First DoA game and it's a very good game.
When I first plug the game in, the first thing I notice are the next-gen graphics. Even on the title screen they are life like. The first thing I do as I did in Soul Caliber 2 and so on…is I go the practice room. I try out a fair amount of characters and decide which one I want to learn. The practicing has a neat little feature that shows you the button combination at the top of the screen so you can try it out on the comp. If you get it right, it moves on. If you don’t you can try it again. If you get stuck on one, you can manually move it to the next move. Very neat feature unlike having to sort though menus to find the combo like in Soul Caliber 2.
So I decide to go onto the story mode. The first thing I notice is the music. Very nice, clean, and clear background music that fits perfectly into the map. Much like Fable where you don’t “hear” the music more so “feel” it. Then WHAM it hits me, the voices are still in Japanese or Chinese. I’m thinking ‘either I have a bugged version, or it’s meant to be like this.’
Either way I press on and after a while the voicing doesn’t even really register anymore ‘cuz you just want to get straight to the fighting. The smooth style of the kicks and the clear animations of razor fast punches come to life on the 360. The first few battles and even the first time I played through the story line with a character, I lost many of those matches. It had some to do with the shear beauty of the game but more or less to do with the learning curve; especially to one who has never played a DoA game in his life. But after a while it gets fluent as any pick-up and play style game should.
To sum it all up, Dead or Alive 4 has everything a next-gen game should have: wonderful graphics, amazing sound/music, a great character scheme, and some very nice features. But with every good game comes bad things, even Halo isn’t perfect. More plot depth is needed. You fight a fair amount of one on ones and then K.O. this really hard final boss to get a nice movie and some un-lockable features (costumes, viewing the end movie for each character you beat the game with, and so on) I know that some people like the “all fight and little story” type of game so give us an option under the game settings to have that in our game. That way we can all be happy. Another thing, not much of a tutorial, yes there is a nice “press these buttons to do this attack” feature, but it doesn’t really explain everything on a nice silver platter. But I digress. All in all DoA 4 is an amazing game and worth the wait. Despite a few flaws I would recommend this game to any arcade fighter fan or to someone who was interested I would advise them to rent it and give it a fair chance, it is a challenging game but it is worth learning.