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Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z caught our attention right away when it was announced a few months back. The stand-alone “alternate reality” Ninja Gaiden harkens to things like Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare and Yakuza: Dead Souls, it creates an all-new version of the Ninja Gaiden universe, unconnected to the events of the other games- in which Yaiba Kamikaze, an antagonist of Ninja Gaiden‘s main star, Ryu Hayabusa- who was slain by the great ninja some time ago. Well, that isn’t stopping him from coming back for a little revenge, fighting though a zombie outbreak that’s sweeping the world to get to his prize.
Team Ninja’s studio head Yosuke Hayashi spoke with Joystiq at Gamescom, detailing how the development team felt about the new universe created for Yaiba, and whether there may be a sequel somewhere down the line.
“”It’s not a sequel or a spin-off, it is its own thing, and so the systems are very different. We want to have it open to another audience, to people who like zombie games. The target is a little bit different, but it should still feel like a good, solid action game.”. Hayashi-san also spoke on the other teams involved in Yaiba‘s development, Keiji Inafune’s (Dead Rising) Comcept, and Spark Unlimited, from California.
“It’s been interesting to see the Comcept team, the Team Ninja team, and the Spark team working together on this project,” Inafune said. “First we were being careful with each other and respecting each other’s boundaries, and stuff like that. But it really has become an open dialog between the teams, respecting the strengths of each team, and bringing out those strengths through discussion and through open and honest collaboration. To see that happen that between Team Ninja and Spark has been something that’s really good for Yaiba.”
Hayashi-san also answered questions concerning whether the game might be held off on to make release on next-gen platforms, to which he replied “We’re very focused on making this for the current generation, for PS3 and 360, when we first started talking about this project it was before any news on anything about next-gen was out, so that’s been our focus for the entire project. If once it comes out and the new hardware is out a lot of people want Yaiba on next-gen hardware, we’re certainly open to the idea. But currently there are no plans for that.”
Finally, when asked if they’d like to do a sequel, Hayashi-san commented that they would love to, but it really depeneds on how succesful this game was, which is unsurprising. It seems a tad early to be asking about potential sequels, especially since the finished product, well, ins’t finished yet.
So, you guys looking forward to this zany zombie Ninja Gaiden? It’ll definitely be something for fans of other zombie hack-and-slashers, like Lolipop Chainsaw. We’ll update as more information comes to light.
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