Team Ninja’s library of games definitely include skimpy outfits for attractive women, but their reasoning behind this is Japanese culture sees it different from other cultures.
Dead or Alive 5, the new fighting game from Team Ninja, kind of has a reputation of being ‘immature’ in some gamer’s view. The roster of female characters in the Dead or Alive franchise all wear skimpy outfits and all have to get special physics applied to their breasts so they can jiggle about (yet never pop out of their clothes). Team Ninja’s Yosuke Hayashi recently discussed this issue in an interview and claimed that the female roster of Dead or Alive 5 is the norm in the Japanese culture.
“For us, within our culture, 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,” says Hayashi. “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.”
Hayashi claims that Team Ninja always wanted to make their girls look attractive, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. “When you take that to countries outside of Japan,” says Hayashi, “it tends to be very misinterpreted in some cases, people considering it sexist or derogatory, etc.” Hayashi also adds that since Team Ninja is a Japanese developer, it would be ‘common sense’ for them to make their female characters like this.
Hayashi might have a point that different cultural views might be looking at the female characters in Team Ninja’s Dead or Alive franchise differently. In Western society female characters might still be stuck in the “damsel in distress” trope, such as the thesis for the Tomb Raider reboot and the disappearance of Ellie in Dead Space 3. However claiming that the Japanese culture likes their female characters like this seems harder to believe. What do you think? Do you think how female characters represented in Team Ninja’s Dead or Alive franchise is the norm to Japanese culture?
