Still About the Bounce
I remember being at a friend’s place when someone put Dead or Alive into the PlayStation, and nobody pretended we were there for the fighting system. Tekken did that better anyway. We were there for the physics—specifically how the female fighters’ bodies moved. It was crude and obvious, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball pushed that even further, making the entire game about buying gifts for half-naked women at the pool. That was the franchise’s whole identity for a long time.
Dead or Alive 6 came back closer to an actual fighting game, though the series hasn’t lost what brought people in originally. The story continued from where the last one left off, bringing back Kasumi, Ryu Hayabusa, and others. The arenas got more elaborate—Forbidden Fortune is a pirate ship descending through its own interior while a giant kraken reaches toward the fighters and flames spread across the stage. That’s the kind of moment these games nail: the world falling apart around you while you’re trying to land hits.
The returning fighters included Brad Wong, the Drunken Fighter, who spent years training Zui Ba Xian Quan in remote Chinese regions, learning that stumbling, unpredictable style that makes him almost unreadable. He’d missed the last tournament chasing a legendary drink his master sent him to find. Eliot was back too, having completed his training journey and now carrying knowledge of the advanced Xinyi-Liuhe-Quen technique.
The new fighters were more interesting as actual martial artists. NiCO, called the Lightning Technomancer, uses Pencak Silat amplified by plasma discharge from her combat gear. She looks young but she’s brilliant—a scientist in the secret M.I.S.T project—and that combination of brains and technique makes her genuinely dangerous. Kokoro uses Ba Ji Quan with elbows and palm strikes meant to unbalance, refined by her maiko training. La Mariposa, a former DOATEC researcher named Lisa Hamilton, returned with her luchadora aerial attacks, deadlier than before.
What caught me about this roster was that the series had actually made space for these characters as martial artists with technique and backstory, not just designs. The game still carries its reputation for physics and fanservice, but somewhere the fighting had become legitimate. Maybe it always was and I just wasn’t paying attention. Dead or Alive 6 came out and I played it. I watched the fighting more than expected. If you’re just there for the bouncing, the old Beach Volleyball games are still out there.