Dead or Alive 6 Last Round Review

I’ve always liked Dead or Alive – unfortunately, that sentence usually has to be followed by a “but,” lest people think you’re some kind of weird pervert. “Not like that!” you might yell. “I think the Triangle System is rad!” It’s tiresome, and Dead or Alive 6 is a mechanically rich fighting game that deserves better than that stuff dominating the conversation around it. That said, while everything that made it special in 2019 still holds up today, Last Round specifically just doesn’t feel worth the cash if you already own the original – and there are several things missing from it that really should have been included in a re-release of a seven-year-old game.

Before we jump into the ring and throw some punches, let’s set some ground rules and establish what Last Round is (and unfortunately is not). Last Round is Dead or Alive 6 bundled with five of the seven DLC fighters previously released for the original game (Nyotengu, Phase 4, Momiji, Rachel, and Tamaki), five new costumes each for Kasumi, Ayane, Marie Rose, Honaka, and NiCO, a new Photo Mode, and some small but solid visual updates. That’s it.

What is not included are several hundred DLC costumes (this is not a joke; the Steam page currently lists 440 pieces of DLC, though some are bundles and character unlocks), although you can import most of what you already own if you’ve previously bought an outfit in the original release of DOA6. What you do not seem to be able to transfer are unlocks for the guest characters Mai Shiranui and Kula Diamond from The King of Fighters series – you’ll have to buy them for $11 each, even if you already owned them. Yikes.

And that’s Last Round. There are no new characters or returning stages from older games, as there were in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round. There is no cross-platform play, no rollback netcode, and no Tag Battle, despite fans begging for these additions for years. Team Ninja has promised additional characters and costumes down the line, but this threadbare re-release is absolutely baffling. Dead or Alive 6 is seven years old. If all the existing DLC were included for free or some impactful new feature were added then maybe you could justify it. But as it is, Last Round just feels like an excuse to sell more costumes. Those costumes are nice, sure, but there’s really no excuse for why they weren’t just new DLC.

I’m a Fighter

That’s a bummer, because Dead or Alive 6 is still a great fighter. The Dead or Alive series has always been extremely simple: one button for punches, one for kicks, one for throws, one for holds, and a “new” (as of the 2019 original) special attack button that performs a Fatal Rush autocombo and unlocks special meter moves. But more than a lot of fighters, Dead or Alive is, at its best, a chess match. Using what’s known as the Triangle System, every move invites a countermove – strikes beat throws, throws beat holds, holds beat strikes – and every attack is also an opening, if you’re good enough.

What makes this fighting system great has always been the holds. See, you can counter essentially any strike by pressing hold and the direction you expect the attack to hit (high, low, or mid, though mid punches and mid kicks require different directional inputs), potentially stopping any offensive in its tracks. Holds are inherently risky, though. They won’t stop throws and still lose to strikes if mistimed or if you don’t use the right one – but land a hold right and you can swing an entire round. It’s absurdly satisfying to pull off, even against the computer.

The mind game that creates rules, and it’s still here in Last Round, but it doesn’t change that Dead or Alive is also incredibly easy to pick up. It’s not quite as deep as, say, Virtua Fighter, but anyone can play Dead or Alive 6. Getting good at it involves really digging into moves and countermoves, knowing how both the character you’re playing and the one you’re playing against work, and using that knowledge to pick the right option at the right time. It feels great when you land a hit, and hurts to take one.

When you’re getting smacked around and watching your health bar go the way of the dodo, it stings. But it should. That means you made a mistake. Shouldn’t have mistimed that hold, ya know? But when you max out your Break Gauge in order to hit a Break Blow – think Critical Blows from Dead or Alive 5 – or get just enough Break Gauge to pull off a Break Hold and turn the tables with a nifty counter, the Triangle System sings. Adding a meter to a 3D fighter is always risky (just ask Tekken fans how they feel about Heat in Tekken 8), but I think Dead or Alive 6’s implementation has managed to stand the test of time.

