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Itagaki has only nice things to say about Team Ninja's Metroid project
Being away from Tecmo seems to have done wonders for Tomonobu Itagaki's attitude. In an E3 interview with 1UP's James Mielke, the former Team Ninja head said he was "very honored and pleased to be of service" in response to the suggestion that Ninja Blade was a close imitation of Ninja Gaiden. He admitted he was "pretty tired" of making games featuring super-unrealistic women. He even went so far as to praise Tekken 6 director Katsuhiro Harada, only hating on Tekken when pressed.And rather than harbor hard feelings against his former Team Ninja colleagues who stayed on with Tecmo, Itagaki offered well wishes to the team and its Metroid: Other M project. He called Yoshio Sakamoto, Nintendo's producer on the game, "a veteran I really respect," and suggested that Team Ninja's Yosuke Hayashi "will learn a lot working with him. I hope Team Ninja works hard in making a good game." We like Nice Itagaki! The only ire was reserved for Bayonetta. "If I made a similar game as a game I made in the company I quit," he said about Platinum's Hideki Kamiya, "people would say, 'What an idiot, can't he make anything else?' Well, that is more or less the opinion I have for, uh, that Bayo-something game."
Tomonobu Itagaki returns with new team, new game, same badass attitude
During a recent interview with 1UP, ex-Tecmo employee and leather lover Tomonobu Itagaki (along with comrades Hiroaki Matsui, Katsunori Ehara, and Yoshifuru Okamoto) iterated that he is returning to gaming, and will be backed up by a brand new team on a project for a future game. Unfortunately, we won't see anything on this new game at next week's E3, although Itagaki did confirm he would be in attendance.The new company is tentatively called "Tokyo Vikings" (how ... appropriate) and is largely comprised of ex-Team Ninja staff, including a majority of the folks who worked on Ninja Gaiden 2. Surprisingly, his new team even managed to snag some key character designers from Virtua Fighter 5.Itagaki was overall pretty tight-lipped about the new team and its mystery project, but did confirm that it wouldn't be a fighting game, as Itagaki is sure he's hit the ceiling there with Dead or Alive 4. He wouldn't comment on whether it would be an Xbox 360 exclusive, or heading to other consoles such as the PS3, but his past affiliations with Microsoft might suggest a likely path for his future games.
