Well, someone else has to work on the series. And that someone else is Yosuke Hayashi, the new leader of Tecmo's Team Ninja, and the man responsible for where the series goes from here.

Since I had the chance to speak with Hayashi at E3, I put the question to him: what's next for Ninja Gaiden?

"I think the series has a definite future", he said. "In fact, I already have a concept for the next game in place". As for what that concept is, Hayashi was coy, though he did tease that some aspects of the upcoming Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma might make their way into a future Ninja Gaiden game.

"The online co-op in Sigma 2 is one step, maybe. It could be a testbed for the future", he hinted. "But regardless of whether that works or not, yes, the foundations for a future game are already there".

So relax! There will be more Ninja Gaiden. In some shape or form. Whether you like it or not.

New Team Ninja lead ninja Yosuke Hayashi hinted to website Kikizo that there very well could be more in store for Ninja Gaiden. "Regardless of what Itagaki-san said before," Hayashi said, "in time, what the consumers, the gamers are looking for is going to be the next chapter — the future of an outstanding series."

And that future is? Hayashi kept his cards close to his vest, but added, "We feel that we're in a position of being able to make that call, and to provide pure entertainment that's going to be enjoyed by action gamers and our fans. That calling is already there — we feel it, and therefore we will continue to work towards a future for the series."

Just promise us one thing: You'll act surprised when Tecmo announces Ninja Gaiden III, IV and V. Oh, don't forget to get up in around about those future PS3-only Ninja Gaiden Black ports.

Hayashi Interview [Kikizo]

Tomonobu Itagaki has always been critical of Sigma. He even said that a Ninja Gaiden II Sigma version would be a "loss of face."

Responding publicly to Itagaki's criticism for the first time since the Team Ninja leader left Tecmo, Hayashi said, "There's nothing I'd put against the Sigma series. The face has changed, the leader [of Team Ninja] has changed, the so-called creator has left..." But it's still Ninja Gaiden, he said. "The DNA is there."

Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 picks up where Sigma left off and will be an "encapsulation" of the entire Ninja Gaiden series from Xbox to DS. Hayashi hopes to keep the series going even beyond that with downloadable content for the PS3 (but not the 360, sorry) and possibly future games.

"We're confident," Hayashi said of Sigma 2. "This will be the ultimate package, the one you will always remember."

Hayashi's also confident that he can fill the void left by Itagaki: "I'll prove it with the game," he said, which sounded way more badass in Japanese. Later, in English, he told me he was the boss of Team Ninja now.

You go, boy. Don't let them tell you that you can't be The Man just because you don't wear Bono shades. Go forth and make the best PS3 port/upgrade ever!

Take for instance the fact that Dragon Sword is the first Gaiden game that Hayashi's mom has endorsed, or that the game was designed to be played at the speed of penmanship:

- The game is designed to move at the pace of penmanship. Hayashi started working on "Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword" after wrapping work on the PS3 game "Ninja Gaiden: Sigma." Taking the DS game's reigns from his boss, Tecmo Team Ninja leader Tomonobu Itagaki, he re-designed the controls and made a breakthrough. "Itagaki had programmed the jump to double-tap," Hayashi told me. "When I played it, I just didn't get any sort of attachment to it. When the double-tap happened it didn't feel like the character was going to jump. So I proposed the idea that, when [series protagonist Ryu] jumps it [requires stroking the stylus] from down to up. When I chose that, there was no doubt that this is the way we should use this... This opened up our concept to how we were going to use the stylus."

I asked if the stroke-based controlled were influenced by favorite strokes of letters in the Japanese alphabets. He said, "Rather than [any one] Japanese character, it has more to do with the pace when one is writing, either in English or Japanese ... Someone can write really fast or really slow, but there's a tempo we thought worked really well."

Plenty of other gems in Totilo's write-up over on Multiplayer.

'Ninja Gaiden' Producer: Video Games Depict Only 10 Percent Of Ninja Lifestyle [MTV Multiplayer]

When asked about downloadable content for Sigma, Yosuke Hayashi confirmed that something was coming, but didn't provide specifics, only that Tecmo will make an announcement soon and that the "content will have some amazing depth for a download!" His exclamation point, not mine.

As mentioned before, there are no plans for Home-related content for the game, but Hayashi promises future Team Ninja titles on the PS3 will support it. What future titles? He's coy about the team's plans, but hints that there "could be an announcement coming in the very near future." I hope "very near future" means somewhere between July 10 and July 13. Michael McWhertor

Q&A: Yosuke Hayashi, Development Director of Ninja Gaiden Sigma [PlayStation.com]

Any game that blew up Xbox 360s left and right in its first making, and threatened to blow up Playstation 3's in its second making, has to be a class act.

The director of Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Yosuke Hayashi, was recently interviewed by Gameinformer and had to say this about the development of the game for PS3:

We've made a couple of devkits smoke, but we haven't had any actually blow up yet [laughs]. As far as using the hardware to its fullest, there are a ton of examples, but it's about approaching the process gradually. For instance, initially we didn't think that we were going to be able to do as much as we have been able to, which is something good about the PS3, because we weren't necessarily limited to what it says on paper.

Hey, look over there! It looks like a silver lining... Kim Phu

Ninja Gaiden Sigma Devs Make the PS3 "Smoke" [PSU]