2025 Was the Year Ninja Games Made a Comeback

We all think ninjas are pretty cool, right? Despite how popular they are in other mediums, it’s felt like they’ve 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’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yotei, Sega’s Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, the Game Kitchen’s Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, and Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden 4 and remaster of 2008’s Ninja Gaiden II.

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

Gaiden held out a bit longer than Shinobi, but 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 other dormant franchises, but Team Ninja wasn’t really as declarative with Ninja Gaiden.

So if the Ragebound announcement was a surprise, then Gaiden 4‘s was a genuine shock to the system; the modern games fell off after 2013’s Ninja Gaiden 3—the first of these to not be directed by Tomonobu Itagaki, who departed the studio in 2008 and passed away this past October—and Team Ninja pivoted to its Dead or Alive series (which was also eventually shelved) and co-developing third-party games.

But both the Final Fantasy I prequel Stranger of Paradise and its own Nioh games 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.

If Shinobi and Ninja Gaiden made fans go “They’re finally back!”, Shadows gave the Assassin’s Creed fanbase a reason to say “It’s about damn time.” Ubisoft’s action-stealth series famously avoided Japan in its early days, and many figured it’d been beaten to the punch in 2020 by Yotei’s predecessor Ghost of Tsushima. On one hand, it’s admittedly funny how both put revenge-seeking ninja and samurai as their main characters: Shadows stars Naoe and Yasuke, 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.

From top to bottom, Shadows is an Assassin’s Creed game through and through, and Yotei is a Ghost game in all the ways that defined Sucker Punch’s prior title. Gameplay-wise, it’s 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.

Thematically, though, it means something more to be a ninja in the world of Yotei: the game’s best side story reveals Tsushima protagonist Jin Sakai has been remembered as “the First Shinobi,” a legend whose story is outlawed by the shogun to avoid civil disobedience from the people. “Dishonorable” tactics he employed in the first game, like assassinations and poison weapons, have since been adopted as the “Way of the Shinobi” by an evil clan, with Yotei positioning 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 “Ghost.”

But there’s 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’t know how all of these performed commercially—only Yotei and Shadows have reported sales numbers so far, and Ninja Gaiden 4 being Xbox-published means we’ll likely never know how it sold—but it bodes well that they’ve been individually well-received.

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

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