Team Ninja hype man Tomonobu Itagaki no longer wants to work on Ninja Gaiden games.
Kotaku interviewed Ninja Gaiden guru Tomonobu Itagaki on his plans for the future of his career and the action ninja franchise, only to find that the leather jacket-wearing, shade-sporting Itagaki does not want to continue with the series his team has revived.
“Personally I think we were able to create the definitive 3-D game in this series, so I’m not planing on making any other games in the series,” Itagaki explained. “So I hope fans treat this as a swan song for the franchise. I think we were able to achieve everything we wanted with this game so anything else would be extraneous.”
He added that it “would be ridiculous,” for him to try to and develop a final “swan song” game in the series.
Itagaki aims to create something “totally new, completely unrelated to anything I’ve done before. Not any part of any existing franchises.”
He’s thinking about another action title, potentially with a war them set in the Pacific during World War II.
“I think the Pacific theater of World War II is a interesting topic,” he said. “I think it would be cool to work with an American developer and do a game based on the Pacific Theater. I think it would be cool to do something like what Clint Eastwood is doing for that time period.”
The idea came to his mind in the midst of the interview.
“That’s what it’s like to create something; you start from nothing and you have to clear your mind and come up with new ideas,” he described. “I’m interested in that period of time, for my generation, that was an event that influenced us more than anything else. I think that would be an interesting topic to explore.”
Published: May 14, 2008 03:00 pm