Dead or Alive 2 was, I believe, the very first game I personally played in the series. I think the first game was more of a sleeper hit because I don’t even remember seeing an arcade cabinet for it. It was successful enough, though, that by the time the second game came out, it was much more accessible and easier to find. I didn’t play it until rather late, but I eventually picked up the PlayStation 2 version, which I believe was an enhanced update of the original release, as was common with fighting games of that era.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were an incredibly competitive time for fighting games, and there were two big reasons that Dead or Alive stood out. Two gigantic reasons… on almost every female character, lol. Tomonobu Itagaki created the series with Tecmo’s internal development team, Team Ninja, and he basically made a version of Virtua Fighter starring a cast of beautiful women.

It was a good time to be a freshly minted teenager. It was too early to have a girlfriend, but you were definitely interested in girls in a way you hadn’t been before. The female cast is pretty diverse, with different nationalities and hairstyles, though not so much in body types. It was a different era, and the beauty standards were definitely different from what they are today.

I also thought it was really cool that Ryu Hayabusa from the Ninja Gaiden series wasn’t just a playable character, but a fairly important one. He’s almost as significant in Dead or Alive as he is in his own franchise. I guess it’s not much of a surprise that Tomonobu Itagaki went on to revive the Ninja Gaiden series not long after Dead or Alive 2.

For a fighting game of its era, it also has a solid roster. It’s not an enormous cast, but it’s a respectable size, especially for only the second entry in a new fighting game series. If I remember correctly, my favorite characters were Kasumi, Ayane, and Ryu Hayabusa.

Like I’ve said before, the closest comparisons I can think of are Virtua Fighter and Tekken. I’d probably say it’s closer to Tekken, because Virtua Fighter is just a little too technical for my taste. The gameplay is focused entirely on hand-to-hand combat, with no weapons like Soul Calibur and certainly no projectile attacks like the Hadouken from the Street Fighter series.

I did think the final boss, Tengu, was rather lame. Based on the demons from Japanese mythology, he should have been much cooler than he was. He’s not especially intimidating, I didn’t pay much attention to the story surrounding him, and the whole fight has that strange visual effect that looks even more ridiculous in a screenshot, as seen above.

Overall, though, I really enjoyed Dead or Alive 2 for what it was. It’s definitely not my favorite fighting game, even among 3D fighters, but it’s memorable and a lot of fun to play. Having so much virtual eye candy certainly doesn’t hurt either. I was actually kind of shocked that the series eventually became an Xbox exclusive for about two console generations. That always surprised me because Japan largely rejected the Xbox family of consoles, meaning the series had to rely much more heavily on players in North America and Europe to keep making money.