by Team Ninja has reportedly confirmed plans to reboot both Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive in the future.
That’s according to a translation of a presentation given by the developer’s president in South Korea this week. According to Ruliweb, during a panel at the G-Star conference in Busan, Fumihiko Yasuda said that he is working on bringing more news to fans as soon as possible.
A slide reportedly shown at the end of his panel – pictured below – features images of both classic Team Ninja series along with the caption “The Future of Team Ninja – Rebooting a Popular Series” in Japanese.
VGC has reached out to Team Ninja owner Koei Tecmo for comment on this story.
Update – Koei Tecmo is responding
In response to this story, a spokesman for Koei Tecmo Games told VGC, “We have nothing to announce at this time.”
We have requested additional clarification and will update this story again when we receive it.
Yasuda has repeatedly publicly expressed his desire to revive the Ninja Gaiden series.
The Tecmo action-adventure series hasn’t seen a mainline installment since 2012’s Ninja Gaiden 3. Yasuda, the director of Nioh and its sequel, was the level designer for Ninja Gaiden 2 and directed the third installment in the series – the first since the departure of lead creator Tomonobu Itagaki.
In an interview with VGC that took place in January 2021, Yasuda told us that he had no plans for a new installment in the Ninja Gaiden series, but expressed his desire to return to the series one day.
Then, earlier this year, he said that “all the pieces would have to fit” for a theoretical future Ninja Gaiden game to be developed, and expressed his willingness to potentially outsource a new game to an outside company or a younger in-house team.
“We’re not announcing anything,” Yasuda said, “but these two ideas sound like great plans and in a sense are both possibilities.” Those are both very, very reasonable ideas for a possible sequel in any series, not just Ninja Gaiden.
“But what I’m saying is, theoretically, if we were working with another company on a new Ninja Gaiden title, we would have to make sure it would be a title that fans would actually enjoy and exceed their expectations.
“It’s not just a question of ‘Hey, let’s just do this’: all the pieces would have to fit, and it would have to be the right team…either a younger in-house team or another company that would really have to fit the Ninja Gaiden pedigree.” .”
