Dead Or Alive's character interactions feels like A.I generation. These mfers will be saying the most incomprehensible shit to each other before a battle. It is impossible to follow this story as it is presented here. I kind of respect wanting your fighting game to have pretty deep and interesting lore, which DOA honestly does, but also completely fail to convey any of it in-game.

From my scouring online: this is what many fans call the BEST Dead Or Alive game. To which I truly don't understand. DOA2 is a great fighting game, and a pretty astronomical leap from the first game, but best one in the SERIES? Dead Or Alive is a VERY GOOD series, and while this is a really good game, I am absolutely certain they made better than this. The stages have gotten the complexity that defines DOA, but I feel like the depth of combos and the fighting system's full potential still won't be truly realized until DOA3 and 4.

Of course, DOA 2 is the one I played the least of growing up. DOA3 and 4 were showpieces for the Xbox, so of course I had those. But DOA 2 slipped me by, even though they released it 3 separate times hoping I'd play one of them. The most I had played it was in an arcade! They had this bad boy at Round1 in Cleveland, and you better believe I fed quite a few tokens into that one.

But on a console? Let's get one thing straight: the Dreamcast port is missing so many features you've come to expect from a modern fighting game. Modern for 1999 btw. No command list (Soulcalibur has one.) No button displays for training. (Soulcalibur has this.) No fucking QUIT BUTTON on the pause menu (Every Game Made After 1990 Has One.) Let's not even get into not being able to edit your controls in-game, so you will have to hold the button combination that resets the game so you can edit that shit. I know this is pedantic but what an annoyance from such an otherwise well-presented game. I will say though that I do like having the button combinations to force quit the game, as having a Rage Quit option in your game is always appreciated.

Presentation is off the fucking hook, though. This game looks great, animates great, has kickass music, and some clean as hell menu design. Dead Or Alive has always looked like a game from the future, and DOA2 still has that sensation to it.

There is also a unique nature to DOA games where you can actually button-mash and still have a pretty satisfactory experience, but also a wealth of deeper game mechanics if you want to really get into its systems. The hold system is where the game's skill floor and ceiling really shows itself, as getting good at holds is one thing; but knowing how to delay strings or mix-up combos to prevent yourself from getting held is another animal all-together. The triangle system doesn't always work for me, such as when a throw just doesn't register on the opponent for reasons I can't decipher, so I'm whiffing on something I am absolutely connecting on, but it's something different at least, and the fact that they got to THIS from Dead Or Alive 1 is fucking crazy. It's like if Tekken 3 came out after Tekken 1 directly.

Having played more, though, I think I understand why DOA isn't quite as beloved as Tekken or Soulcalibur: the cast is uniquely despicable, and unlike Mortal Kombat you can't claw any of their eyes out. Bass Armstrong will begin matches saying variations of "You belong in the kitchen, not in the ring!" to any female character, and his plot motivated reason for being in the tournament is to beat the shit out of his daughter. Zack literally owns the DOA universe's Pedophile Island. Ayane getting treated like shit in her village while her siblings got pampered makes it impossible to really like Kasumi or Hayate, nevermind that Kasumi has all the electrifying charisma of a somber face drawn onto a balloon. Ryu Hayabusa and Gen-Fu are the only guys here that do not inspire antipathy; both actually being cool dudes with noble intentions for entering the tournament.

I reserve my special hatred for Jann Lee though. He is my least favorite character in any fighting game. I hate those stupid fucking noises he makes. I hate that stupid little jot he does. I HATE that canonically he is always being Leifang despite her being a vastly more likeable character. There is nothing more I want than to see Jann Lee get boiled alive in some kind of horrible Jigsaw trap. Dead Or Alive is one of the few fighting game franchises that never excises cast members for games, but I think they should make an exception for this annoying asshole.

Anyway, pretty cool game. Justice for Ayane, though.

This one is apparently pretty controversial so it brings me no pleasure to say this: but I thought Tekken 6 fucking rocked. Unfortunately, this elite fighting game shares the same disc space as one of the worst beat-em-ups ever conceived so there is that fact we must live with. But the actual fighting game aspect here is probably in my top 3 of the series. (Tekken 3 and Dark Resurrection also in there.)

Cool story though: my local game shop HAD the collector's edition of Tekken 6 with the fight stick for pretty cheap, so I had to get it. Tekken games have so far been very hostile towards the analog stick, so I figured this was my best option. It was! The fight stick works great, but unfortunately has Lars's Dumb Ass on it, so whenever I lose I have to look at that cocksucker.

In reality, this felt to me like just an enhancement on Dark Resurrection. The awesome ghost battles are still here, which I have sunk an enormous amount of time into, just getting a pretty endless fill of Tekken, and you get the full arcade story mode for your characters as well, along with the state mandated Shitty Final Boss Fight that fighting games are required by law to have.

Now, I had heard that he was a real dickhead, and while he IS; I found him far more reasonable to deal with than Jinpachi. He can be stun-locked pretty easily by quick jabs and can be baited into moves due to his huge size. While I imagine he is a fucking horrorshow for Kuma or other slower characters, I found him relatively painless with Xiaoyu, Asuka and Yoshimitsu.

