Koei Tecmo Announces New Dead or Alive Game and DoA6 Last Round

The latest State of Play stream turned out to be quite a surprise for the FGC. Out of all the announcements, the facts that a new Dead or Alive game is in development, was one of the least expected ones.

They don't give away too much, the whole teaser is less than 30 seconds, and if you don't count the intro or outro, it's barely longer than 10 seconds. The video mostly shows off Ryu Hayabusa trading a few blows with what seems to be Kasumi, although it's interesting to note that the face is deliberately obscured throughout the teaser.

What's not too obscured is Dead or Alive's characteristic fan service, which almost feels like a statement after Dead or Alive 6's reveal trailer was accused of toning things down in that regard.

Between announcing it as a "new project" and concluding the teaser with "the dawn of a new chapter awaits," we might be looking at a soft reboot of sorts. We don't see this with fighting games all that often, but it's a common trend among games in general to start hiding the numbers once they get past a certain point. Considering how long this series has been out of the spotlight, it might be a wise decision to mark the next title as a new beginning.

In general, it feels like this might be the ideal time for Dead or Alive to make a comeback. The recent Ninja Gaiden 4, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black remake, and Ninja Gaiden Ragebound have brought some of the familiar characters back into the mainstream, at least to some extent. At the same time, Tekken doesn't feel like it has the same grip on the genre after the mixed reception and continued missteps of Tekken 8.

Depending on when the new Virtua Fighter comes out, Dead or Alive might get an uncontested launch period and finally get a lot of eyes on the game.

Although admittedly, I don't think any of us would be surprised if Keoi Tecmo manages to sabotage themselves in one way or another, it's almost customary for every fighting game release. Price point, marketing, and online functionality will likely become major factors in how successful this game will end up being.

On the more positive side, in the current gaming climate, it should be easy enough to dismiss the usual criticism of Dead or Alive simply being too openly titillating to succeed or earn interest of larger audiences. It certainly didn't impede the popularity of Marvel Rivals, or many of the currently popular gacha games. Hell, people were going wild for the Street Fighter 6 outfits, and Tekken 8 regularly embraces that side of the game too.

Aside from this new title, Koei Tecmo also announced a definitive version of the current entry – Dead or Alive 6 Last Round. 

By and large, the primary goal behind it seems to be to bring the game to modern platforms (PS5 and XBox Series S/X). Aside from that, this appears to be a very lacking offering. It's simply DoA6 with DLC characters, though it seemingly will not include the mountains of costume DLCs.

Disappointingly, it will also feature neither rollback (somewhat expectedly) nor cross-platform matchmaking. That said, on Team Ninja's website they promise more characters and skins. Considering that DoA6 wasn't very popular, and that Last Round is comparatively an even worse offering than that game was on release, it's hard to imagine why they would expend budget to make further DLCs.