#976 Dead or Alive 1 (ARC) Boss: Raidou playthrough.
0A playthrough of the boss Raidou in Tecmo's Dead or Alive 1.
So, here we are. Dead or Alive. Joy.
Dead or Alive is easily my least favourite of the main fighting game series. It's always been a game with more emphasis on style over substance, usually in the form of its incredible stages, and the over-emphasis on costume-acquiring for female characters. It also has one of the absolute most flawed fighting engines in existence, and it comes down to one thing; the counter button. This button is your worst goddamn nightmare, as in every game the AI will happily use it to bullshit levels of absurdity, countering nearly everything you do or throwing you off of your combos. It's also used to execute certain holds, and the AI nearly always seems to have priority over you with its holds and throws. You do get used it after a while however, especially in the later titles, and by DOA5 in particular I found myself getting quite used to it and kind of appreciating its inclusion, though I still think it’s really damn cheat.
DoA is also extremely derivative of Virtua Fighter as a series, right down to having a mimic boss as its first boss and quite obviously just being a modified version of Virtua Fighter 2, although in hindsight I’ve come to realise that it’s effectively almost a replacement to Fighting Vipers as the zany, quirky alternative to Virtua Fighter’s modest design. Team Ninja have never really taken the series all too seriously (as evident from the fact that no less than three DoA Xtreme Volleyball games exist), and the series has continually either been left to wallow in obscurity or, now, more recently, been milked for every left drop of what it's worth.
Raidou is yet another mimic boss. Like Dural, all his moves are derived from one of the regular playable characters, which makes him a wholly unique character. He is time-released as a result, but ultimately must be hacked to be played as in the arcade version of the game, unless you want to leave an emulator running on your computer for weeks on end. Which you shouldn’t do regardless, as the Model 2 emulator has a huge tendency to crash. Raidou in terms of design quite good, looking rather intimidating. The actual character himself is a piece of shit, something which I'll talk more about in a later video.
Like VF2 and Last Bronx, the other fighting games on the Model 2 engine, Dead or Alive 1 is an innately extremely tough game if you don’t know what you’re doing. As with Last Bronx, my original playthrough for this was 50 minutes long, with 30 mins of that being spent on fighting Gen-Fu, and it nearly always came down to that bloody counter button. This game also has perhaps one of the nastiest/best mechanics in any arcade fighting game there is, depending on how you see it. I lean more towards the latter though. If the player hasn't won a match, the AI will go easier on them. Once I've won a round though, they go full bullshit and counter and/or dodge every move I try. It's an interesting mechanic, but I find it a touch malicious in the way it effectively lulls you into the false sense of security.
As you can see though, this playthrough went hilariously well. Just like my Red Eye playthrough for Last Bronx, I managed to knock 40 minutes off of my playing time by finding the enemy’s weakness and then exploiting it for all its worth. That’s no less than three Model 2 fighting games I’ve found exploits for (VF2, Last Bronx and this one), and it’s more than a little jarring to have been the one to conquer these seemingly impossible titles. I feel like the guy who discovered that Achilles’ weakness was his heel; it’s weird for such monstrous entities to have such evident exploits.
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