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Where some fighting games let us create ridiculous characters with custom costumes (looking at you, Tekken 7 and Soulcalibur VI), Dead Or Alive 6 boldly makes its pugilists look ludicrous by default. Team Ninja's latest face-puncher is out now, released this morning, and is the first in the series to launch for PC on the same day as its console counterparts. "That's good and all,…
Following the epic boyband road trip of Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix now plan to let us create our own pop trios in Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. Today they announced the 3v3 crossover brawler, made with Dead Or Alive developers Team Ninja and released on PlayStation 4 in 2018, is coming to PC as a free-to-play edition. I think my dream pop trio might be…
Feature: New Testaments
New Testaments is a new monthly column in which Amr Al-Aaser presents an overlooked modern game and explicates its best ideas. Nioh is the kind of game that this column exists for. On release it quickly saw itself buried beneath the comparisons to Dark Souls, praised for the ways it imitated the series, and criticised for its failings in repeating From Software's successes. But while…
Dead or Alive 6 will tone down the wobbly bits, half-heartedly
It’s hard to separate fighting game Dead or Alive from its masturbatory fantasy aesthetic, but for the sixth outing, game director Yohei Shimbori says Team Ninja is trying to do just that. Sort of. Maybe. If the fans are OK with it. Maybe it will be worse!
Koei Tecmo have announced a sequel to 2017's neat-o action-RPG Nioh, imaginatively named Nioh 2. So far it's only confirmed for PlayStation 4, but I wouldn't worry too much: the original wasn't even announced for PC until it had been out on PS4 for months. A PC release for this too would seem likely. Hopefully. The game you might've heard described as "Dark Souls but…
Dead or Alive 6 was announced today, following up the last iteration which was unleashed way back in 2012. The new title has an expanded roster, a debut trailer that we've got embedded below, and plenty of electricity shooting out of hands and/or out of the floor and/or the electrified wires of the battleground boundaries that keep your fighters contained. Team Ninja has also worked…
Nioh is a peculiar beast in that we consider it to possess "one of the finest combat systems ever put on a screen", but at the same time its lack of keyboard and mouse support makes it a bit of a black sheep in the PC family. Dark Souls comparisons have been inevitable for Nioh, not only because of its steely try'n'die fantasy swordplay, but…
Feature: Soulsful
Describing a game as X meets Dark Souls is a sure way to invite mockery and contempt. It's lazy critical short-hand, people will say, and they're often correct. Well, prepare to mock. But only a little. I promise I'm not being lazy when I say that Nioh is Dark Souls meets Sengoku period Japan though, and to prove it I'm going to use that short-hand…
While the release of Team Ninja's samurai Souls-like Nioh is still a couple days off yet (due this Tuesday, November 7th), the PC launch trailer hopes to impress upon you that the game was very well received by the press on consoles, as dense with effusive praise as it is with angry demons. It might read a little like that overly enthusiastic Batman: Arkham City GOTY box, but…
My PS4 is basically a machine for playing off-brand Dark Souls games*. The best of them is Bloodborne, which is a goth-horror masterpiece that came out of the studio that created Souls, From Software. I dearly hope to see it on PC one day. The other is not a From original but rather something of a Fromage. Its name is Nioh [official site] and it's…
If you missed out on playing Dead or Alive 5 Last Round [official site] because you didn't feel like paying full price for a fighter you'd probably play a few minutes and forget about, sorry about that. You still have to pay full price if you want to play the full game on Steam, but if you'd still rather not, soon you'll be able to opt…
I admire how much Dead or Alive embraces its silliness. The fighting game series might be known for its terrifying unreal simulation of breasts, but that's unfair to the many other oddities in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round [official site]: geishas fighting roughnecks, huge amounts of zany clothing and costumes, tiger maulings, a colossal Buddha statue coming alive to deck pugilists, and so on.…
I am glad to see more fighting games come to PC, and especially one where you can have a lady dressed as Sexy Sherlock Holmes kick a member of a Whitesnake cover band off a roof. Publishers Tecmo Koei have announced a PC port of DoA 5 Last Round, Team Ninja's next zany person-puncher. It's the third main version of DoA 5, expanded in the…
