Heavenly Sword called "half-assed" by Ninja Gaiden Guru
In the latest issue of EGM, Ninja Gaiden creator Itagaki Tomonobu spoke out against the upcoming Heavenly Sword, deeming the sequences where you press certain buttons to perform certain actions (known as "hero sequences") a poor design choice and "half-assed".
Itagaki-san was quoted as saying: "I've never played a good game where the developers put a big icon of the button you're supposed to press onscreen ... I look at Heavenly Sword and it seems really half-assed, because it's asking you to do all these button-timing sequences but you are not getting much payoff from it." We have to disagree with Itagaki-san. For some of the actions you perform, there wouldn't be a really good substitute outside of timed button sequences. It's mostly for style and we enjoy watching them. With that in mind, we think there's a lot of potential for payoff.
Kyle Shubel, producer at Ninja Theory, responded to Itagaki's statement. It's a battle of words! "My response to Mr. Itagaki would be that the intent of the Hero sequences is to empower the player to experience events that would be nearly impossible to play in a natural platforming state ... for example, making the player run down ropes, leaping from rope to rope as they're being cut from underneath you, all while dodging other objects - that would be a frustrating experience to 99 percent of our users if we were to force them to do that manually." We agree, and we'll leave it at that.
[via N4G]
