{"id":376889,"date":"2025-12-30T00:48:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T00:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/376889\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T00:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T00:48:10","slug":"2025-was-the-year-ninja-games-made-a-comeback","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/376889\/","title":{"rendered":"2025 Was the Year Ninja Games Made a Comeback"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all think ninjas are pretty cool, right? Despite how popular they are in other mediums, it\u2019s felt like they\u2019ve gradually become less of a presence as video game protagonists in favor of soldiers, adventurers, and regular guys. What a surprise, then, that 2025 brought the stealthy warriors back with six major games: Ubisoft\u2019s Assassin\u2019s Creed Shadows<\/a>,\u00a0Sucker Punch\u2019s\u00a0Ghost of Yotei<\/a>,\u00a0Sega\u2019s\u00a0Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, the Game Kitchen\u2019s Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, and Team Ninja\u2019s Ninja Gaiden 4 and remaster of 2008\u2019s Ninja Gaiden II.<\/p>\n

These all belong to franchises, two ongoing and relevant, and two made relevant again with their first new installments in years. It\u2019s that second category that feels more special; once upon a time, Shinobi and Gaiden\u00a0were some of the most well-known ninja games around, characterized mainly by their punishing difficulty and famously associated with their respective developers.<\/p>\n

Gaiden\u00a0held out a bit longer than Shinobi,\u00a0but both went away in the 2010s as Sega and Team Ninja moved on to other franchises. Sega at least gave fans a heads-up it was looking at resurrecting Shinobi back in 2023 along with some of its\u00a0other dormant franchises<\/a>, but Team Ninja wasn\u2019t really as declarative with Ninja Gaiden.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Team Ninja\/PlatinumGames <\/p>\n

So if the Ragebound announcement was a surprise, then Gaiden 4\u2018s was a genuine shock to the system; the modern games fell off after 2013\u2019s\u00a0Ninja Gaiden 3\u2014the first of these to not be directed by Tomonobu Itagaki, who departed the studio in 2008 and passed away<\/a> this past October\u2014and Team Ninja pivoted to its Dead or Alive\u00a0series (which was also eventually shelved) and co-developing third-party games.<\/p>\n

But both the Final Fantasy I prequel Stranger of Paradise\u00a0and its own Nioh\u00a0games showed the developer never walked away from its brand of tough action, so it made sense to see the studio team with PlatinumGames to bring Ryu Hayabusa back to the forefront.<\/p>\n

If Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden made fans go \u201cThey\u2019re finally back!\u201d, Shadows gave the Assassin\u2019s Creed fanbase a reason to say \u201cIt\u2019s about damn time.\u201d Ubisoft\u2019s action-stealth series famously avoided Japan<\/a> in its early days, and many figured it\u2019d been beaten to the punch in 2020 by Yotei\u2019s\u00a0predecessor\u00a0Ghost of Tsushima. On one hand, it\u2019s admittedly funny how both put revenge-seeking ninja and samurai as their main characters: Shadows stars\u00a0Naoe and Yasuke<\/a>, and Yotei has Atsu and her brother Jubei, with her being the only playable of the two. But with a nearly seven-month gap between them, both games opted to play to their individual strengths and respectfully acknowledge the other when the situation called for it.<\/p>\n

From top to bottom, Shadows\u00a0is an\u00a0Assassin\u2019s Creed\u00a0game through and through, and\u00a0Yotei\u00a0is a\u00a0Ghost\u00a0game in all the ways that defined Sucker Punch\u2019s prior title. Gameplay-wise, it\u2019s Shadows that wins out with its way of the ninja, using Naoe to emphasize stealth, which continues to be the weakest element of the Ghost games.<\/p>\n

Thematically, though, it means something more to be a ninja in the world of Yotei:\u00a0the game\u2019s\u00a0best side story<\/a> reveals Tsushima\u00a0protagonist Jin Sakai has been remembered as \u201cthe First Shinobi,\u201d a legend whose story is outlawed by the shogun to avoid civil disobedience from the people. \u201cDishonorable\u201d tactics he employed in the first game, like assassinations and poison weapons, have since been adopted as the \u201cWay of the Shinobi\u201d by an evil clan, with Yotei\u00a0positioning Atsu, already a sword for hire as the game opens and proficient in spywork, as the correct inheritor of his work and mantle as the \u201cGhost.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a9 Lizardcube\/Sega <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no one game that has the legacy of the ninja game; even with their overlap and the generational divide they fall on in terms of sensibilities, all six feel important to helping the genre make a comeback. We don\u2019t know how all of these performed commercially\u2014only Yotei<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Shadows<\/a>\u00a0have reported sales numbers so far, and Ninja Gaiden 4\u00a0being Xbox-published means we\u2019ll likely never know how it sold\u2014but it bodes well that they\u2019ve been individually well-received.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s clearly an audience that would like to stealth and slash it up as ninjas, so here\u2019s hoping we see more of these again, or even get some newcomers into the fray. The more ninjas, the merrier.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We all think ninjas are pretty cool, right? Despite how popular they are in other mediums, it\u2019s felt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376890,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[55252,1016,184268,76964,76963,74,163618],"class_list":["post-376889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-assassins-creed-shadows","tag-ghost-of-yotei","tag-io9-year-in-review","tag-ninja-gaiden","tag-shinobi","tag-technology","tag-year-in-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}