Interviews// Team Ninja's Head, Yosuke Hayashi

Fighting games must seem a lot like buses to Nintendo. It has waited patiently for a proper brawler to appear on any of its systems, and now with the advent of the 3DS we’re seeing support from two of the genre’s biggest players from the off.

Capcom’s Street Fighter IV arrived at launch, and soon we’ll be seeing Team Ninja’s Dead or Alive franchise join it on store shelves.

But Dead or Alive Dimensions isn’t being treated as a sequel, or even a glorified port like Capcom’s offering was. Team Ninja head Yosuke Hayashi instead likens the game to more of a ‘reboot,’ or at the very least a ‘best of compilation’ from past years. With the added bonus of StreetPass and WiFi Connection, of course.

From there, we had a chat about the challenges in making Dead or Alive Dimensions, the atmosphere within the studio since Tomonobu Itagaki’s departure and the state of the Japanese game industry in general. Read on for some candid insight.


SPOnG: Dead or Alive Dimensions is a reboot of the fighting franchise - why did you decide to do this, rather than continue the series in a traditional manner?

Yosuke Hayashi: It’s been five years since Dead or Alive 4 - that’s a long time for fans, so we wanted to make a game where players could get into the swing of things smoothly and without any unfamiliarity.

But, even if we did say that this was the next true Dead or Alive title, there are still many people who have never played the series before. We wanted to introduce the franchise’s history and its characters to new players.

So, there are two audiences for this game, really - the fans who have never played Dead or Alive before, and those who have - for the latter group, we felt that keeping a record of the franchise’s history we could make a ‘best of’ collection, like how musicians have with CDs, to satisfy these players too.


SPOnG: It’s the first Dead or Alive game on a Nintendo platform. What has prevented you from doing so before, on the Gamecube or Wii for example? Was there something special about 3DS?

Yosuke Hayashi: We didn’t choose the 3DS simply because it was a Nintendo product and we needed to check a box, but rather we saw a lot of potential in the handheld. The wireless connectivity was one of the big advantages for us, and along with the high specs and the obvious 3D capabilities we felt this was a good console to release a fighting game on.


SPOnG: What did you learn whilst developing with 3D technology?

Yosuke Hayashi: It’s a bit like watching the 3D film Avatar… when you first watch the trailers, you just see a blue… thing on the screen. You kind of think ‘what is that?’ But as you watch the film, people all around the world felt closer to these characters because of the 3D effect.

Developing Dead or Alive Dimensions has had the same effect on our team - we felt like the characters were more substantial, and there’s more of a connection with the player. Because of that, making this game was a lot of fun.


SPOnG: When Nintendo first showcased the 3DS, one of the big gameplay advantages of it would be to allow players to better determine depth in 3D space. When developing a game with that in mind, does that have an impact on your design process?

Yosuke Hayashi: Yes, we couldn’t have just taken the 3D and simply added it to our game. We had to adjust our designs and development to accommodate the technology, and we had to tweak the 3D capabilities as well. We learned that some people were complaining about becoming tired when using the 3DS for a long time, so what we really put our effort into was creating a game which is easier to play and easier on the eyes.


SPOnG: How challenging is it to create a fighting game, with all the nuances that you’re used on in arcade and console development, on a portable like 3DS?

Yosuke Hayashi: Fighting games differ from other games due to the interaction between people. In the arcades you meet people in the area and fight them - meeting new people is a key element of fighting games. With 3DS you can connect to the internet and play with other people, or you can meet new friends using StreetPass and due to its portability. So, in that sense 3DS was a really fitting device for a Dead or Alive game.