Yosuke Hayashi says Team Ninja won’t change the way it represents female characters.
In a recent interview the head of Team Ninja, Yosuke Hayashi, talked about Dead or Alive 5, and what players could expect from the most recent addition to the franchise. Dead or Alive has been notorious for its portrayal of female characters, and naturally the conversation turned to their portrayal in the latest game. What could players expect? Hayashi was unrepentant, claiming that the representation of women in DoA was a part of Japanese culture and Team Ninja wasn’t about to change its ways.
“For us, within our culture,” said Hayashi, “we’re showing women like that, and we’re trying to make them look attractive. 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.” He also said it was “common sense” to portray females in the DoA style, though in context he may not have intended the phrase “common sense” in the same way English speakers would understand the term. The full quote reads: “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.”
Though Hayashi claimed that Dead or Alive 5 would be more sophisticated than its predecessors, it became clear that he was referring to visual style only. “We really wanted to make the game look good in motion,” he said, “and not shy away from adding a layer of filth and grit. We’re making a game that looks like it could be a blockbuster movie, while being grounded in a fighting game.”
Dead or Alive 5, jiggling warts and all, is due out in September 2012 for Xbox 360 and the PS3.
