Stephen Totilo sat down with Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword producer Yosuke Hayashi last week during the devs tour of NY and managed to squeeze some pretty interesting and different information out of him.
Take for instance the fact that Dragon Sword is the first Gaiden game that Hayashi’s mum has endorsed, or that the game was designed to be played at the speed of penmanship:
It wasn’t until Team Ninja’s Yosuke Hayashi stepped off the plane in the States this week that he heard about the connection some in the Japanese media were trying to draw between his recently released Ninja Gaiden game and the rampage of a disenfranchised gamer at a shopping centre near Tokyo.
Team Ninja’s stab at bad-arse ninja action on the Nintendo DS has arrived, with Ryu Hayabusa and the demon ninja hordes he must defeat looking tinier than ever in Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. The game is almost entirely controlled by simple stylus motions, using techniques that may already be familiar to DS gamers who have played The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. While the scope may be smaller, the team at Tecmo doesn’t appear to have skimped on the production values.
The question is, however, can the white knuckle action of Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden work on a handheld? We’ll tell you what we loved and hated in the review.
Tomorrow (Wed.) will see the Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword launch party at the Nintendo World Store in New York City from 2pm – 6pm. The game’s producer and director Yosuke Hayashi will be on hand to sign autographs and met and greet the crowd. If you purchase the game there you will be granted one of those nifty Dragon Sword Ninja styli. There will also be demo stations set up around the store so you can try before you buy.
As alluded to yesterday, here is a screen clip from the Fuji TV nationwide network news attempting to draw a link between the senseless multiple stabbings by suspect Masahiro Kanagawa in Ibaraki Prefecture and gaming. Fuji TV flashed a clip of Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and wrote this at the bottom of the screen:
DS game NINJA GAIDEN Dragon Sword is on sale. People are buying it! And to encourage those people along, Tecmo’s Team NINJA is running a special campaign from March 21st to April 16th, giving away 15 iPod 8GB Nanos to those Japan-based gamers who complete the game with the highest “Karma” score. Nice of Tecmo to give those away. Better yet, nice of Tecmo to trust people not to hack the game. Then again, it is just an 8GB iPod Nano… Team NINJA Nano [IT Media]
For whatever reason, I’ve had very little interest in Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword for DS. (Maybe it was because Itagaki laughed at me.) But this new gameplay footage, while not necessarily the most epic battle in history, looks both fun and technically impressive. Not to be a graphics whore, but man, look at those graphics! Not too shabby for a DS title!
I kinda dug Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword on the DS both when I checked it out on the Tokyo Game Show floor and was forced to play it at the Tecmo party later that night, with a duo of developers looking on. It’s seems like a fun little game.
And now Tecmo’s let us know that the game will be hitting the DS sometime in March and dropped this official box art on is. It’s nice to see some solid timing showing up for games hitting early next year. I was beginning to think it was going to be a slow few months.
