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.

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.

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.

The console versions of Dead or Alive 6 infamously dealt with pretty substantial input lag – the delay between when you press a button and when the character performs the action you’ve told them to, even when playing offline. It could be as high as eight frames, and it does not seem to have been addressed at all in the console releases of Last Round. Some amount of input lag is common in fighting games, but eight frames is bad by any standard. As with the original release, however, the PC version (which is what we used for this review) has minimal input lag. It sucks that this issue is yet another thing that wasn’t addressed in Last Round, and it’s a significant enough problem that Dead or Alive 6 is once again much harder to recommend if you can only play it on console.

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.

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.

Arcade cabinets have made a major comeback over the last few years, with companies like Arcade1Up bringing replica cabinets to market that can transform any room. While these units are highly sought after, they take up so much space, so it can be challenging to find a place for one. However, there is a perfect line of arcade cabinets from Numskull that addresses this very problem: Quarter Arcades. These cabinets are 1/4 scale, so they take up much less space than a traditional arcade cabinet.

As part of Amazon Prime Day, you can score the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Collector's Edition Mini Arcade Cabinet for $214.19, which is the lowest we've seen it all year. Grab a slice of pizza, and prepare to transform your office with this unique mini arcade cabinet! This deal is set to expire at midnight, so you'll need to gift it to yourself today before Prime Day ends to enjoy the discount.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been in video games for a long time. Since the late 80s, we've seen TMNT games released very consistently, and one of the most memorable for many is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Arcade (later renamed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game when released on NES). This Quarter Arcade cabinet has the original 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade ROM, so it's just as you remember.

As a mini arcade cabinet, this unit sits at 16.9 inches tall, and is one-quarter the size of a standard cabinet. Despite the smaller scale, Numskull has kept this cabinet as authentic as possible to the original, with all retro artwork and details recreated. That even extends to the screen, which is a full-color mirror screen to mimic arcade cabinets of the time.

The TMNT Collector's Edition Mini Arcade Cabinet includes a rechargeable battery, so you can place it anywhere and not tie it to a wall. The smaller size is also a huge plus, as you can fit this unit in an office or on a shelf, which just isn't possible with a full-size cabinet. If you've been on the hunt for a unique addition to your gaming setup, this could be a great option.

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Noah Hunter is a freelance writer and reviewer with a passion for games and technology. He co-founded Final Weapon, an outlet focused on nonsense-free Japanese gaming (in 2019) and has contributed to various publishers writing about the medium.

Towns located near the real-life Mount Yotei in Hokkaido are planning to leverage the success of Sucker Punch’s PlayStation 5 exclusive Ghost of Yotei to attract more visitors to the area outside ski season. Official merch collaborations with local craftspeople and curated tours of in-game locations are just some of the initiatives in the works.

Set in 17th century Japan, Ghost of Yotei puts you in the shoes of Atsu, a warrior setting out to take revenge on the six men who slaughtered her family. Backed up by Sucker Punch's in-depth research trips to Hokkaido, Ghost of Yotei recreates and shows off the natural beauty of Mount Yotei and the surrounding area, prompting positive comments from Japanese people living in the area upon the game’s release last October.

Now, towns in the Niseko region surrounding the real life Mount Yotei are hoping to attract Ghost of Yotei fans to the area, as reported by Nikkei (and spotted by VGC).

The real life Mount Yotei is in Shikotsu Toya National Park in Hokkaido. Nearby is Niseko, which is already a popular tourist destination due to its high snowfall, giving it a long ski season that runs from November to May. During peak months, luxury hotels in the area charge around 200,000yen (approx. $1,200) per night, however this drops to around 10,000yen ($60) in the summer off-season. The towns in the Niseko area are hoping Ghost of Yotei will draw more visitors to the region even when there’s no snow around. “We hope that through playing the game, people will discover not only the area’s winter landscape but also its spring, summer and fall scenery, and that this will lead to actual visits,” a spokesperson from the town’s planning and environment division told Nikkei.

With Ghost of Yotei selling over 3.3 million copies by November 2025, a discussion group was quickly established to explore tourism strategies related to the game. Seven towns in the area, plus tourism associations joined the group. A representative from Niseko told Nikkei: “We want to focus these promotional efforts on seasons other than winter.”

So far, Niseko has teamed up with a Tokyo-based company specializing in IP collaborations and are aiming to sell Ghost of Yotei T-shirts, with further plans to expand the range of officially licensed merch. Local businesses are also getting involved. Kumagera, which makes sustainable products carved from local wood, has already released a series of Ghost of Yotei badges and magnets. There are also plans to offer curated tours of locations featured in the game.

Sucker Punch’s previous game Ghost of Tsushima boosted visitors to Japan’s real-life Tsushima Island, resulting in the game’s director Nate Fox and creative director Jason Connell being named cultural ambassadors. However, more tourism to the island has been a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Tsushima’s Watazumi Shrine was repaired after a typhoon thanks to donations from Ghost of Tsushima fans. But on the other, it ended up banning tourists in March 2025 due to the bad behavior of some visitors.

Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.