Ninja Gaiden 4 review

Ninja Gaiden 4 has a very specific crisis of identity: It is simultaneously too much, and not enough, like the seminal 1993 action comedy Surf Ninjas.

Surely Ninja Gaiden 4 has virtually nothing (aside from ninjas) in common with a notorious flop of a kid's film co-starring Rob Schneider and a magical Sega Game Gear, you might be thinking. Well, my friend: Guess what happens in this videogame when you get to the water level.

I spent the 15 hours or so it took me to slay my way through 2,580 enemies in Ninja Gaiden 4 hoping that I'd arrive at the answers to two questions: Does it feel like a proper sequel to Ninja Gaiden (2004) and Ninja Gaiden 2 (2008), which are both on my shortlist of the finest action games ever made? And if not—if this new iteration, made by PlatinumGames rather than Team Ninja, reworks the series in its own edgier (or sillier) image rather than in the mold of Ninja Gaiden of old—how much does that matter?

The answer to that first question started to come into focus when I rode my ninja surfboard out of the demon dimension and directly into a Tokyo nightclub to pulverize ghost piranhas with a giant hammer while a rave oontzed in the background. It feels more like a Platinum game than old Ninja Gaiden, and in its best moments that's a strength. But too often it reins itself in, giving the impression of a band performing a workmanlike cover song: they're playing the right notes, but it just doesn't grip the soul in quite the same way.

Ninja scrolls

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It's hard for me to fully articulate why I love the early 2000s Ninja Gaidens so much more than their contemporaries like Devil May Cry 3 and Bayonetta without turning this review into a 5,000 word essay; just picture Charlie Day wearing an Aliexpress balaclava, madly gesturing at the red strings connecting words like "i-frames" and "input cancelation" on his conspiracy board. The short version is that where DMC and Bayonetta are expressive in presentation, the Ninja Gaidens are purely expressive in execution. They are games about pressing the exact right buttons in the right order to stay alive and feeling briefly like you are the baddest dude to have ever lived when you do.

Ninja Gaiden 1/2 do not have a berserk gauge that fills up to let you become an invincible killing machine—you've just gotta do that the hard way. Nearly all of the game's core combat abilities are available to you from minute one; other than upgrading weapons to unlock more elaborate combos, you get better by internalizing when to mash out a seven hit flurry on weaklings and which enemies are best dispatched with a twirling, skull-pulping Izuna Drop from mid-air.

The best thing I can say about Ninja Gaiden 4 is that it largely retains the precision of chaining a perfectly timed dodge into a combo that delimbs an enemy, and the thrill of triggering an Obliteration animation on that weakened foe so that you're invincible in the moment another one comes screaming in with an attack. It still delivers the ferocious high of absorbing the blood orb you freed from that mutilated corpse to insta-charge an ultimate technique before the body's hit the floor, giving you a moment to breathe and plan while an animation plays of your ninja peeling the skin off the next nearest enemy.

But most of what it adds is at best superfluous, and too much of it gets in the way of that timeless core design.

Series protagonist Ryu Hayabusa really was the perfect vessel for an action game as singularly focused as Ninja Gaiden, because he has no personality beyond "ninja in black." Instead of emoting, he kills demons. Backstory? Dad's a ninja. Jokes? Never heard of them. In Ryu's games, the point score that appears on screen as you slaughter hundreds of enemies is austere compared to the way Devil May Cry pumps you up with a rating of "Alright!" or "Sweet!" or "SSStylish!" Ninja Gaiden 1/2 are as no-nonsense as they can possibly be while still asking you to fight a vamping demon on top of the Statue of Liberty.

Halfway through Ninja Gaiden 4 you will literally jump over a shark as Yakumo, a new protagonist ripped straight from the seventh most popular shonen anime of the season. You'll also:

• Repeatedly grind on rails while hopping over the same obstacle and dodging the same pop-out crossing gates 100 times
• Jump over pits and slide under barricades on your surfboard, which is essentially just the rail grinding but frothier
• Fly through the air dodging falling boulders using a ninja wingsuit
• Start with a mystifying number of the core Ninja Gaiden combat abilities locked away behind a currency called NinjaCoin, but then earn enough NinjaCoin to earn them so quickly you'll wonder why you needed to unlock them at all
• Pick up "missions" mid-level to kill an enemy slightly off the main path
• Be notified, after every single battle, that you have enough points to unlock a new skill on one of your weapons using a second currency
• Charge up a berserk meter that lets you clear an entire screen of enemies in one flashy ultimate attack

Ninja Gaiden 4, in other words, is full of nonsense.

Some of its nonsense is a lot of fun! After the first few hours sent me through rainy Tokyo, a perpetually overcast mountain region, and a black-skyed demon realm, I welcomed the silliness of fighting fluorescent piranhas on a disco floor. The surfing bits suggested the game was finally ready to start exhibiting some personality—even if it was more in keeping with DMC's Dante killing demons with billiard balls while eating pizza or Bayonetta sticking her BDSM gun-heels in an angel's mouth, once you've passed the nonsense threshold you've got to lean in, right?