Dead or Alive 6 Last Round also feels absurdly good to play on PC. Hits carry weight and impact, characters feel agile, and matches are quick and engaging. You can pull off some truly sick combos if you know how, but matches still revolve around risk-reward decision making and execution. I’m also still a big fan of the Danger Zones, which range from overtly silly things like “you got blasted into a pterodactyl egg and now the pterodactyls are Big Mad at you” to “it’s funny when someone falls down a really big hill and hits everything along the way.” Positioning, poise, and proper timing are elements of any fighting game, but it’s hard to overstate how simple and clean and good Dead or Alive’s moment-to-moment game feel is. Everything just flows.

As someone who played a lot around the original’s release in 2019 but didn’t keep up with every update since, one of the benefits of Last Round is getting to use the five included DLC characters I hadn’t tried out. I enjoyed them all, but really clicked with Momiji, Rachel, and Phase 4. Momiji trades power for speed and aggression, while Rachel is all brute strength through short strings that turn into lots of damage, which tracks if you’ve played as either of them in Ninja Gaiden. Phase 4, well… she can do a little bit of everything – one of those “feels immediately good to play” kind of characters, at least for me. I definitely want to spend more time with her.

What’s Old is New Again

Dead or Alive 6 is otherwise the same game I remember – and though that’s disappointing for a $40 re-release, it’s mostly a good thing when it comes to the actual game stuff. It still has excellent teaching tools, including an incredibly detailed tutorial, command training, your standard training mode (complete with frame data), and combo trials for each character. If this is your first Dead or Alive, it’s easy to find your footing, and if you’re knocking off some rust, these things still help a lot.

I’m also a big fan of DOA Quest, a challenge mode that puts you into a fight and gives you up to three tasks to complete, like doing X amount of damage in a combo or hitting an enemy while they’re sidestepping. The best part is that if you don’t know how to do something, you can press a button and be immediately taken to the appropriate lesson in the tutorial, practice to your heart’s content, and then go back to DOA Quest when you’re done. Incredible. Fighting games are hard to learn and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, so good teaching tools are essential to getting people in and keeping them around. DOA6 may be seven years old, but it got this stuff right, and that’s a big deal.

The other single-player modes are good, too. Say what you will, but I like the enjoyably silly if disjointed story mode. Sure, it’s about tournaments and evil corporations and global conspiracies and ninjas and cyborgs and all sorts of crazy stuff, but it’s also very endearing. Where else can you see a guy yell “Hey, ninja man!” at an actual ninja before throwing a steel drum at him and immediately thereafter watch two women bond over their love of fighting, and then watch a couple of kids cheer on a New York street fighter after a sparring match? Not many places, and I would much rather play through this than something like Street Fighter 6’s World Tour, or just watch a movie like in Guilty Gear Strive.

It’s also nice to see a fighting game campaign that puts women in its lead roles instead of relegating them to supporting parts like most others do. The boys play their parts and get their moments, but this show mostly belongs to Kasumi, Helena, Ayane, Honaka, Laifeng, and Hitomi. They make choices, have agency, and solve their own problems in a way people who have only ever seen them playing beach volleyball might not expect. And sure, the story is a little Looney Tunes, but every fighting game’s is. Ever paid attention to Street Fighter lore? There’s a guy who thinks he’s a car, and that might not even be the weirdest part of it. Dead or Alive even makes a hell of a lot more sense than something like Mortal Kombat (and I say this as someone who likes MK’s nonsense), and while the overarching plot can be messy, the individual scenes and character interactions work well and are a lot of fun.

Of course, that’s not the reputation Dead or Alive is typically known for, and because one of the selling points of Last Round is new costumes and a Photo Mode, I suppose I now have to talk about the thing that consumes every piece of criticism ever written about this series: how everyone looks and moves. Yes, the women look Like That™. Yes, many of them are very bouncy. Yes, you can change their hairstyles, give them glasses, and even dress them in revealing outfits if you’re into that (though you’ll still need to pay extra for the truly egregious stuff). Personally, I’m here for the punching.

