One of the most acclaimed comic book stories of the last decade is getting the video game it deserved — and the developer announcement is even better than the reveal. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin was unveiled at Summer Game Fest, with PlatinumGames — the studio behind NieR:Automata, Astral Chain and Bayonetta — teaming up with Paramount to bring it to life.
If you don't know the source: The Last Ronin is the 2020 comic by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird and Tom Waltz that became a cultural event on its own — a genuinely bleak future-set story following the last surviving turtle in a ruined, occupied New York, hunting the Foot Clan that took everything. It's Moby Dick with katanas; grief, duty and the question of what family means when yours is gone. It is very much not the pizza-and-surfboards version of the IP.
Platinum's hiring makes it hard not to dream in specifics. This is the team that made swordplay feel like breathing in Metal Gear Rising, built Nier: Automata's bullet-hell-action hybrid into a tearjerker, and gave Bayonetta fight choreography worth pausing for. Somber action with weight is uncomfortably close to the exact brief.
No release window was announced — expect this one to cook until it's right. But between this and the evergreen love for 2022's Shredder's Revenge (which we reviewed here, and still recommend), the turtles' second golden age continues on both tonal ends of the spectrum: party-time throwback on one side, mournful elegy on the other.
Cowabunga, but quietly, and with a blade.