After Dead or Alive 5 Ultimate hit consoles this past September, Team Ninja also announced the game would be hitting Japanese arcades. Dead or Alive hasn’t seen an arcade release since Dead or Alive 2.
With this arcade release comes a new character to the series, named Mary Rose. Little is known about this new character except that she is voiced by Mai Aizawa (Rune Factory Frontier, Lucky Star). According to the Famitsu article that revealed the new character, she is the smallest (and least busty) character in the DOA universe. Her fighting style has not been specified yet. There’s also no word on if she will be added to the console version as DLC.
This news follows in the footsteps of Atlus and Arc System Works announcing an arcade-only update to Persona 4 Arena, called Persona 4: The Ultimax Ultra Suples Hold (I swear I’m not making this up). Added to the arcade version of that game are Yukari and Junpei from Persona 3, as well as a new character (possibly linked to Persona 5) named Sho Minazuki.
In the last couple years we’ve seen arcade releases like the aptly named Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition come to consoles either in the form of DLC or retail disc… so I suspect we will see something similar with these games. That wasn’t always the case in pre-DLC days, though. Soul Calibur III had an arcade release with revamped mechanics and characters that never hit consoles. Cammy made her debut in the Street Fighter Alpha/Zero games in the Japanese arcade release of Street Fighter Zero 2 Alpha… but things were different in those days.
UPDATE- an official trailer for the character is now out:
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