For a game which is unabashedly fanservice, it's amazing that it neither seeks to accumulate fans nor serve them.
The new volleyball controls are abysmal. They continue to be non-responsive, with the "difficulty" of the match decided by the game, choosing whether or not to allow your player to respond to button presses and how quickly, or in most cases frustratingly slow, they will react. This superficial difficulty caused by intentional mechanical failings is maddening. Especially when you realize that a match is unwinnable regardless of effort, and that the game will punish you for losing, but that in addition to that, they've installed safeguards that will punish you if you turn the xbox360 off or signing off; shame on you for trying to skip an arbitrarily unwinnable match. The several bugs which cause the game to lock in volleyball mode (i.e.- your opponent passes a ball into the back of their ally, which causes the ball to hit the ground but the game doesn't realize this; so your ally and their spiker will continue to repeatedly spike/block the air indefinitely) make this problem worse, as when they rear their heads it's essentially a relationship hit, game loss, and loss of that day period as you have to reload the game to continue. The camera was also changed since the last outing, and rather than go with a stable camera angle which would allow the player to actually see what was happening on the field, they decided to implement the "virtual crackhead" camera. This new innovation allows the player to never have a usable view of the court, but to additionally sway uncontrollably and CHANGE THE ORIENTATION OF THE PLAYER'S CONTROLS during key situations, such as blocking spikes and returning the ball. If pressing B to receive the ball after a spike and having your field of mannequins not respond wasn't frustrating enough, when the game does allow you to play it changes the rules constantly. This forces you to compensate by "playing drunk" and doing sweeps of the control stick to maintain focus in the proper direction; this is of course if you can determine what the proper direction IS when the camera frequently shifts to deny you the ability to see the opponent you were attempting to block a spike from. Which way will they spike? Where will they spike from? The only answer to those questions is just stand against the center of the net and hit the block button when you hear one of your opponents' names being called, then hope that you get lucky twice by both your character responding to the button press and the game auto-compensating your character into the way of the ball.
The "Tecmo hates their fans" theme carries over into ALL of the other aspects as well.
-The casino is a minefield. It will occasionally corrupt your save for no apparent reason. It also quicksaves to prevent you from "cheating". Despite the fact that the main game can't be lost, and the only objective is to collect rediculous amounts of money, you'll have to figure out another way to accomplish that because apparently cheating in the casino to obtain it would cut too much into the volleyball grind.
-They released a patch removing the ability for players to not have to pay to rewrap a swimsuit a dozen times before a girl would accept it. Oh the horror!
-The credits aren't skippable on the first playthrough, forcing you to sit through the dev team bragging that they managed to phone-in a game of this quality.
Then there's the Collections Based Gaming portion of the game, which is just as dull and uninteresting as last time. You spend countless hours grinding the volleyball game, which this time around is actually insulting because of the mechanical difficulty, to save up and unlock various swimsuits, with the clear intention of getting these girls as naked as possible (as all the most revealing suits are the most expensive, as well as suits geared towards mainstream Japanese fetishes such as aprons and schoolgirl outfits). Cross-seeding of swimsuits (as each girl has their own collection) is needlessly difficult, and relies entirely on the mockery of a dating sim they've constructed. The accessory items are uniformly tacky, and there's no way to prevent a girl from wearing them once in her collection except throwing them out; so completing a collection for a girl essentially means providing her with a plethora of hockey helmets covered in flowers, old lady bonnets and non-flexible, non-alpha-channeled shoes. They implemented a "favored suit" status from the dating sim, but have still completely ignored the fact that the average gamer probably doesn't want the girl taking things which they've sealed away in the collection and strutting around in them. Just because I bought the 20 pallet swaps of that generic two-piece to complete the collection doesn't mean I think they looked good, nor does it mean I actually wanted to see her in them. A toggle to lock the NPC takeover of the girls to only whats in their inventory would've been nice.
Speaking of the gamer achievements, they truly are achievements, but ones that I wouldn't want associated with my gamercard, as they're monuments to the fact that you had to spend upwards of hundreds of hours completing a softcore fanservice game with punishing controls and no redeeming qualities before you even hit your first 20g milestone. Thankfully Microsoft's Indian customer service team helped me out on this one, by refusing to transfer or delete my version1 account (original Xbox).
