but I think this is the only game [series] that makes you truly feel like a master of martial arts. The flow of its combat is unmatched. The way your kicks and punches connect or combos break into scripted animations resembles those highly-choreographed masterpieces of wuxia cinema from Hong Kong of the 90s. It does for the fighting genre what Devil May Cry did for hack-n-slash or what Serious Sam and F.E.A.R. did for first-person shooters by creating a system with mechanical depth that feels very organic. When you dodge your opponent and transition into a three-punch combo and then they break it by grabbing your fist, pulling it towards them and elbowing you on the head, it's all so fluent you almost forget that this is just a bunch of code. As a player, you feel as if you're fighting a real opponent and are able to match their skills in martial arts with yours. It's truly phenomenal.

Plus now that the game is capable of rendering 3D environments, they're also part of the gameplay and add to the sense of realism. Animations are context-based. When you corner someone and grab them, your character might pick them up and pin them back to the wall with a hit. And of course you can knock people off the platform you're standing on onto a lower one with an appropriate animation. I don't know which game invented that, but it's a feature in many fighting games by this point, and it works really well with the general direction of DOA2.

But I think this technological advancement into complete 3D is also the reason for this game's impressionistically poetic art-direction. Just like in its antecedent, the story is very minimal and confusing, which I found both engaging and occasionally hilarious. You try to piece together what's happening from detached lines of dialogue. But very often the game opts for no dialogue at all, and simply savors the mood of the scene by framing a character in their dynamic environment exposed to the elements, be it snow, wind, sunset, etc. There is an almost Daoist levity to it all. You could even say it's aesthetically complimenting the sense of flow that the gameplay exudes.

That being said, there is still one thing I dislike here. Just like in the first game, there is a dire lack of content for a single-player. I understand that these games are designed for multiplayer, but I don't really care. For me, having played this game for about an hour, I've pretty much experienced everything the game has to offer. I wanted to do some single battles, but it doesn't even have that, only tag team and sparring (aka practice). Pretty much once you've beaten the extremely short story with every character, there's nothing else to do here.

P.S. Oh yeah, I almost forgot: booba!