Team Ninja reportedly confirms Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive reboot plans

Team Ninja has reportedly confirmed plans to reboot both Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive in the future.

That’s according to a translation of a talk the developer’s president held in South Korea this week. According to Ruliweb, Fumihiko Yasuda said during a panel at the G-Star conference in Busan that he was working to bring fans more news as soon as possible.

A slide reportedly shown at the end of his panel – pictured below – shows images of both classic Team Ninja series along with the headline, “The future of Team Ninja – Reboot of popular series” in Japanese.

VGC has contacted Team Ninja’s owner Koei Tecmo for comment on this story.

Yasuda has publicly stated his desire to revive the Ninja Gaiden series multiple times.

The Tecmo action adventure series hasn’t seen a mainline instalment since 2012’s Ninja Gaiden 3. Yasuda, who is the director of Nioh and its sequel, was a level designer for Ninja Gaiden 2 and directed the series’ third instalment – its first since the departure of lead creator Tomonobu Itagaki.

In an interview with VGC that took place in January 2021, Yasuda told us that he had no plans for a new instalment in the Ninja Gaiden series, but stated his desire to one day return to the series.

Then earlier this year, he said that “all the pieces would need to fit” for a theoretical future Ninja Gaiden game to be developed, and expressed willingness to potentially outsource a new game to an external company or a younger internal team.

“We’re not announcing anything,” Yasuda said, “but both of those ideas sound like great plans and are both possibilities in a sense. Those are both very, very reasonable ideas for potentially a sequel in any series, not just Ninja Gaiden.

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Team Ninja says it isn’t against outsourcing a new Ninja Gaiden

Studio president Fumihiko Yasuda says a new series entry would need 'all the pieces to fit'

“But what I want to say is, if we were to theoretically work with another company on a new Ninja Gaiden title, we would need to make sure that it would be a title that the fans would really enjoy and exceed their expectations.

“It’s not just a matter of, ‘hey, let’s just go do this’: all the pieces would need to fit, and it would need to be the right team… either a younger team internally or another company that would really need to fit the Ninja Gaiden pedigree.”