Itagaki: Devil’s Third ‘is going to be a breakthrough for the industry’

Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki has claimed that Devil’s Third is so good it will mark a watershed moment in the action game genre.

A creator hyping their game is nothing new, of course, although Itagaki is doing so against a backdrop of fierce criticism for his Wii U title, with previews labelling it as one of the worst games Nintendo has ever published.

If we had given up, then we wouldn’t be able to show our face to all the people that had supported us up to that point,” he said of the game’s seven year development cycle in a translated Famitsu interview. There wouldn’t be any opportunity for us to work in this industry anymore.

Our desire was to complete the game by any means while establishing our company structure, developing the game itself, and keeping the company going all at the same time. We were finally able to make it through thanks to Nintendo who really made it all possible along with everyone in the industry, and also thanks to the expectations from all the fans and gamers that were waiting. With all that support, I couldn’t be someone who would drop it all and walk away.

It’s a culmination of everything so far – not just mine, but of everyone that works here. Please try it for yourself. I think it’s going to be a breakthrough for the industry. I believe it’s going to take shooters to the next level.”

Itagaki, who has blamed the game’s bad previews on the press, went on to detail the research that went into making his first shooter.

As far as shooters go, I’m still in elementary school, so I had to do a lot of research on shooters from other studios,” he added. We looked into them in really fine detail – what’s the cursor like, what’s the crosshair like, etc. We had to play around with a lot of really fine dials. But there are a lot of those details, and they quickly add up and build on each other.

Just stuffing a ton of elements in doesn’t mean the player is going to have a good time though. That’s why controllability is important. You can throw weapons [laughs], you can throw molotovs, you can guard, you can dodge, you can jump, you can slide. Normally, trying to put everything in just makes it all a mess, but we were able to fit it all in Itagaki-style.”