Anime fans have a new game to look forward to from Bandai Namco.
As reported by Gematsu, Taiwan’s video game rating agency has confirmed the existence of one Death Note: Killer Within. Gematsu also reports that the original publisher of the Death Note manga, Shueisha, trademarked this name last June around the world.
The rating lists PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 as its platforms, and that’s all we know for now.
Death Note was originally published in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2003 to 2006, and received anime adaptations from 2006 to 2008. The manga was the first collaboration between writer Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, who would go on to make the manga Bakuman and Platinum End.
The series also made their way stateside, culminating in an infamous Netflix US film adaptation in 2017. But on the video game front, there have only been three games before this, all published on the Nintendo DS and only released in Japan.
Death Note: Kira Game, Death Note: Successors to L, and Death Note -Spiraling Trap- (L the proLogue to DEATH NOTE were adventure games with a variety of gameplay elements, each seeking to recreate the world of the manga in myriad ways.
On the other hand, Death Note characters were used in crossover games connected to Weekly Shonen Jump, including Jump Super Stars, Jump Ultimate Stars, and Jump Force.
That means Death Note: Killer Within will be the first Death Note video game to release on PlayStation, the first one to release outside of a Nintendo platform, and the first original Death Note video game in 16 years.
It’s certainly curious as to why Death Note is getting a video game after all this time. While the franchise certainly had its fans, it would be reasonable to state that everyone had largely moved on.
There is a new batch of manga / anime franchises that have yet to be brought to the West, such as Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. On the flip side, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, Death Note’s original creators, have themselves moved on to their third manga.
But perhaps the onus for this new title is Bandai Namco’s recent ongoing success with their anime video game adaptations. There was no particular reason for their Fairy Tail and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures video games, but they did turn out to please fans.
Since Death Note is not your conventional action oriented series for younger males, we hope Bandai Namco came up with a fitting game design to do the series justice. We suppose some sort of investigation game would be suitable, but if they made a dating sim where you can treat Misa better than Kira or L ever did, we would take that too.
