Adjusting your options, as you know, is an excellent way to customize your gameplay.

Music: On
Difficulty: Hard
Handed: Right
Bouncing Breast: On
Favorite Food: Hot Dogs

I have very little love for early 3D fighters. This is known about me. I look at Virtua Fighter and I start to seethe and write ill things in my Yu Sazuki rage journal so that my negative thoughts might cause him psychic harm. In private, I've expressed that the earliest 3D fighting game I can recall liking is Dead or Alive 2, which sparked some discussion with my friend Larry about whether it was with the original DOA or Soul Edge that the genre finally came into its own.

Well, it's not like copies of Dead or Alive are that expensive, and Soul Edge or Blade or whatever you want to call it are pretty reasonable, too. I could trust the reviews on this, run the numbers and put my faith in Backloggd's average ratings, but DOA currently has a 2.8 average to Virtua Fighter Remix's 3.3 and I know that can't be right, so I'm afraid I just have to buy both of these games and determine for myself when 3D fighters got good.

Starting with DOA, which I have a more personal connection to, was a good idea. Character movement feels fluid, controls are responsive, there's a surprisingly deep combo system, and attacks carry enough weight to feel impactful. More refined than its stiff and clunky contemporaries, robust in modes and unlockables, yet still low-fi, DOA feels like a proper half-step between 3D fighters of the Saturn era and the looming sixth gen. It is just a shame Ayane can only be unlocked after sinking a significant amount of time into the game, but hey, that's why you always keep an Action Replay cart in your Saturn. Well, that and to play burned discs and bypass regional locks.

The AI does have a tendency to fluctuate between being insanely punishing and outright braindead, sometimes from round-to-round, but I don't think it's any better or worse than other 3D fighters of this period. Which is to say, I have a hard time taking any of these seriously enough to dig into how the AI operates, they're all drenched in protoplasm and even DOA has a few drops coming off its frame. The more important element here to me, personally, is the overall feel of the game, and the fast-paced nature of combat and responsive controls definitely put DOA ahead of the pack.

That said, it's not my favorite game in the series (toss-up between 2, my first, and 3 which looks incredible on the Series X), and the jury's still out on whether or not Soul Blade is the better game, but I still had a great time with Dead or Alive. It's a very strong first outing and a solid step in the right direction given the slew of dire 3D fighters hitting the Saturn around this time.