The original Ninja Gaiden 2 was a bloody game. Slicing various body parts off your enemies resulted in a satisfactory red fountain that painted the surrounding environment. However, in the upcoming PS3 remake those wonderful blood fountains have been replaced with a sparkling blue glow. GamesRadar questioned the game’s director and producer, Yosuke Hayashi, about this change and he explained that:
Each game has its own concept and with Ninja Gaiden 2, the focus was on extreme violence. But with Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, we really questioned whether violence is a necessity for a game, so we decided to move away from that trend. So the violence ‘approach’ is not the way we approached the development of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.
Is violence a necessity for a game? When your game is Ninja Gaiden then yes, yes it bloody is. Apparently the answer that Team Ninja came up with was “no” though I do not know why or how they came to that conclusion. This sudden decision that Ninja Gaiden needs less blood is an odd one.
Why should developing this remake be so vastly different to developing the original? If the violence was a necessity when they released the game last year then surely it still is now? It’s true that seeing blood spray everywhere is extreme violence but cutting someone’s head off is as well, regardless of which colour bursts out of the resulting fleshy stump. So what purpose does this change really serve?
Personally, I think there’s more to this than what Team Ninja’s current stance of “because we felt like it” suggests, but who knows. Perhaps Itagaki was the only one at Team Ninja that liked blood…though it appears that there is still love for those breast physics as the remake adds a few female characters that are as ridiculously bouncy as they’ve always been. That should be enough to distract the stereotypical gamer from the toned down gore.
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I’m pretty sure it was Itagaki. No-one else on Team Ninja could get it up long enough to do something with those breast physics with all the blood around.
Maybe they want to sell it in Germany?
its because they are all robots, dummie.
Why is this news and not a rant, which it clearly is?
If anybody plays games simply because of blood/graphics, he is stupid.
@ParaParaKing: The news is the changes that have been made to this remake and Team Ninja’s comments on why this has been done. Perhaps I rant a bit towards the end but I meant only to give my opinion on it.
I never meant to suggest that you should play games solely for blood or graphics and I don’t believe that I said anything of the sort in the post. I was just commenting on the strangeness of having so much blood in the original and then taking it out when remaking the game for another platform a year later.
If those fountains of blood weren’t in the original then me ranting about them not being there would be different. It would be the same for any feature that was removed for any remake. I’m sure it’s still a good game but that wasn’t the point.