Well it's been a few days now and I've put a few hours total into DOA5. Polished off the story mode last night , I've done a bit of training and survival mode. I think it's long enough to form an opinion.
In short, it's good, it's fun but it's not great and honestly- Dead or Alive 4 was in many important ways a more polished and fun game. My earlier comments about doa5 feeling like a twisted metal game made after singletrac partnered with GT interactive all those year ago still ring true.
In my many years following team ninja and tecmo I paid particular attention to the level of polish their games recieved when Itagaki was producing them. Dead or alive 2 in the arcades and on dreamcast - it was the nicest looking game available in 1999/2000 and the gameplay systems were tuned to near perfection for what they were trying to do. After that we got DOA2 hardcore (the JP ps2 version doesn't count because it was literally stolen and printed from itagaki's desk he wasn't happy about that, look it up) a title which nearly maxed out the PS2's visual capabilities at launch and added a crapton of extra costumes as well as a couple of new stages. Almost like a deluxe directors cut of an already great game.
Then began the Xbox era, where after seeing how much better the graphics could be on an xbox , itagaki built dead or alive 3 over a 10 month crunch of what was most assuredly development hell and now all the hardcore fans look upon that game as being the best version. It certainly had some of the best backgrounds and added 2 awesome new characters to the mix. I suppose it lacked a bit in the costume department but really, minor issues. It was considered a worthy and polished successor to dead or alive 2 even if it didn't change THAT much.
Finally, there's Itagaki's magnum opus, the oft delayed Ninja Gaiden reboot. Indeed there are aspects of the game that aren't perfect but due to the speed of it's gameplay it's not as though the camera in particular could have been done much better than it was without affecting the gameplay negatively. Combining the best aspects of zelda, onimusha and devil may cry into a relentlessly awesome beat em up that many fans still consider the high mark of the entire genre. Why ? Polish and stubbornness on Itagaki's insistence that everything in the title have interactivity of some kind.
Around this same time we see the rise of the B team at team ninja, a team which itagaki still had approval for and as far as I know was still acting producer. They built Dead or alive extreme beach volleyball, a reasonably fun volleyball game and mildly entertaining casino simulator. It was still about as polished as it could be for what it was, demonstrated the newest in house version of the dead or alive engine as well. Looked great!
At this point we see the convergence of resources within team ninja - seeing how much better the doaX engine was compared to the doa3 engine, Itagaki decides to get a special collection of doa1/doa2 released so that fans can play all 3 dead or alive games on their xbox. Dead or alive 2 receives a ridiculously awesome facelift becoming the most polished team ninja title to date and assets / stages in it are shared with development on dead or alive 4 which at that time was likely in pre-alpha state. As well, after the popularity of the hurricane packs as well as ninja gaiden itself , itagaki approves his new understudy Hayashi to oversea a directors cut of ninja gaiden. One that will merely incorporate the hurricane pack content into the standard ninja gaiden experience. Rebalancing the games difficulty a little bit including adding an easy mode of sorts for people who had a hard time with it. Itagaki was still acting producer for it though. This re-released Ninja Gaiden Black is considered the best beat 'em up action game of all time.
You can see up to this point that everything Itagaki has involvement with was gold , he typically did only some grunt work programming and was more of an active producer and consultant then the straight up director of these games but you can see his style helped propel all of those games into a catagory of their own.
Unfortunately for him I think the scandal at his workplace party kind of did in his motivation and quest for perfection. Hayashi went on to almost solo create dragon sword for the DS which was actually a pretty fun game. Itagaki had to move with almost break from doa2 ultimate onto doa4 and you can tell in the finished product that it didn't get the full polish of his previous games. Internally you'd get a bonus for releasing games every year at tecmo- a task which he and his teams were very good at on the xbox/ps2/dreamcast but unfortunately due to the added scope / detail needed to make doa4 look good it just never happened to the same level. They clearly stopped short around september of 2005 and just decided to clean up bugs and finish what was in the game to make it out before the end of the year and still obtain their bonuses. Itagaki in particular needed the money because he took a demotion and pay cut after the scandal involving his co-worker and the resulting lawsuit. You could see his stress level show in the games themselves but they were still fun. DOA4 had some awesomely polished stages and character models, it's only graphical downfall was that it used the same engine as doa ultimate which had been around since the dreamcast days, heavily modified though it was , it didn't use all the new technology available to it's fullest. Typically team ninja games would really push the hardware but they simply didn't have time for 6 months of polish like they used to. The higher ups at tecmo decided to forgo bonuses for team ninja despite DOA4 shipping on time and doing quite well worldwide , so after all that hard work and stress the team basically got nothing for it. They were then tasked with porting ninja gaiden black to the ps3 as well as making a doax 2. Itagaki wanted nothing to do with the playstation but felt his understudy hayashi would do well enough. Hayashi's team went on to create ninja gaiden sigma while doa x2 was left under itagaki. Again despite not receiving their 2005 bonus check for getting doa 4 out on time , the team toiled away to release doax2 with an even tighter development schedule. I think doax2 was the game that "broke" itagaki, it was so rushed had NONE of the polish present in any of his previous games and I"m pretty sure was only made for a paycheque. It was also stretching thin his management resources because he had left hayashi a team for the ps3 ninja gaiden , was working on doax 2 AND had started work on ninja gaiden 2 with some of his more enthusiastic employees. As we all know at this point, ninja gaiden 2 was released in a state that was practically a beta and it's a shame because the game was awesome in just about every way , had it received the polish of pre-doa4 itagaki we'd have easily been putting it in top 10 lists everywhere. Instead it was released out of spite, co-published by microsoft to prevent it's porting to any other console without massive reworking it was basically kicked out the door and abandoned so that Itagaki could leave with the best employees at team ninja and sue tecmos asses off for failure to pay. A lawsuit which he and his cohorts eventually went on to win.
