Ninja Gaiden 3′s dismemberment removal explained

With the decision to remove dismemberment from Ninja Gaiden 3, fans and gamers alike have been baffled by the exclusion of the series’ coveted feature. The game’s publisher has now gone into a bit more detailed on why exactly developer Team Ninja wanted to exclude it.

Tecmo Koei’s localisation boss, Peter Garza, recently said to VG247 on the removal:

Think about the reality of the dismemberment. The way it was presented in the past games, you would lop off some limbs and then, the enemies would still come back at you to blow themselves up and do more damage. That’s not realistic in itself. It was fun and we’re not saying it wasn’t fun and that it wasn’t good, it was a good system at the time.

He also said:

I keep going back to visceral brutality and that you get a different feel, a different emotional connection if you’re just lopping off limbs from a faceless enemy or you’re going in to push a button to get that final cut into a human’s body. It’s not easy to cut off, to cut through bones. And that’s what we’re trying to show with the steel on bones sequences as you get that katana stuck in people’s bones and it gets caught in the muscles and you have to push through for that final cut while the enemy is there less than a metre away. That’s more of the brutality we want to show.

Ninja Gaiden 3 is currently scheduled for a launch in Q1 2012 which is anywhere between January, 2012, till sometime in March.