makes for a lot more variety in the series’ trademark tagging-in system, where you can switch between active characters at any time.  The four characters all play quite differently and each have effective counters against different enemy types – for example, Saki is a brawler who tends to get overwhelmed by swarms of enemies but who can stun-lock and juggle single tougher creatures that slap the sword-using characters silly.

I have to take a moment here to thank whoever came up with the idea of making the most adorable character in the game also the toughest hand-to-hand fighter, because it is hilarious fun to watch a pixie-sized girl in a goth-loli outfit punch the stuffing out of a werewolf, cursing like a sailor the entire time.

Oh, and Annna (three Ns) from the first Xbox 360 game shows up again, though only as your helicopter pilot this time.  I can’t say that’s a bad thing, I only have vague memories of playing through her campaign but I seem to remember that her using guns instead of melee weapons made a lot of it kind of trivial and occasional bits teeth-clenchingly frustrating.

None of the Oneechanbara games demand much Japanese knowledge.  You miss a lot of the, oh, let’s just call it story for the sake of discussion, but you don’t miss any of the PLOT, if you know what I mean.   They are super import-friendly, and with the yen as weak as it is now I think they’re likely cheaper than the average new release in the US.

That being said, if you’re averse to remembering that O is confirm and X is cancel, there is some good news.  Oneechanbara Z: Kagura is actually rumored to be getting a localized version soon.  There’s no word on Z2: Chaos, and I rather expect it’s going to depend entirely on how well Kagura does, but, well, fingers crossed and all that.