After indulging in the bliss of playing Soul Calibur, I was eager to wet my appetite on Dead or Alive 2, the next decent fighter for Dreamcast. From the creators of such classics as Tecmo Super Bowl comes a fighter that does in fact manage to bite closely at the heels of Soul Calibur but in my honest opinion could have used a little more polishing and embellishment. In playing these two fighters, I've had to use Soul Calibur as a benchmark to meter future attempts and re-defining this genre.

The visuals and environments in DOA2 are stunning to say the least. The fighting areas are in fact very detailed with light reflections off marble hard floors, fireflies and splashing water. The character detail is even a little bit more defined than Soul Calibur and it would seem they are rather larger in size and contain more polygons giving a very smooth appearance to them. Kasumi is one hot chick! Man, I was blown away at how beautiful the girls, uh, I mean the game, was. One thing I noticed was stranding and clothing movement and reaction of fabric to gusts of air or changes in the movement of the character. The physics modeling for this game is very realistic. I appreciated the approach to having multi-tiered stages where you could knock your opponent to a lower area and continue your relentless assault there. My favorite is kicking someone out of the church window onto the area below. Why haven't game makers effectively employed this before?

The game itself plays very solidly, with many moves available and combos galore but there's something that this game lacks in terms of the kind of originality that Soul Calibur had. The fighters do not have any weapons other than their hands and feet, which is fine but in general you can usually expect the same button to do just about the same thing i.e kick, punch, block, for each character. The game itself is defaulted in Arcade or "Story" mode to only one round per match, and I don't know why but I've always been a best 2 out of 3 kind of guy. The brief transitions about each fighter are pretty lame in terms of keeping my interest or learning anything inherantly valuable about my fighter. The endings when each fighter defeats Tengu in "Story" mode are less than stellar, and I have yet to see a Next - Gen fighter with thought provoking or satisfying endings. This game has about half as many fighters as there were in Soul Calibur, and in general there is little in the way of bonuses or hidden prizes for achievement warrenting continued play beyond beating the game with every character. The game on it's default settings isn't very hard to complete. What's the deal with one boss fighters? This seems to be the trend but you fight all the other guys and there's this one lone character that is the "Boss" and you defeat him and it's all over. It would be more interesting if you could fite a few sub-bosses before getting to the real thing.

The background game music didn't really impress me, but it wasn't all that bad either. I've heard worse, but it was no where near the kind of intensity of Soul Calibur. The sound effects really rumbled my Trinitron's Surround Sound on some levels, and were well balanced. The intact Japanese voice overs were a welcomed addition to the ambiance of the game, but I would have liked if there had been a wider variety of phrases and taunts for each character than the basic set of lines each fighter retained. Soul Calibur did seem to have more character vocals than DOA2, but then again Soul Calibur had more characters overall.

This game is also available for the Playstation 2 in Japan, with a few more features and perhaps the graphics are a tweak better, but no one here in the states has this system yet. If you have a Dreamcast, then this game is very much worth the buy at $39.95. It's more fun as a party game where you can go against a human opponent than anything else. Almost as good as Soul Calibur, but no cigar this time.