Team Ninja Promotes Mai Shiranui in Dead or Alive After Her Exclusion From Smash Bros.

Mai Shiranui, team ninja, super smash bros ultimate, Masahiro Sakurai

If you missed the rather lengthy 45-minute Super Smash Bros. Ultimate presentation yesterday that went over the new fighter, Terry Bogard, then you might not have heard about Mai Shiranui’s exclusion from the Switch title.

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You see, the new stage that comes included with Terry Bogard is based on the King of Fighters series from SNK and there are dozens of cameos from characters like Andy Bogard, Joe Higashi, and Blue Mary alongside a couple of others but there is one big character that was missing from the list and that person is Mai Shiranui, one of the most popular female characters in gaming history.

Sakurai explained the reason for her omission: “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is for good boys and girls of many different ages so we decided not to feature her –please forgive us.”

Even though Mai is a huge character throughout the SNK fighting games, she was just a bit too risque for Sakurai to include her in the game and considering that she has been known to wear scantily clad outfits, it kind of makes sense.

But, the main point of this story is that this morning, Team Ninja, the development team behind the Dead or Alive series, promoted the fact that Mai Shiranui is available as a DLC character in DOA6. You can see the drama below:

team ninja, dead or alive, Mai Shiranui, super smash bros

You see, that user @denfaminicogame originally tweeted about Sakurai not putting her in Smash Bros. Ultimate and then Team Ninja quoted the tweet, stating that Dead or Alive 6 is rated CERO D, which means it is suitable for 17-year-olds and above in Japan and then proceeded to link to the DLC content for Mai, stating “Welcome to the world of adults…”

When Sakurai brought up Mai during the livestream, he mentioned that Smash Ultimate is rated CERO A, which means it’s good for all ages.

You can obviously see that the company is attempting to monetize Mai’s unfortunate exclusion from Smash Bros. and it’s actually pretty comical to see play out like this on Twitter.

Anyways, if you’re upset about Mai’s absence from Smash, you can still enjoy her presence in several SNK games like The King of Fighters XIV and Fatal Fury Special, with the latter being available on the Switch.


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Greysun Morales
Greysun was formerly the Features Editor at Twinfinite and wrote for the site from 2017 to 2020. He eats ramen 12 times a week and will never get tired of it. Playing Games Since: 1993, Favorite Genres: Action-Adventure, JRPG, Platformers, and Anything With Ramen