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Team Ninja has confirmed a third entry in the Dead or Alive Xtreme series – and it’s going to support Sony’s virtual reality headset.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 was announced last week at the Tokyo Game Show. Confirmed characters were selected via fan vote and include Marie Rose, Honoka, Kasumi, Ayane, Kokoro, Nyotengu, Hitomi, Momiji and Helena, Polygon reports.
Furthermore, the PS4 version – which goes by the full name Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Fortune – will support PlayStation VR. Quite how it will support the headset remains to be seen, although considering the previous entries’ voyeuristic want it’s perhaps not hard to imagine.
The Vita SKU will be called Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Venus.
Team Ninja lead Yosuke Hayashi, however, has said that the game is being made exclusively for Japanese and Asian markets and will not be released in the West. No official reason was given, but changing attitudes in the Western market seem like the probably cause.
Last year Tekken 7 director Katsuhiro Harada threatened to pull female fighter Lucky Chloe from the game after critics rounded on her over-sexualisation. He also lashed out, claiming that Western audiences aren’t comfortable with anything other than muscular skinheads”.
Evidence, however, suggests that US and the West are merely wising up to the exploitation of over-sexualised female imagery, and are becoming increasingly tired of how such techniques are being abused.
Saying that, the Dead or Alive fanbase isn’t just in it for the fighting. There was uproar recently when some of the more revealing costumes in DOA were banned by a multiplayer tournament organiser, claiming that such imagery was simply the nature” of the game.
Dead or Alive producer Yosuke Hayashi told MCV in February that the series’ overt sexualisation was in keeping with its exaggeration of all aspects of reality.
Our characters, male and female alike, are created in a fantasy setting and are using extraordinary abilities to compete with each other in a clearly light-hearted, over-the-top universe,” he stated. Their abilities are very balanced and we want to present all of them as dynamic, strong, sexy and confident. In our eyes, every fighter has the same potential.”
