The Law Of Diminishing Returns Kicked In Forcibly

There are only two fighting game franchises I've stuck with over the years: Super Smash Bros., and Dead or Alive. A bit of a curious pairing. I had the original Smash Bros. and Melee (I don't own a Wii, but I've played Brawl on Alex'). As for DOA, there was 3, then Ultimate 2, and now Dead or Alive 4. The problem this presents is that, while there were certain things about DOA 4 that bothered me, upon reflection, I realized these weren't exactly new problems.

The final boss, Alpha, is pretty cheap in the sense of stacking the deck against, with her teleportation (even in the middle of being combo attacked) and attacks that take 40% of your health. But Genra, the DOA 3 boss had his fireball attacks (no else can attack at range), the shockwave he emitted every time you knocked him down (which shoved you far away so he could throw fireballs again), and the camera shifted to a perspective used at no other point in the game. And the Tengu (Ultimate 2), could fly, and had his weather-shifting cyclone attack. There's always something, but that something usually doesn't let them escape your attacks. If I'm kicking the Tengu in the face, unless he can counter the next kick, he's gonna get whalloped by it as well. Alpha can simply blink out of the way and reappear behind me.

The counters are pretty overpowered, but that's also nothing new. I've had fights where I hit my opponent 20-30 times with kicks and punches, and the entirety of their offense was 6 counters, and they won. It seems nuts some of these counters should be taking 15-20% of my health bar, but there it is. Like I said, though, this was a problem in previous games. The issue now is I feel like the computer relies on it more. It's perfectly willing to sit back and rely on the fact it's response time is better than mine, and just counter my attacks all day long. When a fight goes "punch , get up, low kick , get up, high punch , get up. . .", it's pretty tedious. I start waiting for them to go ahead and finish me, so I can make a fresh go of it. Except I can't even get that because they won't attack! I understand they may have finally adjusted the strength of the counters in DOA 5, which is nice, I suppose.

Here's something that wasn't present in the previous games, sort of. When you beat Story Mode, there's a little movie for each character, showing a little slice of what the character went on to do. Some are silly, some are badass, some are actually very sad. The guys still get that. Zack's is silly, Hayate's sort of badass (even if I still think he's a jackass). With the ladies, they went the T&A route, and yes, I know it would be stupid to be surprised about that with this series. I'm not really surprised, more disappointed. It seemed unnecessary, and I thought they could have done better, like they had previously. Maybe I'm at the point where that can't be the primary selling point. Yeah, the "She kicks high" commercial for DOA 3 amused Papafred and I enough for me to buy it went I got an XBOX, but that was almost a decade ago. I'd hope my mindset has shifted since then (I'm sure Papafred's has). Now, I find I'm actually invested in some of the characters and their histories, even if it doesn't always make sense.