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EA - Medal of Honor release date, Dragon Age sequel, Sims 3 on consoles | Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing demo out now | Did Dante's Inferno topple Mass Effect 2 from charts perch? | Multiple Deals of the Week on XBLA | Aliens vs Predator scores 8/10 | Free Mass Effect 2 DLC hits tomorrow | Exclusive Left 4 Dead 2 Gamerpics with OXM issue 57 | Need For Speed: Shift Ferrari DLC announced | BioWare talks Mass Effect 2 sex scenes | Sega talks Alpha Protocol delay | X10 Fable III news will make you "super pissed off" | Final Fantasy XIII DLC all but confirmed by boxart | Modern Warfare 2 'care package glitch' being zapped | Bungie has last Halo 2 hoorah on April 14th | PS3-exclusive LA Noire confirmed for 360 | Brock Lesnar the face of UFC Undisputed 2010 | Iron Man 2 trailer flies in | Grab Mass Effect 2 'Dr Pepper' DLC the free way | Dark Void gets its own Horde mode | Microsoft turning off Live for the original Xbox | Could Microsoft be raising the Friends List cap? | Just Cause 2 demo on the way | Watch Super Street Fighter IV bonus stages in action | Watch debut Fallout: New Vegas trailer | Monday Night Entertainment trailer crashes in

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Video

Launch Player

XBLA's 350 Club

Interview: Phil Harrison

Feature

Interview: Tomonobu Itagaki

23-May-2008 Ninja Gaiden II's creator speaks with OXM...

Arguably one of the few rock 'n roll developers left in an industry creaking under the weight of PR supervision, controlled statements and conformist opinion, Tomonobu Itagaki is celebrated as much for his honesty as he is his games.

In bullish mood at a press event for Ninja Gaiden II at Soho, Itagaki has just watched journalists run through Hayate's latest adventure.

After getting our hands bloody by slicing and dicing through a horde of enemies - with Itagaki nodding his approval - we sit down with the developer and ask him about Ninja Gaiden II, Devil May Cry 4 and what comes next...

It's been said this is your swansong - why?
First of all, let me say that I've been making games for almost fifteen years now, both the DOA series and the Ninja Gaiden series and every time we do our best to make the best game we can, but its tough to make it one hundred percent. And first of all I'd like to say I'm happy to be here and see everyone playing Ninja Gaiden and it re-affirms my belief that we did a great job on this title, that everyone is able to enjoy it.

Ninja Gaiden had the remix of sorts with Sigma. Can you see the series continue without you? Is that something you'd like to see happen?
First of all, I should explain that Sigma was made by another team not under my direct involvement. I can say I wasn't really happy with the way it turned out. I think its too different from the rest of the series. But here, with Ninja Gaiden II, I can say for myself and others that have been with Team Ninja for years were directly involved in creating this from the ground up and so, you can be rest assured that this is a mainstream Team Ninja production.

The Sigma project began with the idea to give it to a younger group of people to allow them to try their hand at making a game, and hopefully that would be a learning experience for them. But when I saw the final product I realised they needed even more experience to understand what a game is. A game is not just taking something someone else has made and adding on top of it, but creating something from the ground up.

The Sequel

Is this Ryo's last stand, or is he passing the torch on to someone else? There seems to be a passing of the torch between old icons to new, with Dante to Nero in DMC, Solid Snake to Raiden in MGS - is this a coincidence, or are we seeing the ushering in of a new guard?
I think a lot of that stems from the fact that as series continue the sequels aren't necessarily made by those that originally created the game.

If you look at how Ninja Gaiden II was made, I think that the people that have been forced to work on sequels to establish franchises for financial reasons don't understand how Ninja Gaiden II got to be at level of quality that it is. [taps head] That's because I have thousands and thousands of pages worth of notes in my head from decisions I've made and I don't have any of them on paper... so someone couldn't just pick it up and make a sequel.

