Ninja Gaiden 2

"Itagaki opens the vault on various tidbits of information spanning all of Team Ninja's upcoming Xbox 360 games: Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Dead or Alive: Code Cronus, and something called Project Progressive. "

"1UP: But...if Eliot is Gen Fu's apprentice, then why don't they use the same style?

TI: Good question! The most basic reason is because I hate recycled characters, you just keep all the same moves and slap a new name on them. We wanted to use new moves and animation, so that's one of the big reasons. If all Eliot was was this recycled character that had all of Gen Fu's animations and moves, then it would be sad to have to retire Gen Fu then because there'd be no difference between the two.

1UP: Like Soul Calibur palette swaps?

TI: Bringing up Soul Calibur suggests that Namco likes to do that sort of thing, but let's not broach that today, because we don't want to waste our time on that kind of petty stuff. I think the technique of recycling the characters and just changing the names and keeping everything else the same is just to add meaningless volume is the worst thing you can do, I hate it. I don't have time to talk about something so despicable when we have so much other stuff to talk about."

"XBN: Youa??ve made some harsh comments in the past about Tekken. Do you regret saying these things?

Itagaki: Tekken 1 was good. Tekken 2 was better, and Tekken 3 even better than that. My family are big fans of Tekken 3! But Tekken was just did not push the genre at all. Such lazy development, it really annoys me. I do respect what the AM2 team did with Virtua Fighter 4. I am a fan of simplification, and I liked that they tried to increase the mass appeal of the game by cutting out one button. But DOA3 is still a better game.

XBN: Still, youa??ve made some harsh comments in public about the games that pretty much founded the genre. Do you consider it normal practice to slag off your competitors?

Itagaki: Let me tell you the real story with that. Back when the original DOA came out, Namco aired a radio commercial -- they insulted my series. As the father of DOA, I will never forget an insult to my family. I will get them back with nuclear missiles more than 100 times for that. I will never forget it. "

"GI: You’ve said before you want to develop for the most powerful console out there. You must be pretty confident in the Xbox 360.

Itagaki: Yes. I hope so. I think Xbox 360 is the best game console on the earth. It’s better than PlayStation 3.

GI: Can I ask you why?

Itagaki: PS3 has too complicated of architecture.

GI: We asked you this last time we were here, but how do you think Xbox 360 is going to do in Japan? Do you think that the opinion of the Japanese people has changed since we last talked? Has it become more positive? Do you think the Tokyo Game Show will help at all?

Itagaki: I think that it’s going to do better than the last one. But that’s something that everyone knows. They can’t make a bigger mistake than last time. Nothings changed as far as the opinion of the people. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Even if you have some sort of pre-launch opinion. What matters is when the system comes out, what will people think?

With DOA franchise over the years, we of course brought this out, and recently, suddenly we’re getting more attention. People are interested in the DOA franchise. Similar to that, Xbox has to get peoples attention first. Then maybe they get something going after that. Again DOA rather than focusing on criticizing competing games, I focused on emphasizing on what we can do and what we are doing with our own game. Similar to that 360 continues to do that. It focuses on what it does than what others don’t. Microsoft is doing that, and I think Microsoft will pull it off.

Of course after saying that, I have criticized, and have said bad things about Tekken and other games in the past. (laughs) I’m a feisty person, so if someone challenges me I have to fight back. (laughs)"

Ikari>
Han laver jo intet nyt.

Ikari>
Jeg arbejder og skriver freelance.