Ninja Gaiden: The Essential Interview

Itagaki: [in English] Yes, Ninja Gaiden Gaiden.

Kikizo: Not a very good title though, so probably better to keep Dragon Sword! Are there any special points about the DS that you want to exploit in telling the story? Being able to touch and move things, show things in different ways?

Itagaki: Of course... we are doing something quite unique, so Saito-san, tell us a little more about that.

Yutaka Saito: As you know, you hold the system vertically, so it's kind of like an open book. Then what we've done is we've made the story sequences illustrated in almost like a comic book style, using all hand-drawn illustrations, in order to make use of that book style, and also to be able to pass elements back and forth and draw your eye from right to left, using that to kind of build up the storytelling in the game.

Kikizo: When you're starting a DS game, perhaps the first thing to think about is the interface. How did you approach the challenging Ninja Gaiden control scheme for this?

Itagaki: It all started with wanting to make an action game where you could interact directly with the character in the screen. And that character could have been Kasumi and it could have been Ryu Hayabusa; it didn't really matter at that point. But when I really thought about it closely I decided that Ryu Hayabusa would be the best choice.

Kikizo: Speaking of which, we've had a cameo in the previous Ninja Gaiden of Ayane. Are we going to see any other Dead or Alive cameos in this game?

Itagaki: No - if possible I don't want to excessively intertwine the two franchises. I mean obviously they're related in certain ways, but I don't want to take it too far. It's really just kind of a collaboration. There may be cameos at the most, but certainly not a whole lot of crossover.

Kikizo: I've noticed there are also a lot of NPCs this time around; just in the one demo level it seemed like there are already almost as many as there were in the first game. Was it a conscious decision to make it a little more story driven?

Itagaki: It's not so much that it's story driven, it's more like we want to provide a number of opportunities to kind of drive the player forward... so they're getting information, possibly from third-party sources around in the game world, that's kind of driving them on and giving them an idea of what they should be doing next.

Page: 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 

NEXT PAGE >>