Game: Dead or Alive: Paradise
Publisher: Tecmo/Koei
Developer: Tecmo
Genre: Sports Sim (sorta)
Price: $30
Verdict: Titilation thinly veiled by bland minigames
Pros: It is a return for Dead or Alive’s beach volleyball
Cons: Trying to play volleyball is more trouble than it’s worth
Tecmo is well known for games that blend ultra-gory violence with female characters that are obscenely well-proportioned and outfitted leaving little to the imagination. Occasionally they deviate from this formula, dropping the violence and the clothing to give a whole new kind of experience.
Beginning with Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball on the original Xbox, Tecmo dressed its female characters from Dead or Alive in the smallest bikinis they could get away with and pitted them against each other in a bizarre blend of voyeurism and addictive gameplay.
Dead or Alive Paradise extends this idea by reducing the volleyball element, adding a poker, blackjack and cranking up the voyeurism to a new level.
Paradise is basically a game that invites you to become your favourite Dead or Alive girl and enjoy a beach holiday on a tropical island along with all the other female cast members of the classic fighting series.
There is beach volleyball in there, the pool dash (which involves an interesting spin on the quick time event in order to cross a bunch of floats laid out across the pool) and in the evenings there is a casino in which you can gamble away your money against the other girls.
The daytime games reward you with the game’s currency which you can place bets with. There are also a handful of shops where you can buy trinkets and bikinis either for your own character or as gifts for the other girls. The gifts will allow you to make friends with the other girls so they will partner up with you for hanging out and maybe even a game of beach volleyball. Without using gifts it is very difficult to get the girls to join you; if you stink at the volleyball you will have to go through the whole gift giving process again in order to bribe your partner back to play again.
Like every beach holiday you’ve been on, there are plenty of opportunities for sunbathing and frolicking in which you can take photos of your girl and her companion. Of course you need to buy film from one of the shops but it does add to the odd realism of the holiday environment that Tecmo has created.
The minigames are fairly well designed. The volleyball is fun, if a little laggy, and lacks a bit of the addictiveness of the previous Xbox title. The gambling minigames are fun as well but they tend to rely a bit more on the luck of the deal than any kind of skill at poker or blackjack. There is also a chance to play slot machines as well, but a video-game version of a slot machine seems even more pointless to play than a real one.
The entirety of Dead Or Alive Paradise is technically well executed, especially for a mobile PSP title. The graphics are surprisingly smooth, even on my PSP-1000′s elderly, slightly scraggy screen. The whole experience is rather polished and, to be quite honest, I’d be really annoyed if it wasn’t: Tecmo has been at these shenanigans for long enough.
A caution: playing this game will surely make you go blind. The main point of the game is not to master socialising with your fellow holiday makers, become skilled beach volleyball players or even gamble your butt off at casino card games and slots. Dead Or Alive Paradise seems to have been created for one purpose only: ogling semi-naked women with intensely idealized proportions. This is a game that is exceptionally one dimensional, to the point where you begin to wonder why you bothered playing it in the first place.
With all the different mini-games on offer in the game, Paradise also seems to lack focus. It just meanders through a series of minigames linked loosely by interactive animations of girls in bikinis slathering on sunblock that effervesces with curious heart-shaped bubbles. This gives the game a schizophrenic yet lethargic feel to it, as if it is unashamedly admitting that the developers spent so much time polishing off (pun firmly intended) the graphics that they forgot to create any kind of concept for gameplay.
Where Dead Or Alive Beach Volleyball stood up on its own as an intensely addictive volleyball sim that just happens to feature scantily-clad women, Paradise ditches any pretense at gaming credibility by focusing on gawping at the character models rather than gameplay.
Dead Or Alive Paradise is a bizarre, vacuous and entirely frivolous game. It seeks to fill a gap that, while it may exist in Japan, will never exist in the Western markets. It does provide a taste of the more sensationalistic side to Japanese gaming culture. While is may seem like an enticing curiosity it loses its allure quicker than Megan Fox as soon as she opens her mouth to talk.
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