Lara Croft’s next adventure: the Playboy mansion?
Japanese video game studio Team Ninja, maker of the popular “Dead or Alive” franchise, had a simple defense for the ample proportions his company builds into female characters in its games: The customers are asking for it.
"We were getting feedback from the overseas offices to tone down the sexuality -- to tone down the sexiness of the game, and of the characters," director Yohei Shimbori recently told video game blog Gamasutra.
"We actually got a lot of feedback from people who were playing it, saying, 'We want bigger breasts. Make the characters more like that.' That was kind of surprising.
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The company just released the latest game in the Dead or Alive series, “Dead or Alive 5.” A review on popular gaming site Gamespot calls the game’s characters “as full-figured as ever” -- apparently thanks to the feedback of the gaming community.
"If you have a solid fighting game system there, there's nothing wrong with having beautiful characters as a layer on top of that -- that's another layer of entertainment,” Shimbori told Gamasutra.
Other game sites took issue with Shimbori’s conflation of beauty and enormous breasts. Jim Sterling, of the Destructoid gaming site noted the director’s comments with dismay, for example.
“What disturbs me is that for Team Ninja, sexy automatically (and exclusively) equals massive, unrealistically large breasts,” he said, pointing out that many of the video game company’s characters look like children -- and in some cases actually are children.
“They look like creepy sex dolls brought to life,” Sterling wrote.
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