“We actually got a lot of feedback from people who were playing it, saying, ‘We want bigger breasts. Make the characters more like that.’ That was kind of surprising.”
That is a quote from Yohei Shimbori, Director of Dead or Alive 5, in regards to the recently-released title. The Dead or Alive series is a well known and respected series of fighting games that just so happens to include female characters known for having oversized breasts that bounce with a certain fluidity that makes it rather hypnotic at times. In a recent interview, Shimbori discussed how some of the feedback that Team Ninja had received from overseas affiliates was to tone down the “seuxality” in the fighting game. If you’ve gotten your filthy hands on the game, you know that the game is much like the rest in the series; there is a lot of bouncing.
The alpha demo of the game actually featured more “realistic” females and female parts, but proved to be an interesting case where Shimbori and the team heard feedback from the fans and that the developers felt that their instincts to tone it down were way off. This means that the bounce came back and that fans were happy. This came after the folks at Team Ninja were “shocked” by the negative feedback for Ninja Gaiden 3, which was widely panned for bringing nothing new to the table in the series and being too streamline.
So Team Ninja was a lot more in tune with their audience’s needs for this title, and Shimbori and his team were able to avoid the fallout that the Ninja Gaiden 3 team received.
“There’s definitely still room for having sexualized aspects,” Shimbori concludes. “If you have a solid fighting game system there, there’s nothing wrong with having beautiful characters as a layer on top of that — that’s another layer of entertainment that there’s a need for. If there wasn’t a need for it, people wouldn’t have responded to the alpha demo like they did, and send us feedback.”
