OK, Team Ninja - I'll come clean.
I'm a filthy liberal hand-wringer, a knee-jerk "enlightened" scold of the first order, and this has, at times, clouded my judgement.
Your Dead or Alive franchise might be a pinky-white, hyper-gellid banquet of objectification, but it's also a damn good fighting series, and I should really be able to acknowledge this despite my lefty pretensions.
Only... Only I wish you'd just come clean about it, Team Ninja. I wish you'd man up and call a spade a spade.
I wish your boss, Yosuke Hayashi, wouldn't try to claim of Dead or Alive 5's female cast that "we want to show something that's more high class, that adult males of our generation could look at a woman [character] and be impressed with her as a woman, not just as a pin-up".
"We've always had the sex factor in the game," Hayashi confessed to Gamasutra in February.
"In the past, the female characters had to have big breasts, they had to have scanty dress."
Dead or Alive 5, however, would be different.
"In DoA 5 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 the series up to now we focused on some kind of... Sports Illustrated [aesthetic].
like a magazine for high school kids, with women portrayed in that sense.
"But that's not what we want."
Here's a small selection of the latest screenshots.
Oh, and here's a shot of a male character, so the ladies have something to goggle at.
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