Taito and Red Entertainment once made one of the best action hack-and-slash games of all time on the PS2. An homage to Hong Kong cinema, with an amalgamation of some incredible ideas tossed in. The game was released exclusively on PS2 for North America, Japan, Europe, South Korea, and Taiwan. While the game had all the ingredients that make a hack and slash fun, it sadly flopped on the commercial side.
Even if the game didn’t meet Taito’s expectations, the developers wanted to make a sequel and push the story forward, but that didn’t happen. This can be explored in an old blog post from Gamasutra where Hiroshi Aoki said the following:
” Well, the company wanted to go in certain directions… (laughs) I did want to make more, but anyway, it didn’t really happen.”
But wait, there’s more. According to an interview from the Untold History of Japanese Game Developers by John Sczepaniak, it was revealed that an actual prototype of a Bujingai sequel existed. However, the game never got past that phase of development. Here’s a short read:
“There are a lot of things I can’t tell you. For various reasons. <nervous laughter> Bujingai 2 was in development and looked really good, but never got released. <nervous laughter> So that game existed”