Then there's the dating sim. Oh the dating sim! I say dating sim, but that's truly an overstatement as you never date, or even interact, with the other girls outside of volleyball/minigames or the reaction text spammed over their generic gravure scenes for whatever location they happen to be in. That latter unflattering description is actually the "dating sim" aspect of the game; or more properly, the gift giving one. The objective is to sucker girls of questionable age into putting on revealing swimsuits through bribes such as "Chocolates" and "Ice Cream". It isn't quite as creepy in reality as it is in that statement, because the girls are static and lifeless, and the objects are simply placeholders chosen at random to fill the various "love" and "hate" categories. In reality, it plays out very similar to a multiple choice math exam, but one where the problems are hidden: you simply choose A, B, C or D, and then through trial and error figure out which answers happened to be correct. In fact, this should be the most fanservicey portion of the game, but it's quite possibly the least, as the girl's tastes are not only different from the last game (with the exception of favorite colors and one specific food each), but their favored objects of the lore aren't even the items they respond best to! In addition to that, their responses are all muted. They're all just pass/fail tests with stock responses, nothing has any story with it. In fact, there isn't any kind of development over the course of the game from ANYTHING. The island never changes, the girls never change, nothing new ever unlocks, you just mull about grinding the same repetitive tasks until the missallocation of blood causes a stroke.
Speaking of stroke, as a fanservice game, it's a stroke of genius to not write any of the lore into the game, even if the game doesn't itself exists outside that lore. For example, I found myself particularly witty for having Ayane give Helena some Sheet Music; knowing that Helena was brought into the series through Ayane having killed her Opera singing mother during a performance while shooting at Helena herself. I was unfortunately greeted with the generic response of "No need to go to such great lengths for me", which is Helena's indifferent response. In fact, not only are no items tagged to evoke a unique response from any characters (only love/hate categorical ones), but characters aren't even scripted to react uniquely to each other! Ayane and Kasumi's relationship, as quarreling siblings with one trying to kill the other, is no different than Lisa and Tina's, who are listed as best friends; this is doubly sad as in the original game the girls had such unique interactions, if only for the "Guide" character's introduction when the vacation began. Now these intricacies are reduced to a handful of unique "Be Friendly" gravure scenes, none of which are remarkably different than the generic ones. What irks me is that because these unique scenes are so generic (i.e.- Ayane gives Kasumi a five second backrub), I see no reason why they wouldn't have been mixed into the regular rotation which all characters had access to (which are only a measly two scenes).
New to this iteration are a multitude of cloth swimsuits, such as various t-shirts and whatnot. The opening scene lies to the consumer, and suggests that these suits are deformable, and that they will become translucent, shimmer, cling to skin, etc. when they come into contact with water. Unfortunately none of that happens, and the suits retain their dull textures and ribbon models, even when the girl is submerged and swimming in the ocean. Cloth defomation isn't even a novel mechanic, as Illusion's Sexy Beach franchise (which started in response to the popularity of the original DOA:XBV) has already developed it.
The Wave Rider game is essentially Tecmo trying to implement Wave Rider into XBV, but not doing it that well, and they can't take it entirely in that direction because it subverts the "payoff" of collecting the suits if you don't actually see the other girls in them.
Tug-of-War and Butt Battle. Yeah, I can see where they're going with this, but considering the payout on these games is abysmal, and that they're both only glorified Rock-Paper-Bigger Rock, they're not really effective. Nor is Beach Flags, which is like NES Track-and-Field, but utilizing only one button. Block-stomp is carry-over, and remains relatively easy despite the fact that it often misinterprets how hard you've hit the buttons.
Perhaps if they had implemented an EVENT or something in the game, let's say "The New Zack Island Idol Tournament" or "The Queen of New Zack Island Competition", where you had to Butt Battle, Tug-of-War, block-stomp and Capture the flag your way through the brackets with the other girls to face off against Niki.
It totally cut my "What I want to see in XBV3" part in half, so I removed it entirely.