Ninja Gaiden 4 Review (XSX) – A Nice Hybrid of Previous Titles that Falls Just a Tad Short

I grew up playing the Ninja Gaiden games on the NES. They were some of the most challenging games I had ever played, especially Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom. When the series came to Xbox, the first game (which served as a prequel, by the way) made me fall in love with the series all over again. The variety of weapons, the Karma system, the freedom of exploration, all of the secrets to uncover, and the challenging fights made it an unforgettable game. Ninja Gaiden 2 and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge were far less memorable, but now, the series is back after quite a long hiatus (13 years) with the next installment, Ninja Gaiden 4. Can it recapture the magic that made me love the series?

Title: Ninja Gaiden 4
Platform: PC Xbox App (Reviewed), Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Steam
Developer: Team Ninja, PlatinumGames
Publisher: Microsoft, Xbox Game Studios
Release Date: October 21, 2025
Price: $69.99 (standard), $89.99 (deluxe)

In the old days, Ninja Gaiden for the NES was a side-scrolling 2D action game where you played as Ryu Hayabusa, slashing through stage after stage as he uncovered the mystery of his father’s death, only to discover something far darker and sinister. When Ninja Gaiden took the leap to 3D on the Xbox, we learned more about Ryu’s origins while keeping the theme of slicing through demons intact; however, rather than being a 2D platforming action game, the series transitioned into a 3D hack n’ slash. Ninja Gaiden 4 continues that tradition.

Mastering Combat: The Return of Ninja Precision

Let’s face it. If you’re going to be picking up this game, you’re not picking it up to go flower picking, ore gathering, or potion making. You’re picking it up to slash your way through the hearts of countless demons, ripping them limb from limb, and sending them back to the abyss by dispensing indiscriminate punishment as only a highly skilled ninja can. I’m happy to say that Ninja Gaiden 4 lets you do that in spades and then some.

If you have played the first three games in the reboot series, then you will find some old friends here, such as the Flying Swallow, which can decapitate your opponent, or the devastating Izuna Drop. If you remember the combos to pull off some of these moves, then congratulations, you successfully found a way to memorize fewer combos because those inputs haven’t changed since their inception back in 2004. Dust off your muscle memory before hitting Start, and you’ll be ready to begin your demonic slaughtering posthaste.

The only drawback is that you’re going to need some Ninja Coins to unlock these moves; however, if you pick up the deluxe edition, you will be given 50,000 coins for your hard-earned money, which was enough for me to buy around 10 or 12 of the combos straight out of the gate, giving your arsenal of attacks a great head start!

The gameplay itself is fast and furious, and I have to say, out of the four games in the 3D series, this has the fastest combat I have experienced in any of the titles. It will keep you on your toes, but this does come with a bit of a drawback, and that is the camera system. Because the action can be so fast and chaotic, the camera sometimes cannot keep up, and you end up losing yourself on the screen.

To remedy this, clicking L3 will give you a targeted assist, where it will move from enemy to enemy as you slaughter them one by one. There is also an option to turn on auto-targeting so that you don’t have to worry about clicking L3. The fact that you can toggle things is nice, as it freely allows you to switch between both systems. Even though the targeting system is there, the camera work is still a bit flawed; however, this has been an issue since 2004.

Weapons and Bloodraven Transformations

Whoever has played the previous games knows that there are plenty of weapons at your disposal to rip your enemies to shreds. You had the Dragon Sword, Vigoorian Flail, Lunar Staff, Nunchakus, Windmill Shuriken, Kitetsu (my personal favorite), all the way to the Dark Dragon Blade itself. Of course, I’m leaving out a lot of weapons here; however, so did Ninja Gaiden 4.

Aside from the default katana you start with, your main character, Yakumo, only gets three extra weapons. You get a lance, dual claws, and a staff. Granted, things are a bit different here in Ninja Gaiden 4 with the Bloodraven system.