Speaking of Yoshi: the fuck is going on with him. He looks like a Bionicle! They have stapled as much junk to Yoshi's handsomeness so he fits the chunkiness that all the male characters are required to fill. It also costs a ton of fight gold to buy the cosmetics to improve his character model! I know Yoshi's whole thing is that he looks different in every single game he is in, but I would really love if we can get the Bug Exoskeleton look from Tekken 4 back, that one was probably his best look.

Another gripe I have is with its survival mode. Why don't more games adopt Dead Or Alive's method? One big arena, spawn new enemies in as soon as I deal with the last guy, and avoid all the loading screens. Tekken 6 already has some lengthy load-times, so you add in one-round matches and the recipe is a lot of Not Playing The Game, which is a mark against it by the way.

There is also the fucking Tekken Force mode. My antipathy for this game mode is kind of funny to track in my head, as in Tekken 3 I thought it was a cute little addition, and in Tekken 4 I was happy to see it return. By this point though, the rogue programmer on the team insisting on this shit being in the game is now pushing his luck, because this one sucks total ass. Lars is a repulsive anime protagonist that I just did not like one little bit. Didn't like looking at him, didn't like playing as him, didn't like hearing from him. He is NOT Jin, he is NOT Kazuya, and he is NOT Heihachi so get him OFF MY SCREEN!!!!

Aside from that easily ignorable Shit Game Mode: Tekken 6 is awesome! Extremely playable, controls beautifully and looks fantastic. I am sure there is stuff going on under the hood that contributes to its complicated reputation, but from my point-of-view: this is the best one since Tekken 3!

This is a strange game: if you are playing it after playing its sequels there are so many things you will find missing. No plunging attacks, no way to use multiple souls at once, the crescent grass system is leaps and bounds a different animal to the estus flask, and levels are divided into chapters instead of being a connected world.

It is also a 5/5 perfect game that there is NOTHING similar to. Shadow Tower Abyss is as close as a game has come to having this kind of ethereal, otherworldly atmosphere. It feels every time like stepping into a strange dream, helped by the slam-dunk M'wah Perfecto sound effects that are in this game. Everything in this game sounds so perfect that I'm not even going into detail. You heard the menus? Great sounding menus. The entire Tower of Latria level? Scary as shit!! The prevalence of woodwinds and strange instrumentation in its very unusual soundtrack? Nothing quite like it! If Demon's Souls didn't have this kind of packaging, would it still be beloved?

Yes! Because the game is great! Levels are all varied, brilliantly designed, and develop and expand on their challenges in very impressive ways. The aforementioned Tower of Latria is one of the greatest levels in any game, EVER, because it mutates before the player in ways you could never predict on a first playthrough. Shrine of Storms is just a vicious gauntlet leading to maybe my favorite boss of all time (Storm King) and the Valley of Defilement feels like an eldritch nightmare, lacking even the facsimile of a place that Blighttown possesses, looking more like an endless void of rot.

I first played this game in 2012, and I've been enchanted by it ever since. It made me MAD. VERY mad. Maneater was, without question, the most I had ever gotten just fucking Owned by a boss in any game ever. I could NOT stop coming back for more though; there is something about this game.

More people more eloquent than I have talked about why Demon's Souls fucking rocks. The boss fights, not yet devolving into nonsense, are allowed to be Weird, no fear of Epic Youtubers putting them on lists of "Worst Souls Boss Fights" because they don't have 30 different attacks. I really hate to pine after what was, but I wish we could have oddities like Phalanx and Adjudicator again. The dark secret to Souls games is that their combat is never really that good; definitely not good enough to justify the junk fucking fights in Dark Souls 3. No, what Fromsoft are good at are experiences. If I want to really be put to the test with my ability to read an enemy and find my openings I'll play the Nioh games. But if I want Demon's Souls there is literally only one game like it. Not even Dark Souls 1 has the kind of haze surrounding it that DeS does!

A lot of people pay lip-service to Dark Souls II having this dreamlike atmosphere; but I think that is more due to circumstance. Dark Souls II is a very fun game, but one where something clearly went wrong during development. Its dreamlike atmosphere is more due to levels being shuffled together so a game could get done, whereas Demon's Souls is made Like That on purpose. Dark Souls II warriors please understand that I do like DS2.

Other things I adore but don't feel the need to labor on about: the storyline is brilliant, all the side-characters are as endearingly weird as you'd expect from Fromsoft, and the various ways you can use spells to break the difficulty means you can avoid getting hard-stuck by a helpful use of Firestorm. I will say, some of these corpse runs are fucking evil. I was going to list some out, but if you've played the game you KNOW which ones I'm talking about, and if you haven't played the game: you'll just have to find out yourself :)

Now I will take this time to talk about how KICKASS the community for this game is for having it not just playable on RPCS3, but for having the online functioning again, and having it run at a beautiful 60 FPS. So now you can get the entire Demon's Souls experience with absolutely no drawbacks. I am not buying a dumbass PS5 so I'll never experience the remake, and why would I need to? I got Demon's Souls exactly how I want it!