DOA5 lead: Japanese view of women in games 'not going to change'
The Dead or Alive franchise is notorious for its blatant emphasis on sexy female fighters in tiny, physics-defying outfits – in the western world, at least. In Japan, this form of female representation is "common sense," Team Ninja's Yosuke Hayashi tells MCV.
"With the representation of female characters in the Dead or Alive franchise, we've always wanted to make the girls look as attractive as possible, and that's something that's not going to change for us at all," Hayashi says. "We are a Japanese developer, and we're making the female characters with our common sense and our creative sense. When you take that to countries outside of Japan, it tends to be very misinterpreted in some cases, people considering it sexist or derogatory, etc."
In February, Hayashi said Team Ninja would attempt to shift focus in Dead or Alive 5 away from sex and violence, heading instead in "a direction that contains emotional experiences that can move players." It's entirely possible that Hayashi was pandering to western sensibilities with that statement, but it's also possible he plans to combine deep, emotional experiences with sex-infused character models. There's nothing immoral in making beautiful things, as Hayashi sees it.
"For us, within our culture, we're showing women like that, and we're trying to make them look attractive," he says. "We can't help if other cultures in other countries around the globe think that it's a bad representation. Within our nationality and within our national borders, we obviously have morals that we create our female characters from, but within our Japanese sensibilities, we've made those characters the way they are and we're not going to stop doing that."
