Dead or Alive 5 Fans Wanted Bigger Chests, Says Director

Back in February, Team Ninja said something to the effect of wanting to do away with sexualized female characters in Dead or Alive 5, and instead, focus on more realistic looking characters. Then, those plans changed. What happened? Fan feedback, that’s what.

Speaking with Gamasutra, Dead or Alive 5 director, Yohei Shimbori, says that Team Ninja received feedback from western fans who played the Dead or Alive 5 demo, asking that the game not be toned down in “sexiness”.

“We were getting feedback from the overseas offices to tone down the sexuality—to tone down the sexiness of the game, and of the characters,” Shimbori recalls. However, once feedback came direct from fans, Team Ninja decided to alter course slightly.

“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,” Shimbori reveals.

“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 sent us feedback.”