Dead or Alive 5 was announced with a trailer of Ryu Hayabusa and friendly rival Hayate battling on a Tokyo rooftop. This confused many people, wondering why Koei Tecmo and Team Ninja were revealing their famous fanservice fighter with two male ninjas and focusing on the game’s battle system. Forums began discussing why Team Ninja was not using the general series protagonists of Kasumi and Ayane, buxom half-sister ninjas, to reveal their new game. Soon, Team Ninja revealed their awkward new slogan for the game, “I’m a Fighter,” emblazoned on all the advertising and pictures of their fighters. Along with this, they revealed Mila, an attractive MMA fighter whose focus was fighting first and all else second. While clearly designed to be pretty, Mila did not match the barbie doll looks of the rest of the cast, and could have fit in just as well in Street Fighter as she did in Dead or Alive. Team Ninja, it seems, wanted Dead or Alive to be taken seriously.
It didn’t work.
While most people agree that Dead or Alive 5 is the best the series has ever been, sales did not follow through. Koei Tecmo was making changes to the series to pursue the eSports scene, an arena that eluded Dead or Alive despite relative popularity. The rise of streaming has made fighting games into evergreen titles, constantly in the public eye through tournaments and celebrity streamers, and Tecmo Koei wanted a piece of that. They even included a ticker in Dead or Alive 5’s home screen, advertising every small tournament that featured Dead or Alive 5 with the kind of hope and earnestness that evokes a kind of sad smile it never worked out for them. Koei Tecmo decided to institute their Plan B, lean into its worst tendencies.
The DOA community was having a similar crisis of conscience at the time. While DOA5 was incredibly fun to play, and very much could become a tournament-viable game, the specter of creepy sexuality that hung over it was still there. If they wanted the game to be taken seriously, they had to do what very few fighting games resort to: they banned almost half the costumes in the game for tournaments. A lot of the community, especially the parts that liked DOA as a game but also liked the fanservice, hated this decision and argued against it. The community started to tear itself apart over whether legitimizing the game was worth losing their identity.
Koei Tecmo, having failed at the eSports strategy, was now pouring out Dead or Alive 5 DLC through every orifice (and for every orifice). Dozens of costume packs that were the full price of games themselves were released — Christmas packs, football packs, Halloween packs, dress packs, bikini packs; if you have a fetish, Koei Tecmo was more than willing to cater to it. They released DLC characters Marie Rose (an 18 year-old maid that looked 14), Nyotengu (a female version of former final boss Tengu, now humanoid and with large breasts), and Honoka (another 18 year-old with giant breasts and a child-like personality), all three of which became some of the most popular characters in the series according to DOAX3’s character polls. After a brief stint of trying to change their reputation, the creators of DOA now chose to revel in it.
And this is on sale for Thanksgiving.
It is this context that birthed DOAX3. The extensive whale hunting that found its genesis in Dead or Alive 5 lead naturally to Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, where they could sell expensive physical items along with the game to the audience that happily buys these things, damn the expense. Where Dead or Alive tried and failed to be taken seriously, Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is the admission that the experiment is not worth the opportunity cost when there is money to be made with what they know works.
