Hiya. I managed extract files from the games "Shinobi" and "Nightshade", from PlayStation 2, aiming to extract the player models.

I reached the correct files, but it seems the extension .MLD which they have is not documented anywhere.
What I found out though, is that these files have .IZCA in the header, which seems to be a format used in some Sega games from that era, but that's as far as I found out.

I hope to be able to import these models+original armature on Blender as fbx or something, and maybe import back in the game as well, but that's secondary.

I'm linking here two different files, one from Shinobi which is likely the character "Hotsuma", and another from Nightshade which is likely to be "Hibana".

SHPLAYER00.zip NIPLAYER00.zip

Player00.MDL contains "IZCA" 149 times. Iirc you'll have to split up the file for better handling. Despite this there's many unknown 4 letter signatures like PPPL, MLE0 and such.

(The others are similar to those from Valkyria Chronicles, see gomtuu's blender mlx import script on github, but MLX files usually have one IZCA only at the beginning.)