If we’re being honest, there is no shortage of sexy characters in fighting games; Soul Calibur’s Ivy is quite literally a dominatrix and Capcom’s sexy outfits for Chun-Li sell so well that the last couple Street Fighters made the GDP of a small country. If anything, fighting games have only gotten hornier as time has gone on. I mean, have you seen the Guilty Gear cast? Or Street Fighter’s Juri, who is now Foot Fetish: The Character? Compared to some of that stuff, Dead or Alive 6’s brand of horny feels kind of… quaint? Some of the outfits here are tacky or tasteless, yeah, but I also don’t have to purchase or use them, or let them define my entire perception of Last Round. And if someone does use one of the ones I dislike online? All the more reason to kick their ass.

In fact, many of the visual improvements that were dismissed in 2019 as Team Ninja “being weird” actually hold up quite well. It rules that characters sweat during combat and you can see cuts and bruises on their faces and bodies when they’re doing their win poses. You should be a little sweaty and beat up after a fight, and it doesn’t feel like those details have been added with purely exploitative, leering intentions. Fighting is a brutal, bloody business. I like that Dead or Alive 6’s characters look like they’ve been in a brawl after a knock down, drag out fight. Don’t get me wrong: you’d never mistake Dead or Alive 6 for a fighter made today. It looks like a very pretty PS4 game, which it functionally is, but it at least holds up really well.

So yeah, Dead or Alive is still Dead or Alive, but you have to take the good with the bad, and there is certainly good here. Even with the DLC issues, I’d kill to have this many costume options in most modern fighters, and it’s nice that you can unlock so many of them just by playing as characters and spending in-game cash. Some of them are tacky, but I’d rather put Helena into one of her many fabulous dresses than a swimsuit anyway. There’s also an impressive visual variety across everyone’s designs, especially in an age when we’re seeing a lot of the same face shapes and body types be recycled. I want to be clear: I’m not saying Dead or Alive 6 is immune to criticism. Some of it is absolutely deserved; but spending time with it after a few years away also makes me think there’s stuff here that deserves more praise than we previously gave it credit for. I hope we can be normal about that.

Rollback Netcode, My Beloved

As for other single-player modes, well, there’s no shortage. The lack of Tag Battle in this release is lousy, but there’s still plenty to do, like standard versus, arcade, and survival modes, a replay theater, a library with lore entries and trivia, and a music room (in addition to the aforementioned story mode and DOA Quest). Even if you never want to play online, there’s lots here to occupy you.

I even like the new Photo Mode (despite the fact that it will inevitably be used for evil). It’s easy to pick your characters and stage and go through their move list frame by frame in order to get the shots you want. I wish there was more freedom when it came to moving the camera; it’s largely locked in place, though you can zoom in and out and rotate the characters to compensate. Photo Mode also doesn’t work quite as well on a fightstick as I’d like because some options are mapped to the right analog stick, but it’s solid enough.

Finally, let’s talk about online play. The lack of cross-platform play in 2026 is completely inexcusable, but the lack of rollback, while equally maddening, is easier to understand because it’s famously difficult to implement in 3D games. That said, Last Round’s netcode worked surprisingly well when I tested it. I live in New York and played someone in Texas and our matches were, aside from one minor instance of stuttering, incredibly smooth. However, we were both on wired connections. Now, I’m of the opinion that people who play fighting games on wireless connections are ninja dogs who will never see heaven, but the fact remains that a lot of people play that way and it’s going to impact matches. It’s wild that Team Ninja had the opportunity to implement a rollback solution here (which they could have then refined in future games) and simply chose not to. Is it gamebreaking? No. But it’s an incredibly disappointing choice.