The makers of Okami have finally unveiled their new projects, but under a new master: Sega. We catch up with the PlatinumGames dream team to find out how they plan to achieve more than just critical success this generation.

At a recent media event Sega Europe president Mike Hayes lauded new versions of Samba De Amigo and Sega Rally, the success of Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games, and Sega’s acquisition of the likes of the Football Manager and Total War franchises. “But, he said, “there’s one area that’s at the moment still out of our reach, and it’s the area of new IP. New, innovative, creative ideas that set new standards and deliver new gaming experiences to our audience, and that’s the area we want to break into.” Sega’s answer: PlatinumGames.

Sega has signed the studio’s first four games, games made by a dream team of ex-Capcom designers and producers including Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya and Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. Tatsuya Minami, PlatinumGames’ CEO and another Capcom alumnus, told the gathered audience, “A lot of people have been saying that Japanese developers have lost a bit of the sheen they had in previous years. We would like everyone to know that we are different.” And the difference is all about autonomy, as Minami explained to us after the presentation: “What it came down to was that Sega offered the greatest amount of freedom for what we wanted to create.”

The games are MadWorld, a comically ultraviolent thirdperson action game for Wii that looks like a cross between God Hand and Manhunt that’s been drawn by Frank Miller; Bayonetta, a thirdperson action game for 360 and PS3 and designed by Kamiya, who created Devil May Cry; Infinite Line, a space exploration RPG for DS; and a fourth unannounced game directed by Shinji Mikami. From the little we’ve seen of each, perhaps only MadWorld quite maintains the obvious stylistic individualism that marked out Clover’s output, but the line-up still looks robust, creative and exhibits that essential ingredient of new IP: vitality.

“Sega just said: ‘Create what you want to create’,” Minami says, turning a packet of cigarettes over in his hands. We wonder how long the negotiations took to complete – it was, after all, back in 2006 that Clover was disbanded and Seeds, the initial company Inaba and Mikami formed, established. “We have been in talks and we’ve been working together for quite some time now,” he says. “Including the negotiations and the development it’s been a long time. We could have made an announcement before but if we didn’t have any games to show it wouldn’t have been so big.”

But what did Sega expect from the deal? Inaba leans forward. Now PlatinumGames’ executive director, Inaba produced the Viewtiful Joe, Steel Battalion and Phoenix Wright series, plus Okami and God Hand, and was president of Clover.

“Of course, Sega is a long-standing publisher and has worked on many games so it’s very specific about it wants from its games. Whether we’ve met those expectations is not for us to say, but we are very confident that we will deliver top-quality games. As for its request for us, they want games with worldwide appeal.”

For all that the visual style of Clover’s games was their most obvious commonality, it was actually the way they would mix themes from the east and west or repackage Japanese culture for an international audience that more profoundly characterized them. Viewtiful Joe, for instance, paired American movie with Japanese tokusatsu, while Okami exported Japanese folklore in a form that anyone could enjoy.

“There’s no particular reason why we would turn down western publishers, for example. We’re very much willing to work with them as well”/moscalloutIndeed, many western publishers approached Seeds when it emerged from Clover’s ashes to discover its plans – it was quite possible that this rare Japanese developer with its eyes on the world might take a non-Japanese publisher.