Last week KOEI Tecmo Japan put in a trademark for Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, the illegitimate child of the Ninja Gaiden franchise. Now ordinarily this is business as normal, as when trademarks run out a company will often renew it to keep control over the title. However what makes this one special is that KOEI Tecmo Japan has never renewed a trademark for any title or series they didn’t soon after announce something for it.
So what could this mean for us gamers? It may be we could be in for an upcoming announcement of a port of Yaiba Ninja Gaiden Z to PS4/XB1/Switch, just a Switch port (as they have been dumping a lot of their back catalogue onto the system), a sequel to the game or even as something simple as a re-release on the Windows platform.
As for you guys and girls that are unaware, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is a spin-off to the Ninja Gaiden series that focuses on new protagonist Yaiba, who has to battle his way through a bunch of zombies to get revenge on Ryu Hayabusa. The game wasn’t developed in-house like the first three games, and was outsourced to Comcept (lead by Keiji Inafune of Mighty Number 9…uh fame, which is why you also get a MN9 skin in the game). The title was critically panned as a basic button masher with instant death quick time scenarios. Our opinion on it is that it isn’t that great of a game either, just a simple cash in on the (at time of release in 2014) popular Zombie gaming scene.
Only time will tell what this trademark leads to later in 2019.
Would you like to see Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z ported to modern systems? Have you played it before? Let us know in those comments!
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