Kyle Shubel Responds To Itagaki Slaming Heavenly Sword
Tomonobu Itagaki, creator of the Dead or Alive series as well as Ninja Guiden, Tomonobu Itagaki gave 
his personal feelings on Sony’s Heavenly Sword in an interview with EGM, and they weren’t exactly positive.
“I’ve never played a good game where the developers put a big icon of the button you’re supposed to press onscreen. 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.”
Heavenly Sword producer Kyle Shubel was displeased with these remarks. He defended the games use of quick-time events, claiming that players wouldn’t be able to handle the game’s intense action with out them.
“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.”