Team Ninja Trying To Focus On Realistic Women With Dead or Alive 5

Back when Tomonobu Itagaki was the head of Team Ninja, the company was known for: a) Boobs, and b) Blood. Current Team Ninja head, Yosuke Hayashi, says he wants to outgrow that reputation.

“The new team, we want to take it to a new level — to a direction that contains emotional experiences that can move players,” Hayashi says to Gamasutra, elaborating that this is the concept behind Ninja Gaiden 3, as opposed to being a game about cheap thrills and violence.

This new philosophy is carrying over to the Dead or Alive games as well.

“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,” says Hayashi. “In DoA5 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 a separate talk with Edge magazine, Hayashi says that he hopes Dead or Alive 5 will be more successful than Dead or Alive: Dimensions on the Nintendo 3DS, which he shares didn’t sell as well as Tecmo Koei had hoped. Tecmo revealed in November 2011 that Dimensions had sold 310,000 copies worldwide.

DOA5 is taking a few cues from Dimensions, though. Team Ninja revealed today via Twitter that the game will be able to display inputs on the screen, just like Dimensions does in its Practise mode.