Dead or Alive is well known for being at the forefront of jiggle physics, and unfortunately it’s not really known for much else. This could be changing, however, according to Team Ninja boss, Yosuke Hayashi.
"The old team was known for making games that just had two primary elements: Sex and violence," Hayashi told Gamasutra. "It was very obvious. The new team, we want to take it to a new level — to a direction that contains emotional experiences that can move players."
“Rather than just having violence for the sake of violence and cheap thrill, we wanted to give meaning to violence: Why does this happen? We want to link emotion to violence.”
“We’ve always had the sex factor in the game; in the past, the female characters had to have big breasts, they had to have scanty dress. In DoA 5 especially, we’re trying to focus on the real women that surround us; the voice of a female, the mannerisms. We are being realistic about it.”
“In the series up to now we focused on some kind of… Sports Illustrated [aesthetic], like a magazine for high school kids, with women portrayed in that sense. But that’s not what we want. We want to show something that’s more high class, that adult males of our generation could look at a woman [character] and be impressed with her as a woman, not just as a pin-up.”
Before you go getting excited, this is the same man responsible for Other M, which is notorious for making Samus into anything but a real woman. That being said, is this a welcome change, or is DoA betraying it’s niche?