Dotemu and Tribute Games have announced new DLC for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, featuring a familiar face for loyal shellheads.
Miyamoto Usagi, or as more popularly known, Usagi Yojimbo, is joining Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge as a playable character in the new Dimension Shellshock DLC. As reported by Video Games Chronicle, the DLC is coming later this year, with price and release date also to be revealed later.
Usagi Yojimbo is a fully independent comic book published since 1984. Yojimbo is not a name, but a description of his job, bodyguard. Miyamoto Usagi has been roaming feudal Japan as something of a samurai errant-knight, taking a funny animal twist to the genre of Japanese feudal tales.
Usagi Yojimbo has also been a frequent collaborator with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the very start. We won’t go through the history of their comic book or animated crossovers here, but creator Stan Sakai has reinvented the story of their meeting many times over.
Usagi’s first video game is actually on his own game. Samurai Warrior: The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo released in 1988 for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum. His first appearance in a TMNT video game is in 2003’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus, and is based on his appearance in the 2003 series.
Dimension Shellshock will actually be the first time that Usagi can be played alongside the Turtles. So maybe they hadn’t been able to do absolutely everything in terms of these collaborations. But there’s a first time for everything, and this is a great place to start.
It’s also somewhat intriguing that Usagi Yojimbo didn’t show up in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, a 1991 arcade beat-em-up that had the Turtles fighting the Foot Clan in different places and points in time. Given that Dimension Shellshock has a similar premise to that game, this seems like a good place to explore that possibility.
Obviously, bringing up Usagi Yojimbo also raises questions on who else can reappear as cameos or playable characters for Dimension Shellshock. I’m personally betting on the hot rod riding teenagers from Dimension-X, the Neutrinos, Zak and Kala.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is available to play on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and Windows and Linux, on Steam. You can watch the announcement trailer below.
