It looks like we’ll be returning to Hayabusa’s and Kasumi’s ninja infested universe very soon.
As shared on the GamingLeaksandRumours subreddit by user KekanKok, Lunatic Ignus has shared a rumor about an upcoming Team Ninja title. While Lunatic Ignus shared this message on Discord, KekanKok shared a screenshot of it.
We have transcribed the message below, slightly edited for clarity:
“Team Ninja will have some kind of presence at G-Star 2024 in November.
I am currently investigating what they will show, but I heard it could be Ninja Gaiden/Dead Or Alive related (reboot / remastered)”
For those curious, G-Star is an annual video game trade convention held in Korea. G-Star 2024 will be held in BEXCO (Busan Exhibition and Convention Center) in November 14 to 17, 2024.
The Dead or Alive series started with Team Ninja’s first Dead or Alive fighting game, launched in 1996 in the arcades on Sega’s Model 2 arcade board. This Team Ninja was led by Tomonobu Itagaki, who would go on to make a name for himself with this fighting game franchise.
While the Dead or Alive fighting games are best known for their sex appeal, Itagaki revealed his design principles for the series put equal weight to presentation, mechanics, and a balance between keeping both casual and hardcore players happy.
This 1996 game also reintroduced Ryu Hayabusa, the star of the 1980s side-scroller franchise Ninja Gaiden. Subsequently, Team Ninja produced a new Ninja Gaiden series for the Xbox, using their new version of the character.
The 2004 Ninja Gaiden released on Xbox offered an ambitious action-adventure title, this time infamous for its incredibly difficulty and graphic violence. But it was also one of the first games to offer a fully realized 3D action game, after developers figured out the basics in the 5th console generation.
Both Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden would both offer online play joining Halo as some of the earliest games to pioneer this feature on the Xbox. This franchise also created a spinoff sports/dating series called Dead or Alive Xtreme.
Dead or Alive last released in 2019, and Ninja Gaiden 3 last released in 2012. While Team Ninja has made various remasters and collections of the games, today they have made a name for themselves with their maso-core games like Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and the two Nioh games.
So many fans were concerned that the studio had abandoned their original franchises completely. While Tecmo Koei just announced Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme for 2025, fans of their fighting game and action game series weren’t sure they were getting anything new anymore.
It’s easy to see why Team Ninja, or perhaps their publisher Tecmo Koei, have decided they need to reboot the Dead or Alive / Ninja Gaiden universe. The latest games in both franchises did lose steam and left their fans disappointed.
Maybe Team Ninja needed to step away from the universe so they could test themselves, and rediscover what they were good at.
Maybe now they are feeling refreshed, and have novel ideas on how to reintroduce this strange beautiful world filled with clones and ninjas. Or maybe Tecmo Koei just found someone else to make a new game for them.
On a personal level, this writer would be satisfied with a new collection of the classic games, to go multiplatform. But it would also be exciting to see if they can change the game, so to speak.
