It looks like Team Ninja is getting ready to bring back two of their most popular franchises. The studio announced at South Korean event that they are planning on rebooting the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive series, the action-adventure and fighting game franchises respectively. While they didn’t offer any concrete information, they did provide a brief slide with an image from both franchises with the tagline “The future of Team Ninja – Reboot of popular series.” This more or less confirms that they have at the very least begun the very early stages of development, which will hopefully bear more fruit in the foreseeable future.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a release for either franchise. The Dead or Alive series saw the most recent activity with 2019’s Dead or Alive 6, which received a bit of a mixed reception at launch. It was also infamous for its DLC content and Season Passes, some of which costs around $99 a piece making them more expensive than the base game. Ninja Gaiden on the other hand has not seen a mainline release since Ninja Gaiden 3: Razors Edge in 2012. That title was an updated version of Ninja Gaiden 3, which was so poorly received that Team Ninja necessitated the updated edition within the same calendar year.
Team Ninja did release the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection which collects Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge and was released in 2021 for several platforms. Other than that, there hasn’t been any new material for the franchise since 2012. In short, it only makes sense for Team Ninja to reintroduce these franchises as a reboot, which also gives the studio a chance to breath some new life into them. Team Ninja is also hard at work on two other major projects, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, which is due to launch on March 3, 2023, and Rise of the Ronin, an action JRPG that was recently announced during Sony’s State of Play in September.