By entering Bloodraven mode with Yakumo, your weapons will take on new forms. Your lance will turn into a giant drill, you’ll get a hammer at the end of your staff, and more. The drawback is that Bloodraven mode drains an energy meter, so you can only use it for a short amount of time; however, it’s great for enemies who love to spam block because it will rip through that and break their defenses. Also, enemies will use powered-up attacks, all of which have visual cues, and you can use Bloodraven mode to block them as well. So, it has its uses, but with its limitations, you won’t be using the secondary forms of these weapons for very long.

What is very impressive, however, is that each weapon has its own combos to pull off, each with unique animations. I’m sure the team spent a lot of time getting those animations to chain together and look as impressive as they could, especially when it came to finishing maneuvers.

Each weapon has multiple finishers, but what I do enjoy here is that they are not forced like they were in Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge. After two games of having the freedom to destroy your enemies as you see fit, getting interrupted with the “Press X” prompt every single time was a game killer for me. I hated it so much that I never played past the first stage of the third game. Here, there is no pop-up. Your visual cue to finish an opponent is watching one of their limbs get hacked off. Then, you can press Y (or Triangle) to instantly finish them.

Don’t want to do that? Perfect! Just keep up your combo, and they will fall over and meet their demise. Giving players the option to use finishers and making that option something they can perform on their own terms was something that should have been done with the third game, so I applaud them for giving us that quality-of-life improvement.

Story and Structure: A Missed Opportunity

The story of Ninja Gaiden 4, sadly, is one of its weaknesses. There isn’t anything special about it. Without spoiling much of anything, you play as Yakumo, a member of the Raven Ninja Clan. You rescue Seori from the Divine Dragon Order, as she promises that there is a way to get rid of the Dark Dragon once and for all. This involves bringing her to different shrines so she can dispel the seals of the dragon, so that you can put it out of everyone’s misery for good.

That’s about as deep as the story gets. Yes, there are some twists along the way, but to be honest, they were all foreshadowed and not all that surprising. One of the things that I felt was a bad call was to bring you to what you perceived as the end of the game, only to switch you over to Ryu Hayabusa, and make you play through the game in a story that takes place before you control Yakumo.

Going through the same stages all over again was a bad call, any way you look at it. It felt more like an excuse to give players control of Ryu, and it didn’t truly add much to an already flat story. If anything, all of these stages could have been eliminated and told through either cutscenes or through vocal narrative and dialogue as the game progressed. If the goal of the developers was to give players control of Ryu, then I would have done this as a New Game+, where they could have remixed the stages, fleshed out the story a bit more, and helped drive that “prologue” feel that they were aiming for. Instead, it was just tacked on and felt more like an artificial extension of a game that I was ready to be done and over with by the time the Ryu chapters happened.

Soundtrack and Voice Acting: Great Music, Weak Delivery

Ninja Gaiden 4’s soundtrack is pretty good; however, it falls into a bit of a situation that I call “The Victor Borba situation.” I’m reminded of watching a streamer playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. When they got to a certain boss fight, they said, “We found the Victor Borba song!” I want to make it clear that this is not a negative, but I feel in Ninja Gaiden 4, when you hear it, you get that same reaction. The thing is, while Ninja Gaiden 4’s soundtrack is good, diverse, and uses a great mix of different genres, those boss fights where Victor Borba graces us with his harmonic screaming (as I like to call it) just overshadow everything else.

Again, that’s not a negative because I enjoyed some of the more mystical music that sounds like it belongs in a Ninja Gaiden game, along with the techno beats when you’re progressing through a really twisted underground rave club in Tokyo. As I said, there is a great variety of styles here that all come together to produce a great soundtrack that I think has a little something for everyone, but let’s be honest… everyone is looking for “the Victor Borba” song.

One of the biggest complaints I have with Ninja Gaiden 4 from a sound perspective is the terrible delivery given to us by Yakumo’s voice actor (at least in the English version). I understand that a ninja is a disciplined person who lives for honor and their mission, so tone and inflection are seen as unnecessary in the eyes of their ultimate goal, but Yakumo has some of the driest, least impactful voice lines I’ve heard out of a main character in quite some time. When literally no-name NPCs sound more well-acted than your main character, that’s a big problem. I don’t know if it was the lack of ability from the voice actor or the terrible decision made by the sound director to have Yakumo portrayed this way, but I did not enjoy the delivery of the voice acting at all.

