Dead or Alive 5: “And You Thought It Was About Fighting!”

But that's a spinoff series. We're talking about the main series here...

@Anon 17:30

I'm going to take this slowly for you. Game companies make spin-off games of popular characters. The more popular the character, the more likely it'll get placed in a spin-off. UNpopular characters don't get spin-offs.

So, 'Popular characters = Spin-off games' and 'Unpopular characters = forgotten by everyone not a die-hard fan'.

This means that the female characters of the DoA franchise are more important than the male ones. To the point that they, and they alone, appear in ALL the spin-off games. In fact, Kasumi and Ayane make an appearance in Ninja Gaiden. So what spin-off games have the males appeared in, again?

This is why I wondered why they even bother with male characters anymore. I'll also point out that from the beginning, the female characters have received far more creative attention than the males; up to and including from the creators themselves.

If you want a comparison of male/female attention inside and outside of a fighting game's fans, look no further than Street Fighter.

but in the main series, which is what we're talking about, all of the male characters have been important... if you take them out, you screw with the story (whither you think it's good or not, taking out the guys would still screw with the story they've built)

If you take out all of the guys, you take out Ryu Hayabusa, who is more popular than any of the females.

You mess with the tournament scene and all of the hardcore fans who main the male characters.

Outside of the fanbase, maybe no one knows anyone besides Hayabusa, but within the fanbase everyone has fans, and people actually 100 page threads of paragraphs about the stories and the character backgrounds.

Even if you could argue that this is all crap, why the hell would a developer get rid of all of this? Even if they are treating the guys like shit in comparison, they're still relevant.

And you want to talk about DOAX, then Zack is in all of the DOAX games, so does that make him in the same league as the ladies for you now?

If they removed all the males, are you trying to say that no one would notice or care? If you look at what happens to most other game developers, like Capcom, if they make a change to a long established series that's as drastic as removing all the males from the DOA series, then you know how the "rabbid fans", especially the females, will react. That's enough to prove that the males characters have some importance. Team Ninja would be wiser to give more attention to the male characters, actually.

And that's even ignoring the fact that you ignored what I said about this being a fighting game, where every character is mained by many different players... and they boycot at the idea of even an old fart of a man like Gen Fu being left out, leading Team Ninja to keep him in the series as an unlockable character.

It'd ludicrous to me that you seriously stand by your stance and aren't saying that you're just joking... I don't even need to be a DOA fan to know this, just someone who knows anything about fighting games.

Anon 21:54:

"...but within the fanbase everyone has fans, and people actually 100 page threads of paragraphs about the stories and the character backgrounds."

Thanks for letting me know I'm talking to a rabid fan. That clears up so much about how you keep missing my point. As most blatantly illustrated by the following, "And you want to talk about DOAX, then Zack is in all of the DOAX games, so does that make him in the same league as the ladies for you now?"

To explain it for the slow: He was comic relief and never makes an appearance except at the beginning and ending if the games. He's a plot device, nothing more.

You keep believing that the male characters are important to the franchise, and I'll keep laughing my ass off at you.