Dead Or Alive 2: Final Hits Dreamcast (Updated)

Fan-made mods are just a part of life when it comes to PC gaming, but on consoles - and especially the Dreamcast - they are fairly uncommon. Enter aptly-named modder Green Ranger who has taken it upon himself to heavily modify Tecmo's superb 3D fighter Dead Or Alive 2 and create DOA2: Final.

This project is the result of several years' worth of work and pulls together two previous mods to the game (DOA2 Special Edition and DOA2 Ultimate Edition), and adds lots of new features. These new additions are mainly visual - new character costumes and designs, plus additional character dialogue which allows for new single player storylines. The story in DOA2 was pretty confusing in the first place, so maybe this new narrative will help to make things a little clearer. Here's a full run down of the new features and character costumes added to DOA2: Final:

  • New Title Screen that reads - DEAD OR ALIVE 2: FINAL
  • Stage Slideshow during Title Screen sequence has been altered
  • New music throughout the game - Stages, Training Mode, Mode Select Screen and Ending Credits have new music
  • Character dialogue changed extensively to give some fighters new storylines, and also dialogue changed in general to sound less confusing when interacting with characters.
  • New/edited costumes for nearly every fighter (costumes from my previous mods were tweaked/updated for this release) 
  • DOA3 character stances for Zack and Genfu
  • Bass & Tina's storyline now have a new Tina Poster on the brick wall and in Bass' room
  • Stage layouts differ for various characters in Story Mode - nice way to spice things up!
  • Bigger Dummy file in CDI image to allow for faster load times
  • In Versus & Watch Mode the Aerial Garden is automatically night, press R-trigger to access daytime Aerial Garden

New Costumes

Kasumi
C1- Made Kasumi Outfit Red instead of Blue (I think it looks better)
C5- New Blue Bathing Suit
C1- New Tecmo Underwear with Bra, only accessible if you press R-trigger to select C1.

Genfu
C6- Added Spider and Web Designs to his pants

Tina
C1- New Spider-Woman Costume
C4- Play as Helena's Mom (Tina's *shredded* costume now edited and placed in her ending)
C5- Tina's Supermodel outfit now playable

**- Tina has a new runway outfit, modified from the *shredded* costume

Zack
C1- New 'Dhalsim' inspired costume
C2- Play as the Bunny that Zack wants to cook for Tina! (The Bunny is now Zack's height so expect hilarity & weirdness!)
C5- Removed glasses from Shawdowman costume- now you can finally see his eyes

Jan Lee
C4- New Dreamcast Shirt costume

Ayane
C4- Added glasses and band-aid to Ayane's face to give her more of a *nerdy* schoolgirl look

Helena
C1- Opera costume now playable
C5- New custom Helena skin- darker skin complexion, tattoo on chest, hair style change, different color clothes, etc.

Bass
C2- New Resident Evil Nemesis Skin, with the face of Nemesis and the Umbrella logo on his back
C3- New 'Clown Man Bass' costume

Leon
C3- New custom Bayman skin with yellow hat, green vest, blue/gray pants and facial war paint

Lei Fang
C4- New Tomb Raider inspired costume
C5- Total color swap of Blue costume to Yellow

Ein
C4- New Brad Wong costume
Pretty cool stuff. At the time of writing I haven't had chance to burn Green Ranger's self-booting CDI to disc and put it into an actual console, but check out these screens taken from the Dreamcast Talk forum thread:
The CDI will work with any number of emulators too, but if you want to burn it to disc this download link should help.

Update June 2022
Since this article was posted in 2015, it seems the fan community has been hard at work creating even more content for Dead or Alive 2: Final. Dreamcast Talk forum user and modder Dirge of Ram in particular has clearly been very hard at work adding a metric tonne of extra features to the game, releasing no fewer than 10 different content drops in the recent past.
These include all sorts from costumes for familiar characters, entirely new additions to the roster, and new storylines for the single player mode. If you'd like to know more, check out this thread over at Dreamcast Talk which also includes all of the download links you could ever need. Great work Dirge of Ram!

Update January 2023
The work has continued on updating Dead or Alive 2: Final. Quite frankly the amount of dedication when it comes to continuing the various storylines is phenomenal, and a huge amount of respect must be paid to Dirge of Ram for carrying the torch. You can find out more about the continuing updates and downloads over at Dreamcast-Talk here.

1 comment:

Green Ranger said...

Hi Tom, this is Mr.GreenRanger, original modder of 'Dead Or Alive 2: Final' for the Dreamcast. Tried sending an email to admin@thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk, but it didn't go through. Anyway, just wanted to let you know there's a couple things that need to be adjusted. The article currently has a link to my old YouTube account, which I no longer maintain. My new channel address is here- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEzvJ7EUnt1KcXD0n-ItpTg

Additionally, the download links you have to my Mod are no longer functional. My Mediafire link remains active, so feel free to update the page with the new link-
https://www.mediafire.com/file/labtu35eln3oq9h/DOA2_FINAL.rar/file

Lastly, you might be interested to know that I've made another game Mod for the Dreamcast- this time for Resident Evil 2, called 'Resident Evil 2: Special Edition'. You can take a look at the teaser and full trailers I've made for it which are on my new channel.