Dead or Alive 5 boss: we've made female fighters cool as well as sexy
"When you fight you sweat now, you get sweaty. There's dirt as well."
Team Ninja has empowered its notoriously-jiggly female Dead or Alive 5 characters with "cool" traits such as being able to sweat and get dirty during fights.
Dead or Alive 5 boss Yosuke Hayashi told Eurogamer that the new features were part of a more mature look for the character roster, although the series' classic take on female fighters would remain.
"More mature gamers can look at a female character without focusing on the boob physics," Hayashi explained. "When you fight you sweat now, you get sweaty. There's dirt as well - we wanted to show a grittier nature. So they have 'cool' characteristics now."
But might some gamers also find sweaty, dirt-clad women to be sexy, too?
"We did think they were going to be sexy as well," Hayashi added. "As a Japanese developer we wanted to keep our roots. But it's a bit more of a mature sexy element."
"Historically speaking, when the first game came out what we used to separate ourselves from other fighters was the female characters and stages. It's come to this point naturally, it's been a natural evolution.
Last year Hayashi told Eurogamer that Dead or Alive 5 would offer "a kind of sensuality and the kind of beauty".
"Guys who just look at chick's boobs... c'mon, there's more to women and more to beauty than just boobs, so we want to take a little more adult approach to how to make women beautiful," Hayashi said at the time.
Does the finished product live up to this?
"That statement encompassed the character design up until now. Obviously we don't want to take anything away from the existing female fighters. We didn't want to remove those traits. Obviously they're not realistic-looking characters. We want to keep that same kind of 'deformed' look. When we say 'mature', we mean it in our own unique style."
"As a Japanese developer we wanted to keep our roots. But it's a bit more of a mature sexy element."
Hayashi has high hopes for Dead or Alive 5 when it launches in September - despite it arriving opposite Namco competitor Tekken Tag Tournament 2.
"We've been going head-to-head with Tekken for a while. We want to bring back Dead or Alive and steal the crown from Tekken," Hayashi concluded.