Unfortunately it never does. Yakumo remains the milkest of toast, a weakness the game emphasizes by trying to make you care about his relationship with priestess Seori, who spends 90% of the game off-screen (and continues the series' long tradition of comically busty, bimboified heroines when she's there). And almost all of NG4's other nonsense suggests an uninspired answer to the uninspired question "how do we modernize Ninja Gaiden?"

Off balance

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The literal and figurative on-rails traversal sections between fights are so rote they infect the levels with a boring sameyness, sapping the drama from what could've been flashy one-off moments. The so-very-2025 game design instinct to make you pay to unlock your core moveset for the sake of "progression" is strangely stunted by how cheap nearly every skill was to buy within the first hour or two of the game. It's certainly preferable to a drip feed, but the progression arc makes the guy who pops up multiple times a level to offer me zero new abilities (except the occasional thrill of being able to block one more hit in a row or equip one more accessory, woo!!) feel like a vestigial remnant of a different plan.

The missions you can take on in each stage also fit awkwardly—they require finding side paths in what are largely linear levels, but as soon as you hop on a rail or a gust of wind there's no backtracking, forcing you to restart from a checkpoint or write them off until you replay the whole thing.

It's strange that a game with a variety of thoughtful accessibility settings (auto-blocking, color coding enemies, disabling hitstop, and more), which will make it playable by many more people, has other blatantly annoying UI elements that can't be turned off. Why do I need a notification after every fight that I have enough of the other currency (earned by racking up stylish kills) to enable a new attack on one of my weapons? I got the message the first 15 times! And why, in a game that gets more thrilling when you're scraping by on the edge of death, does a distracting, glitchy red visual effect have to camp out on screen until I heal?

I guess those "helpful" bits of interface design were supposed to make the game more approachable, but if that's the case I say forget modern quality of life. Give me modern quality of death: Weapons that make Ninja Gaiden 2's scythe and wolverine claws look passé, enemies that demand I change tactics faster than I can think, battle arenas that make me feel like the ninja, not just some guy with a mask and white highlights.

Ninja Gaiden 4 really does try. It overcomplicates the combat to the point of almost breaking, adding in that berserk gauge for flashy finishers, a "bloodraven" modifier button you hold to burn meter on roided up armor-breaking attacks. On the defense side it emphasizes situational uses for blocks, parries, and dodges—which all have their own powered-up forms from pressing that modifier button. The elegant simplicity of old Ninja Gaiden combos has been subsumed into an ungainly beast, but I can't deny that it looks and feels pretty damn sick when my fingers don't stumble over the inputs and I turn a parry into a decapitating flying swallow, then hit an elite enemy with an amped up bloodraven attack just before theirs goes off, triggering a stun that gives me time to close the gap and punish them with a combo.

Platinum's best new idea in this game, by far, is Yakumo's fourth weapon, a pair of mechanical arms that conjure oversized bombs and shurikens from thin air for ranged attacks and unfurl into a pair of giant butcher's blades or claws or mauls at close-range, depending on the combo. It's like four weapons in one and kicks tremendous ass—but it's telling that it's also the farthest removed from Ninja Gaiden's traditionally straightforward arsenal.

Ninja Gaiden 4's momentum falls off a cliff in its last act when it forces you to retread several previous levels as Ryu Hayabusa, armed with a single weapon instead of the usual 10 or so at his disposal. These short chapters give off big "contractual obligation" energy, tediously using Ryu to tell a backstory the game didn't need. His section is such a rush job it almost feels like a meta joke on the player—after a whole campaign of anticipation, the first thing you do as Ryu is re-kill the same boss you just killed as Yakumo three minutes earlier.

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Again Ninja Gaiden 4 nails the fundamentals—Ryu feels stronger and heavier, his powered-up attacks delivering a flurry of too-fast-to-see blows that express a mastery Yakumo hasn't yet attained. I'm glad he's there as an option to replay levels and challenge trials with, but Platinum needed to either make his role in the story matter or leave him out entirely.

Shadow of the ninja

Where Ninja Gaiden focused its action on a city that you explored with a Metroid-lite style of discovery and Ninja Gaiden 2 flew you from one side of the world to the other to keep the pace brisk, NG4 again settles for a middling balance. Its stages linger too long in the same few locales, reinforcing the sense that the game either needed to be shorter or more ambitious. I was at least pleased to find that it ran as flawlessly as an action game of this speed and intensity warrants—on my 9070 XT with every setting maxed, the action held steady at a near-unshakeable 120 fps.

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As a sequel, Ninja Gaiden 4 failed to internalize what made its predecessors the kinds of games that people return to again and again, but it also wasn't bold enough to fully cast off that burden and commit to wilding out the way the PlatinumGames of a decade ago excelled at. But that other question—how much does that matter?—is the one I'm still grappling with.

Even though there's much Ninja Gaiden 4 could've done better, it belongs to a vanishingly rare breed of fast, technical, flashy action game that thumbs its nose at the caution, stamina meters, and RPG systems of the last decade of soulslikes. In these games the only stat you need is kill, and I really am thankful to be able to play a new one in 2025. It just never manages to outsurf the greats that came before it.