Ninja Theory and Namco Bandai partnered last year to produce Enslaved: Odyssey To The West for the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.  The game has its fans, but on the whole the title didn't meet performance expectations, floundered in the market, and failed to reach the mighty heights that some projected for it.  Anyone waiting for the sequel will be waiting for a while, as there are no plans for Enslaved 2 any time soon.  Game Informer has the details.

Enslaved received some generally favorable reviews, but the game didn’t sell as well as Namco or Ninja Theory had hoped. "Enslaved should have done better," Ninja Theory co-founder Tameem Antoniades recently told Edge Magazine. "Right now we should have been doing a sequel and perfecting that sequel and doing what franchises do, which is get better over time. [But] because that didn't happen we've not expanded to two teams like we intended to. So we've remained a smaller shop."

Something about Enslaved bugged me from the start.  I played it at E3 last year and came away unimpressed.  The demo seemed pieced together by committee and guided by market research dictating what a stereotypical modern video game should be.  I just didn't get any personality off of it, and the continued insistence that Enslaved would become a force with which to be reckoned and was completely original (even though it wasn't) really came to irritate me.  Video games don't become a success just because the developers deem it so, and being cocky without the solid game to back it up won't get anyone anywhere.  I hate to see a developer stumble, but Enslaved was never going to be the smash hit that Ninja Theory believed it would be, and I think we're better off that this attempt at a franchise has been put aside.