Bloodborne Producer Masaaki Yamagiwa will be working with Team Ninja on a new project. The collaboration was revealed by former SIE Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida who tweeted a picture of a meeting between Yamagiwa, Team Ninja’s Fumihiko Yasuda, and himself at Team Ninja’s studio.
Team Ninja is currently working on Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, although it is unlikely to be the only project in progress at the developer. Earlier this year they said they weren’t working on a new instalment for the Ninja Gaiden franchise, nor were there plans for a sequel to Nioh 2, so the project on which the trio is working is unknown at the moment. Team Ninja later confirmed the collaboration with their own tweet that also had relatively few details:
Team NINJAにBloodborne、TOKYO JUNGLEなどを開発してた山際@giwamasa が参加することになりました。よろしくお願いします。 https://t.co/ClCyOYeR0b
— Team NINJA (@TeamNINJAStudio) October 8, 2021
Yamagiwa is best known as the producer on projects like FromSoftware’s Bloodborne and Déraciné, as well as Tokyo Jungle from Sony’s former Japan Studio. He has also worked on several Sonic the Hedgehog games including Sonic Advance, Sonic Rush and Sonic: Unleashed. The Producer announced his departure from Sony Interactive Studios back in February and promised to stay in the industry. This is the first we’ve heard of his future plans and we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as we hear more about the collaboration.
His departure from Sony was one of many high-profile resignations following the restructuring of Japan Studo and its subsequent merging into Team Asobi. Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls Remake producer Teruyuki Toriyama left at the end of December 2020 to create his own company. Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama also left Sony and went on the create Bokeh Game Studio with Kazunobu Sato and Junya Okura. Masami Yamamoto, Ryo Sogabe, Shunsuke Saito, Kentaro Motomura, and Gavin Moore also all left on or before March 31, the day before the studio restructure was due to begin.