So what we see when the torch is passed on to younger developers, they have no choice but to create a new character, in order to have a new feature or in order to create buzz around the title without it being attached to its original creator.

Now I don't think that Metal Gear is necessarily the same thing, theirs is more story-based and Kojima-san always worked on the project, but I think that that is an easy escape for a lot of franchises to take.

I mean it ties into something I said earlier in the presentation, if the suggestion was made to make Sonya from Ninja Gaiden II a playable character, that would result in a very poor experiences. I said, if you were to do that you would have change the core gameplay right around to focus on guns and things like that, ala Gears of War. So its just too easy a path to take to say we're going to throw in another character.

The Competition

At the announcement of his new game from Platinum Games, Devil May Cry creator Kayima-san stated that the "action adventure genre hasn't evolved in seven years" and his game would bring about the climax of the genre. What do you think of that statement?
I think Kayima-san makes good games. However, I think they, the systems, gameplay elements in his game tend to be rather shallow and he makes up with that through stylish presentation. I think if you were to compare them directly, the combat and other gameplay elements in NGII are much deeper than projects that he works on.

Of course, who knows? He might be able to come up with something good. What platform is the game on?

Xbox 360 and PlayStation3.
Oh really? Good.

New Features And The Future

With playing Ninja Gaiden II the last half hour or so, and hopefully not embarrassing ourselves too badly (Itagaki-san sat alongside us as we played through the opening levels), the decapitations, the finishing attacks, are beautifully done - did you want every attack's end to do so in this beautiful, almost artistic way?
[Laughs] You were very good, by the way. I really believe that action games should be very beautiful visually, but they also need to be supported by a depth of combat. In my games its all based on a back and forth with the enemies, its very interactive. You feel like you're pushed to the brink but you manage to survive, the enemies are as out to get you as you are to get them. Whereas other types of action games, one of which being Devil May Cry, enemies exist there as objects on which you unleash your attacks.

It's very much a one-way street and once those enemies are finished you have that feeling of 'oh, I'm so powerful'.

I understand the appeal of that type of game but that's really not for me, that's not the type of games I want to make. So I think its important to tie in the depth of combat with the visuals, like not only are you overcoming a situation but you're doing it in a very stylish manner.

A by-product of this is the Ninja Cinema, slowing you to record your best moments and upload them to Xbox Live (similar to Halo 3's Theatre mode). Is this something you wanted from the start?
When looking at forums and things like that for fans of my games, one opinion I heard often was 'wouldn't it be cool if Ninja Gaiden had a feature along the lines of Halo 3 with their saved film feature?' and I thought that wasn't going to be something that would a huge component to the game.

We have worked on replay functionality for over ten years with the Dead or Alive series. As you know, at the end of a fight there's replay, so we've had the ability to have that technology for a long time.

So it was simple to connect that to online, with the idea being you can go into the Leaderboards and look at the top-ranked players and see how they play. We thought it'd be a fun feature to bring some excitement to the community.

Believe it or not, Ninja Cinema only took about a week to implement (chuckles). It just goes to show how much we tried to incorporate as much feedback from the fans, saying 'this is the definitive Ninja Gaiden title, we've done everything we can to make it live up to that name'.

How do you think the Xbox 360 is looking for the future and what is on the cards for you in the near future... a Dead or Alive sequel?
I plan to continue to work on Xbox 360 until the new generation of consoles are released, so you'll be able to enjoy the platform for several more years to come.

As far as a sequel to DOA is concerned? I'm not planning anything right now, mainly because we were able to accomplish everything we wanted in DOA4... just as Ninja Gaiden II is the definitive version of NG, I feel the same way about DOA4. And fans out there might say its unfair for you to finish a series just because you're happy with it, you should listen more to the fans, but if we were ever to consider a sequel to DOA it'd be many years down the road.

For now I'm looking at doing something completely new, unrelated to any of the franchises I've worked on so far.

Gillen McAllister