I’ve been quietly playing “Dead or Alive Ultimate” for the past two weeks. I am new to the DOA-series, the last (and first) 3D-fighter I played was Soul Calibur 2.
There are (essentially) only three buttons: kick, punch and “hold / counter”. All the other buttons are shortcuts to combinations thereof. Guarding seems to be done by the classic SF2 method of holding the direction away from the opponent. The graphics are quite nice but I still don’t quite understand why for example the arms are separate objects and not properly skinned onto the main body. This is usually well-hidden by clothing, but still a bit annoying. Most likely this is not a technical limitation but due to the difficulty in setting up the bones for such an object. Also, there is quite often some slow-down (which may be due to me playing wide-screen mode (PAL) where more scenery is visible) — usually once for 1-2secs every 3-5 rounds — something like this has no place in a fighting game with carefully controlled environments and should definitely have been eliminated before release.
I have finally unlocked all the costumes yesterday (via the survival / collection method). The only difficult bit was getting the medal for winning 50 fights in a row. In the end, I managed to get 59 wins in the Tag-mode with Zack and Jann Lee with the health bar set to “Largest”, mostly playing Zack and using Jann as my backup for when I was in a tight spot. 😀
I still haven’t quite gotten the hang of countering, but at least I can block now. And it has made me want to play Soul Calibur 2 again, which is not online but I have not taken advantage of that in DOAU yet (except for uploading my scores for survival where I am somwhere in the 1750s). It’s not the best fighter ever (and no-one except Itagaki claimed it to be), but then it’s not crap either. Looks like the media-average of (currently) 83% is spot-on. 😉