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Afro Samurai 2: Kuma's Revenge

Afro Samurai 2 - a shot at redemption

We chat with Redacted Studios' David Robinson about his second chance at doing Afro justice.

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We caught up with David Robinson from Redacted Studios who's getting a second chance at capturing what's special about Afro Samurai in a video game.

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Robinson who headed up the Namco Bandai studio responsible for the original Afro Samurai (released on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2009) had this to say about the original game:

"For a lot of reasons we weren't happy with the outcome," says Robinson. "The gameplay wasn't as polished as it needed to be. There were a lot of bugs in the game. The camera was just sub-par. We spent a lot of time focusing on a quality game, but in the end there was just a lot of bugs and we couldn't fix before we finished."

Some time has passed, Bandai Namco (as they're now called) closed down their US studio a few years back and now here's Robinson with a reassembled team at Redacted Studios to try and redeem themselves and the brand.

"A lot of the guys have always said no matter how far we go in the world if this happens [Afro Samurai 2] call us home. And that's exactly what I did. I said Afro's coming up are you going to come home and they all said yes and so they all came back. It's great. It's like a movie where all the heroes come back after being away from each other for a long time."

Afro Samurai 2: Kuma's Revenge is planned for release early next year on PC, PS4 and Xbox One and the plan is to build out the game with more content post-launch.

"For us it's the quality of now. When it comes to the license, I think the original manga is like 2000 years in existence, so we want to make sure we have the opportunity to go in any direction we want. And with digital you can do that, right? You can go in any direction. You don't have to worry about things like being in development for four years before you ship something. You don't have to worry about shipping something and not being able to tweak it and fix it, and be responsive to the fans and the players. And that's the perfect environment for a game like Afro, which is really atmospheric and really depends on the fans to enjoy it and love it and husband it. And digital does that absolutely."

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