It was a comfortable day in Tokyo when I found myself prowling the quiet campus neighborhood of Waseda University, the school that produced former Team Ninja boss, Tomonobu Itagaki, who recently parted ways with Team Ninja and parent company, Tecmo. Obviously, to say "parted ways" is to put it nicely, as Itagaki not only recently handed in his resignation, but took the publisher to court for unpaid bonuses and broken promises. While litigation is great and all that, we're more concerned with what Itagaki's doing with himself now that he's cut ties with the team he made famous with games like Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden. In this, his first interview since going underground, we literally talked with him underground, in a small but well-appointed bar in the area of his alma mater. In our chat Itagaki opens up to us about a number of topics, such as the stagnating (or not) state of Japanese game development, what Western developers do better than Japanese developers, what Japanese developers do better than Western developers, and how he feels about other action games. He also offers up a hell of a lot of analogies about World War II fighter pilots. It might have had to do with Itagaki being drunk.