The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise is on a real upswing lately, from the continued success of IDW’s TMNT comics to the impending release of Netflix’s animated Mutant Mayhem movie. And now we know another TMNT game is in the works, with a mystery developer tackling an adaptation of the 2020 comic book series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin.
This might just be the best news yet. The Last Ronin is a great choice of source material on which to build a game, especially if the project succeeds in capturing what makes other AAA titles like God of War work so well. But if you’re unfamiliar with The Last Ronin, now is a good time to break down the comic and why it could translate perfectly to this new medium.
What Is TMNT: The Last Ronin?
The Last Ronin is perhaps best described as the TMNT franchise’s answer to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The original comic is the first collaboration in many years between TMNT creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. The duo actually drew on unused story plans they originally developed in the 1980s, during the original explosion of Turtle Mania.
Like The Dark Knight Returns, The Last Ronin is set in a futuristic world far darker and grimmer than most TMNT stories. In this world, all but one of the four Turtles has been killed fighting the Foot Clan, along with Master Splinter too. Only one Turtle remains to carry the torch and finish the fight against Shredder’s grandson, Oroku Hiroto.
We won’t spoil the identity of the titular Last Ronin here. That reveal is a major part of the first issue of the series, and we assume the game will make a big deal out of revealing which of the four characters survives this hellish future. But if you want to know, we’ve got a full breakdown of the first issue of The Last Ronin.
The Last Ronin has clearly struck a chord with TMNT fans over the past few years. The comic has already inspired multiple TMNT action figures and a PVC statue from Diamond Select Toys. A follow-up comic is also in the works, dubbed The Last Ronin: The Lost Years. The Lost Years is both a prequel and a sequel. It aims to fill in the many gaps in the Ronin’s backstory, but it also continues where the original book leaves off and introduces a brand new generation of Turtles.
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The Gameplay of The Last Ronin
A big part of the appeal with TMNT games is the opportunity to control your Turtle of choice. In some cases, the gameplay differences are fairly minor. Take the various old-school arcade brawlers featured in TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection, where each Turtle differs only slightly in relative attack power and the reach of their weapons.
But some games, like 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan, really lean into the differences between the Turtles. Each character in that game has a unique ninjutsu style and special moves, and players are able to switch between Turtles at will.
The Last Ronin is sort of the odd man out in that regard. This is a game built around only one Turtle, which would seem to remove any potential for switching out characters and fighting styles. However, the Ronin still carries the full TMNT arsenal. He wields Leonardo’s katanas, Raphael’s sais, Donatello’s bo staff and Michelangelo’s nunchucks, making him a one-man army against the futuristic Foot Clan.
It’s easy to see where the God of War influence may come into play. Kratos tends to wield multiple weapon types in those games, with the tone of combat changing dramatically depending on whether Kratos is wielding his trademark Blades of Chaos, his Leviathan war ax or one of the other mystical weapons in his arsenal. The Last Ronin could follow that formula and allow players to switch between these four weapons on the fly.
Nor is the Ronin entirely alone in his quest. April O’Neil is still alive in this future timeline, and she’s joined by her daughter Casey (named after her late father, Casey Jones). Casey is a budding ninja herself (having read Master Splinter’s books for guidance). While there’s no indication whether she’s in the game, it’s possible Casey could become a secondary playable character in the game. In another nod to 2016’s God of War, Casey could even be the Atreus figure – a semi-playable companion character who joins the Ronin on his quest.
According to Paramount’s Doug Rosen, it’s also not impossible that the other three Turtles could appear as playable characters in the game via flashback sequences. That could be a handy way of introducing players to each new fighting style, by having them jump back in time to spend a few minutes controlling these fallen Turtles before they met their end battling Oroku Hiroto.
In short, while there’s no reason for The Last Ronin to be a carbon copy of the God of War games, there are many ways in which God of War is a fitting choice of inspiration for this action game. If anyone can match Kratos’ ferocity and rage on the battlefield, it’s the Ronin.
Adapting the Story of The Last Ronin
The TMNT franchise has a pretty solid history of making the jump to games, but story is rarely an area where those games truly shine. Most TMNT games opt for the standard formula – Shredder is back, April is in peril, time to go massacre hundreds of Foot Soldiers, etc. Even the 2016 game, which was more ambitious than most in terms of its scope and gameplay, didn’t venture far from the beaten path in terms of its plot.
This is one area where The Last Ronin can really stand out from the crowd of TMNT games. Its story is far darker and more emotionally charged than most. The normally cheerful, humorous tone of the franchise has been drained away, leaving only the story of a lone survivor seeking vengeance for his murdered father and brothers.
Mind you, if The Last Ronin were simply dark for the sake of being dark, it might not be a story worth adapting. We’ve seen plenty of games about lone protagonists cutting a wide swath of destruction as they seek to right a terrible wrong. Fortunately, there’s an undercurrent of hope and optimism to the series that offsets the grim and gritty elements. The Ronin’s character arc is less about whether he achieves his goal than it is learning to hope again and find reasons to live. That’s the arc we hope to see play out in the game adaptation.
That’s not to say the game can’t also lean into the fatalistic darkness of the source material, as well. We’d certainly love to see the cyberpunk-y, Judge Dredd-esque version of New York City brought to three-dimensional life, in the process giving The Last Ronin more of an open-world format than most TMNT games.
There’s also the potential to really make the most of the flashback sequences in the game (assuming it does ultimately go that route). The game could draw on the material being introduced in The Last Ronin: The Lost Years, exploring the full scope of the Ronin’s story and not just the climactic events chronicled in the original comic. The more we see of those missing years between the deaths of the other Turtles and the Ronin’s final battle with Hiroto, the more weight his journey carries.
The Last Ronin could also borrow a few pages from the Halo franchise here. Halo 3: ODST initially puts players in the shoes of a grunt nicknamed “The Rookie,” but the game frequently flashes back in time and pivots to the viewpoints of other members of the ODST squad. Perhaps The Last Ronin could employ a similar approach as it flashes back to the other Turtles. These flashbacks could chronicle their last, doomed struggles against the Foot Clan, channeling the haunted, ominous tone of Halo: Reach.
The Last Ronin is almost surely going to be a very different experience from any Turtles game that has come before, and that’s exactly what has me so excited. This tale is a perfect choice for an ambitious, story-heavy action game. We just hope the developer in question can pull it off.
In other TMNT news, Netflix recently debuted the first trailer for the animated movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and we have a full breakdown of all the mutant villains appearing in the movie.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.