Dead or Alive 5: Last Round Review (2024)

Dead or Alive 5, in all its incarnations, is the best numbered entry in the long-running fighting game series in terms of raw mechanics, and Dead or Alive 5: Last Round doesn’t change that fact. It’s still the fast, fluid, accessible brawler it was when I reviewed its original incarnation over two years ago, and the PS4 and Xbox One versions look ever-so-slightly sharper than it did back then. But despite positioning itself as the definitive version of DOA 5, Last Round feels slightly weighed down by some problematic glitches, and uninteresting new characters that make it feel unnecessarily fan-service-focused.

First thing’s first: the fighting in Last Round remains as excellent as ever. You can read my full review of Dead or Alive 5 for details on what makes the fighting system so addictive, but in short, DOA takes the rock-paper-scissors idea that lies beneath the hood of most fighting games and bakes it right into your every move and decision. The triangular relationship it creates between throws, holds, and strikes make every moment an opportunity to outthink your opponent. Even before you start wrapping your head around a character’s extensive, varied move list, DOA empowers you to recognize your opponent’s tendencies, and punish them for them. This is the very essence of what makes fighting games great, and like its predecessor, Last Round does it incredibly well.

Something else that’s set DOA apart over the years, is how distinctive, flashy, and fluid the characters’ many fighting styles are. Many of them jump off from a traditional martial arts base, and then start taking entertaining left turns with teleportation, elemental attacks, and spinning piledrivers that would make Street Fighter’s Zangief cry (very manly) tears of jealousy. DOA 5’s original cast still walks that line between authenticity and audacity with grace and energy, but the same can’t necessarily be said of the characters that have joined the cast since then.

Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate introduced some new characters as DLC, and Last Round includes them all, plus two additional challengers, for a total of 34. This gives Last Round the largest playable cast in DOA history, but with rare exception, most of these newcomers and returning series favorites feel bland and forgettable, thanks to a lot of reskinned models and generic move sets. Honoka is probably the worst offender here: she’s just a generic-looking schoolgirl with a patchwork move list cobbled together from totally disparate styles across the the rest of the cast. Sure, having more options is great, but if they aren’t interesting ones, more ends up feeling like less.

The more frustrating thing about these characters is that their inclusion feels, on one level or another, more like fan-service rather than good design. Ein and Leon are throwback fan-favorites from older games, but they’ve since been effectively replaced by Hayate and Bayman, respectively. Phase 4 is literally a Kasumi clone - the second Kasumi clone (after Alpha 152). Honoka and Marie Rose have completely forgettable fighting styles, but hey, who doesn’t love a couple of underage-looking girls to throw into a scandalous outfit or two, right? This is the old DOA mentality, the one I was happy to see banished in the original Dead or Alive 5. Seeing it creep back in is as frustrating as it is disappointing.

Not all the characters added since DOA 5 are a bust, though. Momiji and Nyotengu both sport fighting styles interesting enough to make me want to learn them. Nyotengu, like some of the less successful new characters, is a riff on an old DOA character, but one whose highly unorthodox move set has never been reused or repurposed. Momiji's style, while certainly reminiscent of the many ninjas of the cast, adds enough flaming flourishes and impressive acrobatics to set her apart. Watching the two of them face off falls somewhere between late-night Hong Kong wire-fu and a live-action Avatar fan-fic, in the best possible way.

Feature-wise, Last Round is as impressive as its predecessor, which featured an excellent training mode and robust online features, like the ability to run online tournaments, kumite, or training sessions. Sadly, as of this writing, not all theses features are working as intended. Depending on which platform you’re playing on, you might encounter any number of game-crashing, save-data-corrupting bugs. One particularly troubling issue is the lack of support for MadCatz fight sticks on the Xbox One version, which Team Ninja is looking to fix, along with the many other known issues. It’s worth noting that while playing with online throwdowns turned off, I didn’t run into these issues on PS4, but seeing as Team Ninja is acknowledging them on its Twitter feed, it’s safe to say I’ve been lucky.