That scamp Itagaki Tomonobu just doesn’t care, does he? Having recently told us all that “Tekken sucks”, the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden creator has now described the PlayStation 3’s upcoming Heavenly Sword as “half-assed”.

Mind you, at least he’s a little more specific in his criticisms of Heavenly Sword than he was for Tekken - apparently, it was the game’s Hero Sequences that really got Itagaki’s goat.

“I’ve never played a good game where the developers put a big icon of the button you’re supposed to press onscreen,” said the unsmiling one to EGM. Presumably, he isn’t too keen on the God of War or Shenmue titles either. “I look at Heavenly Sword and it seems really half-assed, because it’s asking you to do all these button-timing sequences but you are not getting much payoff from it.”

Was Heavenly Sword producer Kyle Shubel going to stand for that kind of smack-talk? Kyle?

“My response to Mr. Itagaki would be that the intent of the Hero sequences is to empower the player to experience events that would be nearly impossible to play in a natural platforming state… for example, making the player run down ropes, leaping from rope to rope as they’re being cut from underneath you, all while dodging other objects - that would be a frustrating experience to 99 percent of our users if we were to force them to do that manually.”

Why, that’s fighting talk. Sort of.