A JP press site accidentally shared the full announce for Tengo Project's next game ahead of time: as their many extremely unsubtle teasers have indicated, they're remaking the FC/NES co-op ninja side-scroller 闇の仕事人KAGE / Shadow of the Ninja (Blue Shadow in Europe), and it'll be out in the spring of 2024 for the platform of your choice (which not only includes PC from the jump but, for the first time, Xbox). It'll be playable at TGS next month, so it won't be too long before we're all able to see it in action.
They're touting it as a "completely new work" but I think they only mean that in the sense that they're obviously redrawing everything from scratch, not that they intend to deviate dramatically from the content or structure of the original (and to be sure, the screens they've shared are very recognisable as derived from the original game.) They have already confirmed that the two player-characters will have distinct moves and abilities, as opposed to the original where the changes were purely cosmetic.
In addition to (re)confirming the participation of former Natsume composer/sound designer Iku Mizutani, they've also collaborated with Dynamic Pro on the key/character illustrations... that is, Dynamic Pro the corporate entity, but not the actual artist who drew the original illustrations, and A/Bing the original illustrations vs. the new ones makes that very clear:
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The new illustration style isn't awful or anything, but they do feel a little... anachronistic, I guess? Like, the originals are very conventional early-'90s, whereas these ones don't strike me as "modern" so much as something I would've expected from a manga adaptation from 2009 or something. All the in-game visuals we've seen so far have gone through Shunichi Taniguchi's filter and I would've liked them to have done all they key art, too, but it ain't a big deal.
One other tidbit: they say their recent Kikikaikai/Pocky & Rocky game has sold over 150,000 copies so far. Good for them.
(info from https://gamebiz.jp/news/372592, which got pulled as I was writing; lemme know if the images go down too)
