Okay, perhaps Tecmo president Yoshimi Yasuda isn’t being terribly stealthy about his departure from the lawsuit-laden company, but there’s still a touch of mystery about his resignation. Kotaku reported the news this morning that Yasuda tendered his resignation to the Tecmo board of directors, and the board will appoint its current chairman, Yasuharu Kakihara, to step in as president on September 1st. While Yasuda’s resignation is stated to be for “personal reasons,” one can’t ignore that his departure comes right in the middle of some rather public lawsuits against Tecmo by Tomonobu Itagaki and other members of Tecmo’s Team Ninja.
It’s not difficult to speculate that Yasuda’s “personal reasons” surround the fact that Itagaki personally called out his behavior when filing his lawsuit, claiming that Yasuda had broken promises to him and then treated him rudely when confronted about it. Yasuda himself claimed that the promises had been made to Itagaki by his predecessor without the board’s approval, but as Kotaku later revealed, a secret recording of Yasuda allegedly contained statements in direct contradiction with said claim.
Between this and other evidence that Yasuda falsified contracts in order to withhold pay from 300 employees, we’re thinking Yasuda’s personal reasons are somewhere along the lines of “I’m completely hosed.” Of course, our personal reasons have to do with the fact that our copy of Ninja Gaiden 2 keeps crashing during a cutscene on stage 11. If we had any idea how Japanese courts worked outside of Phoenix Wright, we’d be suing, too.
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