Last DoA I played was DoA2 on the PS2, so I really looked forward to this. After getting it yesterday and spending a few hours with it, I have to say my feelings are a little mixed.
I knew that Chronicle mode is there to tie up all the stories together, so I already expected long cutscene runtimes. However, not only are they way longer than the actual gameplay you get in this mode, most of the "cutscenes" are nothing more than digital comics with 3D backgrounds and models - characters have no animations (besides their hair/clothing) nor lip-sync. I've finished ch. 3 so far and I'd say 70% of the battles are basically tutorials teaching you different mechanisms. So to me, this is more like a glorified tutorial mode than a story mode.
Unless I am missing something, the lack of option to change difficulties AT ALL in all of the modes is very jarring. The design decision to have pre-set difficulty in different modes/courses is already bad enough, but having an extremely easy difficulty setting as default just rubs salt to the wound. I think after finishing Chronicle mode and unlocking chars/costumes there would be no incentive to play the single player modes, which leads me to my next point...
The internet mode. After being disappointed at not being able to play at 60fps online in SSF4, I couldn't wait to see this running smoothly online. I've played about 10 matches so far. While lag is present, the game runs passably online. However I have the say the netcode in SSF4 is just obviously so much better. In DoA, it feels like every lost packet or connection spike reflects directly in the match as a slight pause, so even if the game could probably run at 60fps if you have a perfect connection with the other player, most of the time it won't feel like 60fps b/c you get these 1-5 frame pauses all the time.
Also, the inability to do rematch with your opponent means you have to do go back to the menu and do an auto-match again every time you finish a fight. (I'm not sure but maybe this would be different if you played with a friend.) Combine that with the inability to set parameters for the automatching (like match with people of your rank) and the frequency of initial connection failure when you find a match, it easily builds frustration and you can't help but think that they could have used a few more months to just polish the game.
Just my 2 cents.