Visuals and Level Design: Gorgeous but Over-Guided

PlatinumGames used their proprietary engine to craft Ninja Gaiden 4, and I have to say that the visuals look great. Every environment has stunning detail and helps enhance the experience as you make your way through the levels.

The levels themselves, however, are stuffed with gimmick after gimmick, and I feel that takes away from the fun factor of the game if you were to compare it to what I feel is still the greatest game in the 3D series, the first Ninja Gaiden on Xbox from 2004. In the 2004 game, it encouraged exploration; things like wall running were self-explanatory because you saw the huge gaps in front of you, and it felt as if the player was smart enough to figure things out for themselves. Here, you get the yellow paint treatment to needlessly guide players on their way. I honestly hated this, and it made me feel as if I couldn’t figure things out for myself. The more hand-holding you do, the more inferior you make the player feel.

I also do not understand why every level needed a gimmick. From swinging on branches and overhead pipes/bars, to foot skating on rails, to riding gusts of wind, to surfboarding on water, every level felt as if it were forcing gimmicks upon the player to try and keep them as engaged as possible. Then, when you reach what you believed to be the final level, all it did was combine every gimmick in the game into one giant Ninja Warrior course, and tried to pass that off as a challenge when, in reality, it just came across as lazy, uninspired, and a convoluted mess.

The original 2004 game didn’t have yellow paint. It did have some indicators to let you know there were secrets, but outside of that, the game didn’t hand-hold you to tell you where to go. It encouraged you to explore to find golden scarabs, new weapons, new ninpo techniques, lives of a thousand gods, and other secrets. Here, the levels were large, but every time I explored, with the exception of finding a random chest or a demon gate to the underworld, about 80% of the time, I ran into a dead end with nothing to show for my efforts. In some cases, this made some of the levels feel empty and lifeless.

The 2004 game also had puzzles to solve. While they weren’t in-depth, they were still something to do to help make the stages feel unique. They didn’t need a massive amount of repeatable gimmicks because they let the environment handle all of that for them. Sadly, we don’t get much, or any of that, here in Ninja Gaiden 4.

Final Verdict: Stylish Action That Falls Just Short

In short, Ninja Gaiden 4 delivers very high in the realm of action. If you want to relive the glory of the first game’s combat system, with a nice revision of the third game’s finisher system, this is the game for you. If the ultimate goal of your experience with Ninja Gaiden 4 is to hack your way through countless demons and shred them in a multitude of ways, Ninja Gaiden 4 is going to exceed your expectations.

If your goal is to immerse yourself in a deep story and have a sense of freedom of exploration, you may feel a bit underwhelmed. While there is room for exploration, the yellow paint aspect makes the “off-the-beaten-path” areas a bit too obvious, and even so, when you do go off the path, even those areas are painted yellow, which confuses you because you’re not sure if you’re on the right path or if it is a side area. Of course, you can always click R3 to get an indicator to guide you to the main path, but that, too, also takes away from the sense of open exploration.

In the end, as a standalone game without comparing it to any other in the previous series, this is a decent entry that is sure to provide fast and furious action, challenging enemies, and even more challenging bosses (most of which are absolutely beautifully designed in both look and combat abilities). But, if you are comparing this to the games that came before it, the level design, the lack of weapon choices, and some of the more modern aspects of it make this fall short.

It’s still clear that the 2004 game is the best this series has to offer, and while I feel Ninja Gaiden 4 is a good game, it’s not great, and certainly not one that’s going to leave a lasting impression on gamers. Especially fans of the prior Ninja Gaiden games. And that’s okay, because it is fun for what it is, and that’s the ultimate goal of a video game—to be fun. In that regard, Ninja Gaiden 4 accomplishes that goal.

The game Ninja Gaiden 4 is set to release on October 21, 2025, and will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam, Windows PC).

Review Disclosure Statement: A copy of Ninja Gaiden 4 was provided to us for review purposes by PlatinumGames/Microsoft. For more information on how we review video games and other media or technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.