Under the helm of now departed pockmarked, sunglassed despot Tomonobu Itagaki, Team Ninja crafted two of the finest pure action games in Ninja Gaiden. Violent, bloody and beautiful, the tough-as-nails games (particularly the first) offered unparalleled action gaming. Well, until until recent Platinum Games hits Bayonetta and Vanquish, that is.
Team Ninja, now without Itagaki, are busy with Ninja Gaiden III – and I’m scared. Why? It’s going to be different, they say.
"Ninja Gaiden I was all about cutting people and in Ninja Gaiden II it was about dismembering enemies," Team Ninja head Yosuke Hayashi told IGN. "In Ninja Gaiden III, you’re going to experience something new regarding the feeling of cutting people.†"You’ll actually feel how it feels to cut through someone; you’ll feel the bones breaking. We’re going to focus on the feeling of cutting someone more than dismembering them."
"You’ll have to press buttons, things like that, to have your katana go through the bodies. There will be force-feedback to reinforce the idea; There will be work to cutting somebody," he explained. That sounds too much like quick time events to me. "The intention for this title is to focus on the feeling of cutting someone instead of just going through entire armies of bad guys." But..but..I like cutting through armies of bad guys…and their leggies and bodies too.
It also seems like they’ll be making it much more accessible, because gamers these days are pansies. "We are trying to design the game so that anyone can take on the game and experience the action," he said. "You can expect it to be less demanding than Ninja Gaiden II, it won’t be as hard as that." "It might taste a bit different, but it will still stay Ninja Gaiden, and we don’t think the difficulty is a big issue." Maybe, like the aforementioned Bayonetta and Vanquish they’ll introduce super-easy casual modes, leaving insane difficulty as an option.
His most daunting statement though, was this : "We consider Ninja Gaiden I and Ninja Gaiden II’s design to be old," he said. "We are trying something new for the gameplay and starting over from scratch." I’m afraid, but equally excited at the possibility that it’ll actually be good.
Ninja Gaiden 3 will presumably be heading to the Xbox 360, labelled as an exclusive – only to have a superior version trump it on the PS3 a few months later.
Source : IGN
Last Updated: January 26, 2011
