They had this really clean high-res, high-poly look and nice colours compared to the more blocky and blurry looking fighting games on the PS2.
I’ve been messing around with DOA3 and DOA2U on the XEMU emulator and the resolution here is upscaled 3x so what you’re seeing is definitely a lot sharper than it would have been on original hardware, but still. Blown up like this it you could tell me this was a PS3 or Xbox 360 game and I’d believe you.
As much as I like the series for its gameplay and as nice as I think the Xbox games look I’ve always thought that the weakest part of the DOA games has always been their incredibly bland character design and artstyle. Even though they draw from the same pool of martial arts archetypes and stereotypes as every other fighting game series in existence pretty much every character is much more lame and feels less interesting than their equivalents from Tekken, Street Fighter, etc. Kazuya Mishima has more character in his eyebrows than the entire roster of the DOA franchise.
The female cast is supposed to be the draw 
but on balance the designs aren’t that much more hornier than most other Japanese fighting game franchises and the characters in those tend to have some personality to go with the fanservice.
Apparently it is well made for a Sports game. These things happen sometimes, like how the Pokewalker was the best podometer on the market at one point.
Guess I can download the ROM
From what I understand the later games increasingly dropped the volley ball aspect and just became collections of wonky beach activity minigames and a single player casino with everything centered on ungodly amounts of grinding for increasingly tinier swimsuits to put on your characters and making them perform canned showering and poledancing animations.
I get the appeal of a fun fighting game with jiggle physics but I don’t get whatever that is