Yosuke Hayashi, leader of Team Ninja, talks us through some of the features and recent announcements regarding Dead or Alive 5.
One the stages and arenas in Dead or Alive 5:
"We kind of thought of the original Dead or Alive stages and the characteristics they always had, you could punt someone maybe off a ledge, they would fall down and go to the next level of the next and you could just, you know, keep going down and down. Or maybe just kick someone through a window and the window will break, and they'll just fall down to the next level. The old stages were multi tiered and that was kind of the way Dead or Alive stages up until now has been constructed. Looking at Dead or Alive 5 we thought of expanding on each stage and trying to do something new with the stages and give them a new dimension and such. When we started brainstorming for the stages we came up with the first stage which was Scramble - it's a stage on top of a building that's in mid-construction or construction site so you're fighting on that. And we thought rather than just punching or kicking someone off the ledge and them just falling down - how about if we use the whole stage and let that change dynamically in real time."
On photo realism and the character design of Dead or Alive 5:
"When we started out on the development on Dead or Alive 5 as well, we thought of realism and what that means - the word real that we use in Japanese has a really broad meaning - it's really hard to define what realism is to us Japanese developers and Japanese people in general. We thought about going down the completely photo real road as well, even making characters a lot more realistic. That's not really what we wanted to do with Dead or Alive. I don't think that's the right approach for our series. To us a Japanese developers what we really wanted to do is make the cutest chicks out there the cool looking guys out there as well in terms of game characters within the sphere of what we thought, within our definition. In that way we made characters better looking and also just kept that kind of DoA spirit as well in there."