Akumasama
Active Member
Around 6 months have passed, several patches, one major one which is probably the last one we'll see unless they decide to release some big stuff as a DLC (which is unlikely, imho, only new costumes will come), I think it's long enough to be able to analyze the game in a more cold-minded way that it would have been possible when the game was too fresh.
I love the new gameplay of DoA5, despite my complaints at start I wouldn't go back now.
Not trying to say DoA4 sucked, I still love it and in a couple of gameplay aspects I probably liked it more than DoA5, but overall I wouldn't go back. I had the same feelings when DoA4 came up, comparing it to DoAU, altough that was a much bigger of a difference/impact to me, compared to the DoA4>DoA5
In my opinion some things that still do not work in DoA5 are:
I love the new gameplay of DoA5, despite my complaints at start I wouldn't go back now.
Not trying to say DoA4 sucked, I still love it and in a couple of gameplay aspects I probably liked it more than DoA5, but overall I wouldn't go back. I had the same feelings when DoA4 came up, comparing it to DoAU, altough that was a much bigger of a difference/impact to me, compared to the DoA4>DoA5
In my opinion some things that still do not work in DoA5 are:
- Color Palette: new character design is good, but the new textures and colours are really not "coloured" enough, too pallid, tend to gray scale
- Menus: ugly and slow
- Online: the simple and fast way of doing online DoA4/DoAU had was different from all other online BEUs, and maybe that's why I liked it, it was different. It was a standard of its own, there was no need to imitate the rest (especially if these are the buggy results)
- New Sound effects: can find them in Dimensions too, ugly. The permanently present rap-music is ugly too. Damn it this is a JP game not an US ones >_>
- Stages: dunno what to complain about here. They're many, lots of variations, some are reaaaally cool, but somehow I feel "something" is missing, don't know what, maybe it's those low-res "dirty" textures or the issue about colours.
- Costumes: it's not the overall number and I don't want to enter inside the tricky discussion of "DLC yes" vs "DLC no". I'm talking from a pure attention developers dedicated to costumes. Most are rehashes, recolours or are just very plain and simple, compared to the old games costumes which were way more detailed, unique and required a whole more lot of work on their side. It kinda showed it did, the result was much better imho.
- Missing characters and out-of-place ones: I miss Leon altough I can understand it being missing, it was one of the least liked characters. But Ein? It was one of the most liked, not the same as Hitomi at all and all the rest. Also, while I was very excited about the VF character guests, 3 guests is a bit too much, especially if you're gonna skip some of the series' own character. The problem with the VF chars is that they look more like a copypaste from VF rather than a real, deep, careful adaptation of those characters to the DoA world and mechanics. They just don't blend well together, I hate it in the end.
- Changed characters: It's a standard in nowadays BEUs, and seeing how MUCH some characters get completely changed in other games (Soul Calibur!), you can't really complain here. Still some characters got changed too much and I don't like it. It's not a matter of them being stronger or weaker, I don't care, it's about them being too different. Tweaking properties and frames of moves is ok, but cutting so many moves out and adding so many more? Also some of the new animations look really odd and out of place, makes you wonder why they had to change them at all. Changing characters too much is just something I'll never like, ever. I guess this kinda applies to DoA4 compared to DoA3 though. talking about character-specific changes, not general game mechanics ones. I'm too biased atm to be able to judge that. Do you think there were more "big changes" between DoA3>DoA4 or DoA4>DoA5? I guess it depends on the character. Overall I feel DoA5>DoA5 had way more changes, some of which were really unnecessary, which makes me even more disappointed.
