@Murmaider:
Sounds great! Now name a relatively recent title from Tecmo that anyone truly cared about that wasn't a Team Ninja title.
Someone who helms a team isn't just a component, they're creative director, which means that everything in the game pretty much goes through them. Itagaki is pretty much single-handedly responsible for designing the DOA and NG series. Making them a reality is another thing, and I'm not discrediting the hard work of the rest of the team, but without Itagaki as a guide, I don't see them as lasting very long or producing titles of the caliber of Ninja Gaiden or Dead or Alive anymore.
I also love the Nintendo nod. So he's the only creative mind that has the vision to guide his team to the amazing games he wants to make? Granted, I can't think of any company that has had their image so completely defined by the works of a single guy, but to say that a team that is famous for their work under a specific creative director is going to do just fine without him is ludicrous. There's a chance, but not much of one.
Meanwhile, Itagaki will probably be very happily eating his "bowl of dicks" at Microsoft Japan, working on some amazing new IPs (which he'll obviously be forced to, the only really good thing I see coming from this, although the thought of no more real NG or DOA saddens me). Regardless of talent or competency, his replacement at Team Ninja quite simply won't be him. DOA and NG may continue to be made, and they may continue to be good games, but they'll be different.

Also, being someone who has actually played Ninja Gaiden in all three of its iterations (and therefore has more to go on than reviews), I'ma pitch in to all of this jazz about Metacritic scores: If you're going to get all kinds of technical with people's opinions, you're going to be dealing with an endless pile of crap from both sides. Being people's opinions, you can re-interpret them however you like. To treat them as de facto, be-all end-all evidence to prove your argument is absurd.
Sigma was a non-Itagaki-helmed port enhanced for the PS3. It still scored higher than NG2 with reviewers, but that doesn't change the fact that out of the three versions, it got the lowest score. You can't use the argument of "old game is old," either, given that Ninja Gaiden Black has a higher Metacritic score then the original.
Also, jump back and check out all of the perfect scores for NG and NGB, then compare them to the two perfect scores that NGS got. Now go compare the enhancements that were made between NG and NGB, then compare them to the enhancements made to NGS. Slapping a new coat of paint on is one thing, but the weapons and content added in NGB were AMAZING. I felt happy with the purchase for the addition of the Lunar Staff alone. NG could have some of these things added through the online portion of it (one of the first genuinely good DLC attempts on a console), but for the majority without that accessibility, it was an INCREDIBLE amount of content.
NGS is still an excellent game, but the differences aren't as good. I still found myself going back to the old weapons instead of the new ones (yes, I even shunned the double katana). The new missions weren't really "new," and Rachel wasn't nearly as fun to play as as Hyabusa was. All of the content that makes NGS an incredible game is carried over from the previous iterations.
Also, when NG first released, action games hadn't seen a truly stunning release of a melee-based title in a while (Devil May Cray most definitely does not count), especially with the level of challenge and speed that NG presented (remember the difference between "challenge" and "difficulty"). In recent times, though, we've seen more quality titles that can deliver that kind of thrilling speed without the "YOU'RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH" feeling that Ninja Gaiden gives some people. Check the low-scoring reviews for NG2: they're almost all unanimously complaining about the difficulty of the game.
Why wasn't NGS complained about in the same way? Well, I could definitely argue that it's something that the reviewers knew wouldn't be changed, so they didn't expect any different.
But then again, given my complete lack of any kind of actual evidence, you could throw an equally speculative argument back at me and we could sit here endlessly bickering like the majority of the internet masses.

/soapbox

Well, in the sense that the instrument was gaming-related, it is. However, the motivation and the action of beating a child to death itself aren't game-related. The controller just happened to be the closest blunt object at hand, so he used it. It's not actually related to any specific game, and any jury would be hard-pressed to actually connect the case to a video game.

Shouldn't you guys be on 4chan or something? If you want to make jokes about the death of a child, this place is definitely populated by far too many decent human beings to have any room for shitbags like you.