Team Ninja’s Itagaki to other developers: there’s no way you can beat our upcoming games

11 June 2007

4 Comments

Posted by:Ferry

While showing the Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword DS demo at Tecmo’s HQ, Team Ninja’s Tomonobu Itagaki had an interview and made some incredibly bold statements about their upcoming titles like Ninja Gaiden 2 and Code Cronos. He also admits he has not seen the Dead or Alive movie!

Question: It’s well known that you work a lot, how much of your time is spent working on peripheral projects such as Ninja Gaiden DS or Ninja Gaiden Sigma than working on current projects?
Itagaki: Currently, I’d say if my entire time working was 100 units, then one of those units would be for Ninja Gaiden Sigma, 49 would be for Ninja Gaiden DS and then 50 would be for my remaining project. I try to make it 120 whenever I can.

Question: Games like Code Cronos and Ninja Gaiden 2 have been sort of waiting in the wings for quite a while now. Do you think we’ll be hearing some announcements about those titles in 2007?
Itagaki: I’d like to show everybody some of the new stuff that we’ve been working on in the near future. The only problem with that is that when the other developers see what we’re doing, they’re going to lose all of their motivation to create any game in the same genre, because there’s no way they can beat it.

Question: Games take so long to develop now, and Team Ninja games set a pretty high standard—and people like that. Is there ever a temptation to grow the team exponentially to produce more titles?
Itagaki: There is such a thing as an appropriate size. It’s like the armed forces—you can increase the number of foot soldiers as much as you want, but if you don’t have enough commanders to lead them you’re not going to get the same amount of fighting strength. In other words, if you double the size you’re not going to double the fighting strength if there aren’t enough commanders to lead them. In that same regard, one of my biggest challenges is to start help along a new generation of directors, one of which is [Yosuke] Hayashi, who’s doing Ninja Gaiden Sigma, in order to get more commanders to get more troops.

Question: Your games are notoriously difficult. How do you balance making a game that appeases the hardcore user base while still remains accessible to people who may not have time to train in order to play a game?
Itagaki: I think as a result of what we do, a lot of times our games tend to be more on the difficult side. It probably just comes from a natural desire for challenge. When I play a game, I want to be challenged by it. That might not always be intentional, but I think it just kind of feeds into that desire to be challenged. I talk about this a lot, but I wouldn’t want to go into a cabbage field with a big knife or a scythe or something and just start cutting down thousands and thousands of heads of cabbage. That’s not something I would find fun. I do think there are probably some people out there who want that kind of experience when playing a game. That’s why, when it comes down to the number of enemies on-screen, I’d rather have good enemies than just a lot of enemies. That’s why I don’t buy into the philosophy of, “Look! We have a thousand heads of cabbage on screen at once, isn’t this great?!”

Question: This might be like pushing on a sore tooth, but have you seen the Dead or Alive movie? Did you have any thoughts about that?
Itagaki: I haven’t seen it. I’ve just been looking at the reactions my fans have had to the movie. I haven’t been involved whatsoever in the movie. Ever since the movie was announced, all I’ve said was that I just wanted them to make something that wouldn’t be disappointing to the fans. Looking at the reactions, some have liked it and others didn’t, I think that’s just the way it is.

At the end Mr. Itagaki mentions someone on his team saw the movie and liked it for what it was. After Europe’s luke-warm reception, it’ll be released in the USA on June 15.
You can read the full interview at Gameinformer, pic via Draft.