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DOA:XBV takes place on Zack Island. Zack (from DOA3) took his winnings from the DOA3 tournament and gambled his way to a fortune. He took his new wealth and purchased a small Island, which he dubiously named “Zack Island”. He even came up with is own money system, “Zacks”. You’ll also find stores on Zack Island such as the “Zack of all Trades”. You get the idea. Along with all the Zack shit, you have a hotel, pool, swimsuit shop, accessories shop and a bunch of volleyball courts. But what tropical paradise would be complete without babes? Well at least Zack isn’t a total moron and he realizes this, so he tricks all the girls of the Dead or Alive tournament into coming to his island for another “Tournament”. They all show up, including newcomer Lisa (a friend of Tina’s). Once they find out there is no fighting tournament, they decide to stick around and play some Volleyball. Of course, this is where it gets interesting.

There are two Modes to XBV: Exhibition mode and Go to Zack Island. In Exhibition mode you can hone your… ahem, skills while learning the ropes of the basic volleyball game. Volleyball is easy to learn. Most gamers should be able to completely MASTER this aspect of the game after a day or two of casual playing. After maybe an hour, you should be good enough to win 50-75% of the matches you play. You’ll play with your AI partner against two other AI controlled opponents or against 1 other human opponent with their AI controlled teammate. Yeah, that’s right, only 1 vs. 1 with an AI teammate, no Co-Op. No Xbox Live either. So in other words, Multiplayer functionality really blows. The camera isn’t exactly perfect either. It’s playable when it’s only one person playing, but with 2 people it can get confusing. You’ll only see one side of the court at a time (whichever side the ball is on). The Camera does a good job at following the action, but a lot of the time you won’t even see both your players due to the constricted field of view. You can’t control this either as the camera is controlled by the game, not you. This can be a problem when you want to position your AI partner but have no idea where they are because you can’t see them! This problem haunts single and multiplayer modes, but when you are playing single player, you can usually feel your way through where your AI partner is. One more quirk is if you had played the game in single player, you’ll always play on the same side of the court with the same camera angle. In multiplayer, one person obviously has to play on the other side of the court. So after you’ve already acclimated yourself with the camera for the normal side of the court, they throw you the curve ball and make you (or your friend) play on the other side which feels totally different and unfamiliar.

Zack Island is basically the ‘Story Mode’ of the game. It’s here where you get to pick one of the girls and spend a 2-week vacation on Zack Island. Lisa will greet you, as she is the default partner (unless you play Lisa, in which Tina is your default partner). Once on the island you’ll have a few choices of what to do. There are three shops: the Swimsuit shop, Accessories Shop and Zack of all Trades (which opens on Day 3 of your vacation). Each character has different items they can purchase from the Swimsuit shop. Lisa gets all the slutty swimsuits, by the way. The goal here is to buy gifts for the other girls. If the girl likes you enough, she’ll keep you present and usually wear it. The ultimate goal is to get every girl in one of the nearly nonexistent bikinis, such as the Venus or the “V-kini”. It’ll take a lot of work and relationship building on your part, but it is possible. In fact, this is about the only real motivating factor towards the longevity of the game because the rest of the game gets boring real quick. Each girl has her own separate inventory. This means you’ll be an old geezer before you manage to get every single item (there’s probably a thousand total) for each and every girl. If you actually think you’ll get every item on every girl, then more power to ya. Item collecting gets real tedious after a while. If the girl doesn’t like the gift, then she’ll throw it away. You’ll cringe as you see your favorite girl throw away a 1 million dollar swimsuit (so much for realism). With enough time and hard work, it IS possible to get any swimsuit on ANY girl.

You will have a chance to do three things each day, with 14 days total for each vacation (but only 12 for your very first vacation for some reason). You can play three Volleyball matches, play the pool hopping game three times, frolic around the island, give gifts, or any combination of these there-of. The other girls will randomly appear at different parts of the island throughout the day. This gives you a chance to give them gifts or partner up with them. There are different in-game cut scenes for each girl at each part of the island. You can even zoom in and control the camera as you watch the girls jiggle around. There are some cool cut-scenes too, like Hitomi doing her Kata on the beach during the daytime. Each one of these in-game cut scenes last about 30 seconds. If relaxing and checking out the girls are more your speed, then you can always choose to relax at the pool and watch your girl wiggle and gyrate around the poolside. This game gets so sexually suggestive at certain points… they could have thrown in a few X-Rated masturbation or lesbian scenes and it would still seem like it fit with the game. On that same note, NO, there isn’t any full nudity in the game, save a very brief glimpse of Christie in the games opening cut-scene.

