Itagaki explains why he brought Devil 3rd to Wii U.

Devil's Third is a bloody shooter. A game obsessed with perfecting the close kill. And now it's a Wii U exclusive.

The shooter's creator, Tomonobu Itagaki, is a man best known for games that titillate with skimpy clothing, or lopped limbs. He's a to-the-point game maker, not shy with his criticism. So it's not surprising that in bringing the game to Nintendo, there were some arguments.

What might be surprising, though, is the idea that this developer — a man who is rarely seen without his dark sunglasses and worn leather jacket; a developer seemingly so different from Nintendo's famed creators — discovered within the Japanese game company not just strong allies, but what he describes as a fundamental design lesson.

"There are also cultural differences between the way that I've worked and the way Nintendo works, which is when it comes down to the basic grammar of games, the method of game creation," Itagaki said through a translator. "And so we certainly fought some, but I think that I saw the value in a lot of the ways that they do things and learned a great amount.

"Now this is close to a trade secret so I can't say too much, but I feel like I learned the most fundamental meaning of what it means to push a button. When you tell someone, 'Push the A button,' there's a wealth of information there. And I feel like all of us who have worked on this project, as a result, have grown a bit."

Now the game is back with the same drive to reinvent the up-close-and-personal kill in shooters, and to bring the game exclusively to Nintendo's Wii U. That the game is coming to the Wii U is in part due to Danny Bilson, the former senior vice president of creative development at the now defunct THQ.

It was to Bilson that Itagaki first went with his game all of those years ago.

Devil's Third, despite its jump from Sony and Microsoft consoles to Nintendo's Wii U, remains mostly unchanged. Itagaki said that 90 percent of the game's concept hasn't been altered. But that remaining 10 percent, he said, was shaped by Nintendo. Specifically, he said, Nintendo's Hitoshi Yamagami and Yusuke Nakano loved his project like their own and both helped and taught him.

"That other 10 percent I think really has been flavored by this cooperation with Nintendo," he said. "Now, as I'm sure you're aware, Japan is a small country in terms of landmass, but it still has an amazing concentration of lots of different cultures within it, and I think that Nintendo culture is one of those, and I had this opportunity to learn about Nintendo culture through the years working with them."