Dead or Alive isn't only about curvy ladies. It's a proper fighting game. But some might not like—or cannot get pass—DOA's hyper sexualized female fighters.
What does Team Ninja, DOA's developer, think about those reactions? Team Ninja head ninja Yosuke Hayashi told website MCV that the goal is to make the female characters look "as attractive as possible" and "that's something that's not going to change." Continuing, Hayashi added:
We are a Japanese developer, and we're making the female characters with our common sense and our creative sense. When you take that to countries outside of Japan, it tends to be very misinterpreted in some cases, people considering it sexist or derogatory etc.
For us, within our culture, we're showing women like that, and we're trying to make them look attractive. We can't help if other cultures in other countries around the globe think that it's a bad representation. Within our nationality and within our national borders, we obviously have morals that we create our female characters from, but within our Japanese sensibilities, we've made those characters the way they are and we're not going to stop doing that.
People might think this is a poor excuse—that Hayashi is hiding behind cultural differences. People might think that Team Ninja should play by different rules. People think that Dead or Alive should tone down how it represents women. Team Ninja, however, doesn't seem too bothered about what people think.