There is only ONE ‘Mini-game’ in XBV (several were mentioned, but apparently cut). You will utilize the pressure sensitive buttons of the Xbox controller to make your girl hop across floaty things in the pool, from one side to the other. This Pool Hopping mini game pays out next to nothing compared to winning volleyball matches. I only play it when I get sick of playing volleyball. Volleyball, on the other hand, is pretty fun at first. Until you get so good and are able to win every single match. At some point, I got so good the only way I’d ever loose is when my AI controller partner would screw up. Not only do you have to beat the other team in skill and tactics, but you have to beat your partner as well. In the end, when it’s you vs. a skilled pair of AI opponents, it all comes down to who messes up first – the other team, or your partner. You’ll only use two buttons, A and B. You can control your movement with the left analog (or D-Pad) and also your partner’s movement with the right analog. There are certain spots you’ll discover where you can place your players and you’ll simply NEVER miss a defensive hit. Some of my volleys lasted nearly 10 minutes. It got so intense at points, I think I now know how Kasparov felt playing Deep Junior in Chess. Whoever screws up first, looses. When you are playing against a team who are “Confident”, matches can get real ugly and long-winded as you trade volleys FOREVER. The girls all have three different moods, represented by their pictures. The better their mood, the better they play. You can increase your own partner’s mood by winning matches and giving her gifts. The mood of the rest of the girls who appear around the island will vary. It’s only at the very confident mood where an experienced player will run into the 10-minute volleys. Playing a pair of opponents who show either of the two lesser moods is usually not that hard. The lowest mood is a cakewalk, as your opponents will suck bad enough to get aced on serves. After each point there’s usually a replay where you can use the triggers to zoom in on the girls goodies. This is mildly entertaining at first, but looses it’s appeal after a while when you just want to get the match over and done with. The game uses Rally scoring, so you don’t need to serve to score a point. Default matches go up to 7 points but can be up to 15 if you wish. The volleyball matches themselves are very linear. You can’t even accidentally hit the ball out of bounds! Every match starts to feel the exact same after a while.

Once the day is over you’ll head back to the Hotel. Once back in your room, you’ll always get a gift from Zack. Usually it’s a random gift, which could be a swimsuit, food, or even trailers for past, present and future Team Ninja games. You can view your collection of items and also send gifts for the other girls. This is the only time you are able to give gifts to your partner, unlike the rest of the girls who randomly show up during the daytime around the island and can receive up to three gifts per day from you (and one more at night in the Hotel). At this point, you can either go to sleep or go to the Casino. The Casino hosts your typical games, which include Slots, Poker, Blackjack and Roulette. There’s a slot machine for every girl and the items that come up when you spin a specific slot are items that each corresponding girl likes as gifts. Try to restrain yourself at the Casino as it’s very easy to loose your entire savings in the blink of an eye.

The soundtrack consists of poppy dance tunes, which fit the game, but didn’t really appeal to me personally. Fortunately you can customize your own soundtrack and set up your play list at the island radio station. The sound effects are charming. Hitomi makes this cute… (growl?) sometimes when she goes up to spike the ball. The voices are all in Japanese with English subtitles, except for Zack’s voice, which is done by Dennis Rodman. I don’t speak a word of Japanese but the Japanese voice actors sound great to me. All the girls have different personalities, thankfully. This gives them a lot of depth and unique appeal. Graphically, XBV looks great. The girls do look every nice, with the exception of two things: 1) Their skin shading needs to be a bit more detailed and 2) they never show much facial expression. If you ever manage to pry your stare away from the girls, you’d also notice some of the backgrounds are marvelously rendered.

Let me go off on a RANT now… It seems this game fell victim to over-hype. Press releases stating all sorts of “cool stuff” was interpreted and hyped up as hidden features, secrets, unlockables, etc. There was so much hype spewed forth about this title, both from Tecmo AND the fans, that I was really disappointed to learn there really isn’t much of anything “secret” or unlockable in the game. Well over a month after release now, no one has unlocked or found anything that could resemble any sort of official secret or hidden feature. Tecmo/Team Ninja have provided a few interviews to various sites and they HINT at stuff, but no one can confirm any of it. There are dozens of mysterious traits to this game, but it seems like Tecmo just didn’t have enough time to do anything with them. When you have thousands of rabid gamers who can discover a graphics glitch in the game when you wear a certain swimsuit and position the camera just right when you are laying at the poolside in a particular pose… yet they can’t find any sort of hidden levels, characters, cut-scenes or anything of that nature… it makes me wonder. Personally, I don’t think there IS anything really hidden or unlockable in this game. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong. Other than the slot machine pictures and a clever link they created to DoA3 Survival mode (items dropped in survival mode are also items the girls like as gifts) – there really isn’t much to discover. While the DoA3 Survival Mode deal was “a neat trick”, it wasn’t really that rewarding. The Game Mechanics are almost as impressive as the graphics. Team Ninja came up with a clever way to take out the cheap-ness factor, such as turning off your Xbox right after you loose a match so it won’t count, or after you loose big at the Casino. You can’t do any of that. The game actually figures out the outcome just before it displays you the result. It then saves the game nearly instantly effectively meaning it’s near impossible to cheese it up and cheat using the power-off method. I was pissed at first, but then I started to respect the system as it made a game that had little meaning in the first place, mean just a bit more.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed for XBV for two reasons. The multiplayer functionality and the lack of unlockable secrets – the latter really pissed me off. Tecmo and Team Ninja have been tight lipped about any hidden secrets in the game and NO ONE has figured out any REAL unlockable secrets in this game at the time of this review. By now I would think Tecmo or Team Ninja would come out and give us SOMETHING, but they haven’t really given us anything other than leading us on? If you like watching pixilated women jiggle around, then you’ll probably like XBV. If you’re looking for a real Volleyball game, then wait for better titles coming later this year. XBV is more of a Japanese dating sim and should have been called “Island Adventure” instead of “Volleyball”.