The Dead or Alive series is well known for its portrayal of scantily-clad characters who defy certain laws of physics with their body parts, but this may soon be a thing of the past according to Team Ninja boss, Yosuke Hayashi.
Hayashi took leadership of Team Ninja three years ago and Dead or Alive 5 will be his first opportunity to show the new direction he is taking the studio. Speaking to Gamasutra, the developer of Dead or Alive said that the game’s fanbase has grown past the sex and violence and wants something more meaningful.
“The old team was known for making games that just had two primary elements: Sex and violence,” Hayashi said.
“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.”
Hayashi also told Gamasutra that in Dead or Alive 5 the developers want to focus on “real women”, signalling a shift away from the comically buxom fighters in previous games.
“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.”
What do you think of Dead or Alive’s new direction? Is this a welcome change? Or should the series be left alone? Left us know!
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