I'd like to start this Ninja Gaiden 4 preview by recalling a story from my misspent youth. I know, I know; who cares – but stick with me here. Back in 2004, developer Team Ninja was entrusted with rebooting and reviving the Ninja Gaiden franchise. I was drawn to the blood and the brutality displayed in screenshots printed in glossy magazine spreads, and wanted to experience it for myself. I spent my allowance on renting the game for two days from Blockbuster. (For those of you under the age of 30, this is something we used to do in an era predating Steam sales, PlayStation Plus, and Game Pass). I was forced to return the game having never beaten Murai, the first boss. Embarrassing.
I tell you this now only because this the memory was prised from its vault by Masakazu Hirayama, producer and director at Team Ninja, and Yuji Nakao, producer and director at PlatinumGames, as the duo inquired about my history with the series, ahead of getting my hands-on with its first new mainline installment in a over a decade. The pair laughed, and told me to enjoy myself. By the end of the hour-long session, I was met with a round of applause from the development team. Also embarrassing.
Raining Blood
I later discovered that after a day of overseeing playtests, I was one of only a few players that day to best the demo's boss. I'm not surprised there was such a low-rate of completion, because Ninja Gaiden 4 is absolutely, gloriously brutal. A wondrous menagerie of blood, blades, and bastard-hard combat combat encounters. Still, my self-aggrandizing has a point here beyond mere ego-inflation: there's something so gratifying about seeing this series back to what appears to be its best.
When Ninja Gaiden launched as an Xbox exclusive two decades ago, it was among the most challenging, enthralling action games of its era. When FromSoftware's Demon's Souls landed five years later, everything changed. The way we understand and engage with difficulty in video games, altered forever. Hirayama-san tells me that Ninja Gaiden 4 is as much a pushback against this culture shift as it is an opportunity to bring about the long overdue return of a legendary franchise.
"The conversation around action games has changed quite a lot since the last Ninja Gaiden game. Soulslikes have taken center stage, but this is Ninja Gaiden. It's the first game in the series in over 10 years, and Ninja Gaiden is still all about high speed, pure action gameplay. So we are going against the trend in that way, all while injecting our own distinct game design sensibilities. This is a game from PlatinumGames – it has style, it's dynamic, and responsive. This is an evolution of what has come before, which was something we have been very deliberate about in this game."
"The conversation around action games has changed quite a lot since the last Ninja Gaiden game"
Now, I should say that I have gone back to Ninja Gaiden (and the games which followed it) in the years since that disastrous weekend so long ago. And there are exceptionally simple things that Ninja Gaiden 4 accomplishes which reconnect me with Ryu Hayabusa's past adventures, even as a new protagonist takes center stage here. There's satisfaction in chaining wall-jumps. A coolness inherent in the way bloodsplatter is flicked off from blades when young ninja Yakumo is left idle. Fun to be found in the total evisceration of enemy soldiers. Body bifurcation on an impossibly, implausibly-enjoyable scale.
Light Attack [X]. Heavy Attack [Y]. Two inputs which, when combined correctly, lead to total annihilation. There's an undoubtedly strong focus on first-party upcoming Xbox Series X games for 2025 out there right now – Black Ops 7, Gears of War: Reloaded, Grounded 2, The Outer Worlds 2, and Keeper. But there's a part of me that truly wonders whether Ninja Gaiden 4 is quietly the one to watch out for.
There's a simplicity inherent to its design ethos that I find compelling. A very real, very basic joy to be found in slicing waves of enemies apart limb-by-limb. And, really, what more could you want from a new Ninja Gaiden game in 2025? I just hope the final game comes packed with the sort of boss battles that have the power to ruin entire weekends when it launches on October 21 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.
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