DOA: Paradise goal was not soft porn
It does not degrade women, says dev.
Dead or Alive: Paradise director Yoshinori Ueda has told Eurogamer that his PSP game is not supposed to be softcore pornography nor degrading towards women, despite titillating promotional videos and a marketing slogan that reads, "Paradise in the palm of your hand."
"That's certainly not something we're intentionally going for," he said. "From our perspective, we're trying to make beautiful women, that has been the focus - we want our characters to be beautiful. The DOA characters are strong and that they look the way they do is based on trying to bring out the beauty of women."
"We're certainly not trying to degrade women. They have beautiful bodies. We're trying to show off the beauty of their bodies but we're not trying to be degrading about it - we're trying to show that they are beautiful characters."
"It's not that we were trying to make softcore porn. That's definitely not the goal."
In Dead or Alive: Paradise, bikini-clad girls take part in various paradise beach games like volleyball and going to the casino. Players can also have the girls pose for the camera and take photographs of them.
That element of the game irked America's ESRB age-ratings board, which claimed DOA: Paradise was filled with "creepy voyeurism" and "bizarre, misguided notions of what women really want". The ESRB later apologised and offered a more level-headed explanation for the mature rating.
"We know that everyone is going to have a different experience with the game - everyone has their own opinion," shrugged Ueda. "For us, the goal was really to offer a little bit of paradise to the users, and we hope that people playing the game will be able to come away with the feeling that they've visited paradise."
Ueda understands that DOA: Paradise isn't a game in "the traditional sense". "What we offer is a selection of things to play and activities to have fun with. The players have the freedom to play Paradise however they want," he said.
Dead or Alive: Paradise will be released here on 2nd April.