Prior to his departure though and ignoring the toxic environment he worked in for 2006-2008, the man toiled over perfection in games he released or had his name attached to.
Hayashi though... with the master ninja gone , he was left to do whatever he wanted I think but unlike Itagaki who had no problem telling off the upper management and delaying a game to polish it more- Hayashi just bent over and took it. Most of the team ninja of today is fresh faced new employees , loyal to tecmo-koei with none of the bad blood present during the later itagaki years. Because of this none of them take risks , every release they've made has played it safe or bowed entirely to the goal of profits put down from tecmo-koei's heads. It's because of this current atmosphere we ended up with Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Ninja Gaiden 3 , the former was hayashi deciding that NG2 was disgustingly violent and deciding that no one liked the game for the excessive violence , they did indeed fix many of the 360 versions issues but they added in just as many of their own problems to the game design. The result was an overall neutered experience. Then NG3 they tried to make a game that was appealing only to people that didn't like NG games to begin with and failed miserably because it wasn't much fun. Razors edge looks to rectify that error of judgement at least.
That brings my whole rant full circle at long last- to dead or alive 5. Hayashi's team initially rebuilt ninja gaiden black on the ps3 with what they dubbed the 'sigma engine'. This same engine was used to port ninja gaiden 2 onto ps3. It really plays on the ps3's strengths but it's not a very versatile engine when sent back to the 360. With ninja gaiden 3 they built a brand new game entirely on their own from the ground up using that same engine and further tweaked it to work very well on ps3- in the end this meant that nothing was optimized for 360 and both versions looked almost the same.
Obviously to save money this same engine was used again for dead or alive 5. From reading digital foundry head to head stuff and seeing that the main issue with ps3/360 development is their video cards are very close but the 360 can simply render more special effects as well as the added eedram which gives you free 2x anti-aliasing. Comparing ram , since the 360 has 1 block of similarly clocked 512 MB unified memory , you can use tons of it for fantastic texturing, compared to the ps3 which has 256 multipurpose but slower ram and 256mb of fast video memory. In english, this means it's harder to get better textures from the ps3 because you have a hard physical cap. So when you develop for ps3 then port to 360 you have most likely, extra power that you have to spend time to use properly.
They did NOT do this with doa5. Instead they used up 90% of the ps3 texture memory on the character models which is a noble approach but the sacrifice hardly seems worth it- the texture maps on EVERYTHING else look ps2 level. The floors, the walls, the barrels. All of it just looks ugly, not to mention the average background in the game is severly poly starved and special effect lacking as well. The sweat and dirt system present in the game is a nice addition but it uses up every ounce of extra power their engine can produce on ps3 and so the 360 port suffers moreso. I'm no pixel counter so I have no idea if both versions are running sub HD, I know ninja gaiden 3 was. it also seems to me that during win poses the game locks to 30 fps and gains a slight image quality boost, so perhaps gameplay is sub HD 60fps with no AA and win poses turn on a bit of AA and lock to 30 fps in HD ? Who knows. Either way the backgrounds look xbox 1 level with ps2 quality textures and just aren't as much fun to play in as doa4 or any previous doa for that matter.
What ultimately saves this game, is that enough of the previous entries core gameplay is intact, that what's here is still overall - fun to play. Successfully landing a critical burst into a stage specific danger zone is indeed entertaining. I just wish the stages themselves were more fun to fight in beyond these gimmicks. It really doesn't help the game much when the story mode takes place on the worst offender of bad texturing and lame stage design present within the entire game- the offshore oilrig. Technically it has 3 or 4 areas on it but they are all incredibly dull. Speaking of story mode, I found it very lazy how it ended and it only furthers my theory that doa5 is a low budget beta of doa6. The undoubtedly next gen sequel that will fix all the graphical issues by simply being on stronger hardware. I'm curious to see how DOA5 will look about a year from now after a few costume packs and some extra stages are added in. Especially when the wii U version comes out, will it fix some of those graphical issues ?
Sorry for the wall of text people. It's just team ninja has been one of my favorite developers since dead or alive 2 came out and I want to see them succeed in the wake of Itagaki's departure, I really do! DOA5 is a decent game , I just wanted more out of it I think.
