Interview: Team Ninja on Wo Long, Ninja Gaiden’s future and more - Video Games Chronicle

When most people think of Team Ninja, they think of its classic action game series such as Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive and more recently, PlayStation-published Nioh.

And unlike many of Team Ninja’s recent releases, Wo Long is releasing on Xbox – as a day one Game Pass release, no less (although the chances of Nioh coming to the platform still sound slim).

But we also want to note, these are all points that Team Ninja keeps very close to their heart, and views as very important in all their games.

But also, we want to make sure that the game feel is just right, and tuning that is very important?

Going back to the difficulty, we want to make sure that the player understands when they made a mistake, and it doesn’t feel like the game was being unfair, right.

We’re instead trying to focus on what we feel we do very well here at Team Ninja, which is making mission-based action games with a lot of intensity that’s concentrated in those stages that you’re going to be battling through.

So that’s what we want to focus on moving forward with the development of Wo Long, to focus on what we feel we do really well here and make sure that all comes across in the gameplay as well?

And that’s also going to factor into when you want to try to raise that level, do you want to maintain it?

So there’s really a lot that’s going on here.

And it’s not going to be like any other kind of game before it in that regard.

“We’re trying to focus on what we feel we do very well here at Team Ninja, which is making mission-based action games with a lot of intensity that’s concentrated in those stages that you’re going to be battling through.”?

Yasuda: The team here at Team Ninja feel that there still is a lot of potential and possibilities for the Masocore genre in general.

I’d also argue that it’s Team Ninja’s job as well to keep working really hard to make these new games in that genre, that show that there is still life left in the genre, and show there are so many things that you can do from a gameplay perspective?

I feel that it’s our job to keep providing games like Wo Long that are going to show that potential, and there’s still so much you can do in the genre, because I feel there are things that you can only feel, or which are easier to feel, in this genre.

With that history, is it difficult for you to create original titles like Wo Long, while also trying to satisfy the many fans who want to see old series like Ninja Gaiden come back.

We’re really happy there are so many fans, and we want to make a new title for those existing series.

But it’s all down to seeing if that’s a possibility and if there are skillsets there in the team to make use of that?

But what I want to say is, if we were to theoretically work with another company on a new Ninja Gaiden title, we would need to make sure that it would be a title that the fans would really enjoy and exceed their expectations.

It’s not just a matter of, ‘hey, let’s just go do this’: all the pieces would need to fit, and it would need to be the right team… either a younger team internally or another company that would really need to fit the Ninja Gaiden pedigree.

Yasuda: We’re very happy that so many players are going to have the chance to try out a Team Ninja title potentially for the first time with Wo Long.

But just because it’s on Game Pass, we haven’t gone and changed ‘XYZ’… That’s not really something that we’ve done on the dev team side.