It appears that Team Ninja has obtained a brand new employee. According to a tweet from Sony Interactive Entertainment Indies head Shuhei Yoshida, Masaaki Yamagiwa, formerly of From Software, has officially joined Team Ninja. The tweet was accompanied by a photo of both Yoshida, Yamagiwa, and Fumihiko Yasuda, another developer from Team Ninja, all of whom were enjoying a night out. As far as announcements and reveals are concerned, this is definitely one of the more interesting ones we’ve had in a long while.
Yamagiwa’s time as a producer is well noted, having worked on the Sonic the Hedgehog series as well as Tokyo Jungle. His most well-known involvement as producer was on what some consider to be one of the greatest titles of all time: Bloodborne. The From Software classic launched in 2015 for the PlayStation 4 and was critically acclaimed, and is often requested by fans to either be remade for the PlayStation 5, ported to PC, or both quite frankly. Yamagiwa has been a producer in the industry since 2001.
Yamagiwa left Sony back in February of this year, which was part of an exodus of employees departing the company. Not long after this took place, Sony announced that they were shutting down Japan Studio, the longest-tenured developer that Sony had all the way back to the original PlayStation. It’ll be interesting to see what Yamagiwa’s new role will be at Team Ninja. The possibilities are essentially endless as the studio has an excellent assortment of titles in their liberty to work with, most notably the Nioh franchise, itself a spiritual inspiration to the Dark Souls franchise. We’ll be waiting for the day when Team Ninja reveals what they’re going to do with him, and what future projects will bear fruit.