To unlock a third and subsequent members, you will need invitations. These girls will form your volleyball team. When you first start Dead Or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation you can select two girls to instantly unlock. They also won’t help you unlock additional characters. You can use those to level up skills, but that is still not going to give you a significant boost in beating more difficult opponents. The stats will be low, and you’ll likely get many repeats. The “N” and “R” ranked swimsuits drop via the bucket load, relatively speaking, so you’ll have a few different outfits to choose from. In the early stages of playing you’ll amass a fair amount of V-stones (required for gacha rolls) with which to initiate certain gacha. Swimsuits and other costumes being gained through gacha isn’t, for the most part, a huge problem. If this wasn’t bad enough, even game mechanics are locked via gacha. Want a new team member? You’ll have to go through a gacha. Want a new swimsuit or accessory to help increase stats of one of your team members? You’ll have to go through a gacha. The main ingredient of Dead Or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation is naturally - and rather sadly - the overused gacha system. At the moment, with frequent maintenance and an ongoing event, obtaining FP drinks is relatively easy without spending any money at all, but this is not likely to remain the case. Naturally, if you wish to ensure a steady supply of these drinks you’re going to have to buy them with DMM points - which in turn cost real money (1 point is equivalent to approximately 1 JPY, depending on how many you buy at once). Once you run out of enough FP to participate in a match, you’ll either have to put your session on hold until another time, or use an FP recovery drink. You regain a single FP every 5 minutes of real time. This starts at around 6 FP but quickly rises to double digit amounts. Every volleyball match will cost you a certain amount of FP to participate. First, the standard Japanese free-to-play model has been adopted. Hence why calling it a game-shaped object is a very apt description.ĭead Or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation is the embodiment of some of the worst practices currently present in the Japanese games industry. It may look like a game on the surface, but there isn’t even the slightest trace of actual meaningful gameplay to be found. So shallow that calling it a game is an insult to the very concept of a video game.
What should have been the PC equivalent - and an improvement on - the console release of Dead Or Alive Xtreme 3 (subtitled as Fortune on PlayStation 4 and Venus on PlayStation Vita) is sadly nothing more than a shallow shell of a game.
However, the term ‘Game-shaped object’ perfectly describes Dead Or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation, which recently released on PC in Japan via DMM’s GamePlayer. In Valve’s case, they were referring to such objects being used to take advantage of trading cards, etc., which can generate additional revenue for developers every time an item is sold within the community marketplace. Earlier this year Valve coined the term ‘Game-shaped object’ to describe applications that offered little in the way of actual gameplay while being used to generate money for the developer.