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Hayashi: Team Ninja taming its 'sex and violence' image in DoA 5
Team Ninja boss Yosuke Hayashi says the studio's perspective has changed since Tomonobu Itagaki left in a huff in 2008, and even though most of its 200 staff are original team members, Hayashi is calling them his "new team." The most obvious shift is the new team's focus on creating an emotional experience, rather than eye candy, Hayashi tells Gamasutra."The old team was known for making games that just had two primary elements: Sex and violence," Hayashi says. "It was very obvious. The new team, we want to take it to a new level -- to a direction that contains emotional experiences that can move players."That's right -- Team Ninja wasn't emotionally invested in all the sexy gameplay you had together, and now it's looking for something more meaningful. Hayashi may find his new, more mature gaming experience in a Dead or Alive crossover with Virtua Fighter, a la Street Fighter X Tekken, Edge reports."In terms of collaboration titles, there are staff on our team who just love fighting games and if there was any chance to do that we'd actively, possibly do that," Hayashi says."The first 3D game I played was Virtua Fighter; that's the IP I respect most. Virtua Fighter was the father of 3D gaming, so it's very well respected."For now, one thing's certain: The women in Dead or Alive 5 will be more respectable, well-rounded (emotionally) than in previous titles. "We've always had the sex factor in the game; in the past, the female characters had to have big breasts, they had to have scanty dress," Hayashi says. "In DoA 5 especially, we're trying to focus on the real women that surround us: the voice of a female, the mannerisms. We are being realistic about it."
Ninja Gaiden Sigma to have downloadable content of 'amazing depth'
Recently, Sony hosted a message board based Q&A session with Yosake Hayashi, the director of Ninja Gaiden: Sigma, where he fielded questions from various readers about the upcoming action title. It's a great read and covers a wide variety of topics from the number of difficulty levels (five) to their support of Home (no -- but look for unique Home support in future products). The most interesting question though, had to do with downloadable content. When a reader brought up the Hurricane Packs for the original Xbox version, Hayashi responded with, "We'll be making an announcement regarding our plans for downloadable content soon. The content will have some amazing depth for a download!" No additional information was given but considering their track record with DLC, we should be able to expect something pretty cool from them later this year. Further on in the Q&A session, he also hinted that we may be hearing about the next Team NINJA title sooner than we expected, by saying that "There could be an announcement coming in the very near future ..." but that until then we should enjoy Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Perhaps an E3 announcement about a second Team NINJA PS3 title? We'll find out soon!
Team Ninja's Hayashi 'not averse to developing a title for Wii'
This is potentially interesting future news: Team Ninja's Yusuke Hayashi, who is directing the re-remake of Ninja Gaiden, would maybe be okay with making a Wii game or whatever. If he had a good idea for one."There are several groups within Team Ninja. The PS3 group, the Xbox 360 group, and there are Wii fans in Team Ninja." At this point, any new Team Ninja game is, statistically speaking, most likely to be a port of either Ninja Gaiden or Dead or Alive 2. If you like either of those games (and why not?) then you can probably look forward to one of them on the Wii![Via Joystiq]
Team Ninja 'has Wii fans,' would consider developing for console
Team Ninja's Yosuke "Itsygaki" Hayashi, director of Ninja Gaiden Sigma, told Pro-G that the development studio is not averse to developing a title for Wii, pending the title utilized Nintendo's more unique features. "We would make something for the Wii if we came up with something unique that would only work on the Wii," he said. Given Ninja Gaiden's upcoming DS release and its unique control scheme, we can only imagine how Itagaki and co. would go about utilizing the Wii remote's pointer capabilities. Our curiosity turns into discomfort, however, when we think of Team Ninja making a Wii version of DOAX. Hayashi further went on to describe the console preference demographic of the studio: "There are several groups within Team Ninja. The PS3 group, the Xbox 360 group, and there are Wii fans in Team Ninja." We've gone ahead and made a Venn diagram to help visualize the possible trichotomy.
