Some four years after the console versions, The Ninja Warriors Once Again (aka The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors) Tengo Project's remake of their 1994 Super Famicom/SNES single-plane brawler The Ninja Warriors Again, is finally coming to PC: it'll be out on July 25, with a 10% launch discount and/or a bundle with their more recent self-revival work, Kikikaikai: Kuro Mantle no Nazo/Pocky & Rocky: Reshrined: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2288070/The_Ninja_Saviors_Return_of_the_Warriors/
TNWA is a re-imagining of Taito's super-widescreen arcade action game The Ninja Warriors that not only incorporates a lot of elements from the brawler format as established by Final Fight but also a lot of the combat advancements being made by fighting games of the day; it was one of the earlier and more accomplished examples of brawlers re-importing fighting game tech into their lexicon, and aside from the obvious additions (two new characters, two-player co-op, etc), one might be surprised by just how few "modernisations" were made, or required, for current-day players.
For those not aware of Tengo Project, they're a three-person team of Natsume-Atari1 veterans who, after decades on the licensed/contract mega-work treadmill, managed to form a little carve-out to go back to making games the way they did in the '80s and '90s; this specific trio was responsible for the SNES/SFC games Wild Guns, The Ninja Warriors Again, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition and Gundam Wing: Endless Duel, and each of those individuals also contributed to many other classics of the era that include the two Pocky & Rocky/SFC Kikikaikai games, Shadow of the Ninja, Shatterhand and many other games. So far, all of their projects have been self-remakes of their past SNES/SFC works, and all three of them set the standard for retro franchise revivals, particularly visually: the new pixel art is much more detailed and fluid while being almost imperceptible as "new", to the point where a lot of people have to A/B the old and new games just to even recognise how much work actually went into redrawing them.
(The name "Tengo Project" is a reference to their origins as a unit—when they found themselves with some unexpected downtime between Contract Gig #876 and Contract Gig #877, they were afforded the chance to make an original game on their own terms, provided they made it with half the time, half the team and half the cartridge size of a typical project ["ten-go" = 0.5]: that game was Wild Guns, a classic late-era SNES/SFC action game and the end-product of a team that was firing on all cylinders.)
My interest in Tengo Project isn't due to them reviving these specific old games that I happen to love, or any particular preference for retro games, or games with a classic difficulty curve or whatever: I check for them because, unlike so many similarly-skilled peers who'd been forced into a career of drudgery by an industry that came to viewer smaller accomplished teams as prime grist, they managed to re-assert themselves and make the games they want to make, how they want to make them, with the same degree of artisanry that made those games so beloved to begin with. There are countless other veterans toiling away on service games or doing gruntwork on throwaway IP projects or managing go-nowhere venture-capital garbage that have not been so lucky, but my extremely optimistic hope is that some of them might be able to use whatever success Tengo Project has found as a potential springboard to liberate themselves and return to working on the kinds of games that only they can make, while they're still physically able to make them.
(They've heavily hinted that their next project will be based on Shadow of the Ninja, by the way... keep an eye out around TGS time.)
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the current incarnation of the Japanese studio Natsume Co. Ltd., not to be confused with anything related to any version of the internationally-know Atari, nor the US-based Natsume Inc., to which they are only nominally connected
That's Tengo Project's Hiroyuki "Iwadon" Iwatsuki, on location in Osaka with his mentor and former Natsume colleague, Iku Mizutani, in an extremely unsubtle teaser video for an upcoming Shadow of the Ninja revival game... is it a straight remake? a full-on new game? somewhere in-between, a la Pocky & Rocky Reshrined?
For the unfamiliar, here's a look at the original game—I shouldn't need to tell you that the upgrades in store for this revival are bound to be more drastic and more immediately obvious than those seen in Tengo Project's other recent games:
...and here's the box art for the Famicom version, for no other reason than I think it's neat. (JP fans seem to be split on it, in a "ok but maybe the game would've sold better if you'd gone with literally anything else"-type way.)
