Team Ninja: "We know about cutting people with katanas"

Team Ninja has reiterated that Ninja Gaiden 3 will focus on the consequence of killing.

"We're Japanese developers, we know about cutting people with katanas," studio head Yosuke Hayashi told Kotaku.

"You would feel the bones crunching, the muscles contracting. We know what would happen."

This consideration of consequence has gone some way to humanise Ryu, without reducing his efficacy in combat.

"When we started thinking about the Japanese dark hero, we wanted to make him less of a killing machine, more of a person," Hayashi said.

"Behind that ninja is a person, and we wanted to explore what it meant to kill a person up close. It's not that you would feel nothing - in previous games, there's no consequence to those actions -you're going to have some kind of emotion when you actually kill someone."

Ninja Gaiden 3 is due sometime in 2012, on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.