2025 was the best year for ninja games ever, but all of them just made it clear that 2008's Ninja Gaiden 2 remains untouchable
SOURCE:PC Gamer|BY: Wes Fenlon
This year's Ninja Gaiden 2 Black finally does right by a messy but one-of-a-kind action game.
(Image credit: Koei Tecmo)
Personal Pick
(Image credit: Future)
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here.
We try pretty hard to avoid lazily dropping cliches into our writing here at PC Gamer, which puts me in an awkward position as I sit down to pitch to you why a remaster, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, is one of the best games of 2025, despite mostly being a fresh Unreal Engine 5 skin for a game that came out in 2008. So if I must sin, I may as well see just how many forbidden phrases from the style guide I can use at once.
In other words: They really don't make 'em like they used to.
Sorry. Sorry!! That must've been pretty gross to read. If you threw up, that's on me. I thought about jamming a "It's the Dark Souls of…" line in there somehow, but was worried the paragraph may actually become so cursed it could be summoned to life as if through some necromantic power.
I just needed you to know that I know how ridiculous it is to bust out "they don't make 'em like they used to" against Ninja Gaiden 4, a game in a genre that's starved for new additions and by its very nature feels like it belongs more to the 2000s than the 2020s. And the 2D platformer Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound and Sega's beautiful Shinobi metroidvania-lite are both kinda catching strays here, because they're good, and we couldn't have had the year of the ninja without them.
It's just that when it comes to slicing a thousand dudes into bloody ribbons while riding a wave of pure adrenaline, nothing does it like Ninja Gaiden 2 Black.
To me, the 2008 NG2 is simply the best character action game ever made, trading away the 2004 Ninja Gaiden's more measured defense and level exploration for linear stages of precise hyperviolence. Cutting off a limb allows you to instantly execute an enemy as blood gushes from the wound; absorbing their blood essence after you've dismembered them can either serve as vital restorative health or instead fuel an automatic combo that guarantees a kill and a few seconds of invulnerability.
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Ninja Gaiden 2 is mercifully free of gimmicky setpieces and drip-feed unlocks that you'll find in Ninja Gaiden 4; where that game gives you four weapons, Ninja Gaiden 2 gives you 11, and almost each one makes you think "this is the sickest thing I've ever used" until you find the next one 45 minutes later and guess what?
Yeah, it's sicker.
Even better, Ninja Gaiden 2 starts you with all your essential combat abilities available from the first second of the first level. Learn to use them or die: the game doesn't care which.
The original version of the game is also full of bullshit: ranged enemies that will knock you off ropes as you slowly climb them, a couple terrible bosses, slowdown galore. It feels like they rushed it out the door six months early, and yet it still goes incredibly hard, the combat making up for all the bad bits if you tune into the game's frequency the way I did in 2008, and still do in 2025. I deeply admire the dev team's commitment to throwing hordes of enemies at you even when it tanked the framerate, because they knew the lethality of the combat system they'd designed fully came alive when it pushed you to the ragged limits and dared you to become unstoppable.
A later port, NG2 Sigma, cleaned up a lot of the mess, which was probably the right call—but in the process it cut back on those enemy numbers and made some tweaks to the blood and balance that diluted the game's essence. It was a less frustrating, more even-tempered game, but also a less special one. And that was the only version you could easily play for, basically, the last 15 years. Until now. Until Black.
This version of the game is an earnest attempt to marry Sigma's cleaned up port with the more jagged original, and while it doesn't fully return to the original's overwhelming enemy numbers and aggressive balancing it gets a hell of a lot closer. A still-in-development mod gets closer still. In time I feel confident that this will be without compromise the definitive version of the definitive ninja game.
Original Staircase restored - Ninja Gaiden 2 Black (White Mod) - YouTube
I tried (unsuccessfully 😔) to convince my fellow PC Gamers that Ninja Gaiden 2 Black belonged on the Top 100 list earlier this year. This was the heart of my pitch:
Remember the movie Twister? Remember how they made a sequel, TWISTERS, and the way they made it more dramatic was: TWO TWISTERS? That's Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, except YOU are both tornados.
The first 3D Ninja Gaiden demanded careful defense, because even some basic-ass foot soldier could rock your shit. Ninja Gaiden 2 said: F that. You don't need to defend if you simply never stop attacking. We're going to make the enemies EVEN MEANER, but we're going to give you the power to obliterate them with non-stop offense because you are not just a tornado: you are a Sharknado.
It has shiny new Unreal Engine graphics, and it keeps the good changes from Sigma while deliberately reverting to the balance and lethality of the original game. It is the best combat in a Japanese character action game ever made, and yes this is a call-out for Bayonetta and Devil May Cry. I love those games, but there's a raw aggression and speed to Ninja Gaiden that is on another level. If you're sick of Soulslikes, this is your cure. There is no stamina bar and you can kill bosses in like 30 seconds.
You even go to hell! Not because you die, like Kratos in God of War; that's weak and embarrassing and as we all know Kratos kind of looks like a pirate, and ninjas defeated pirates in the great meme wars of the late 2000s. You go to hell because you simply run out of demons to kill on earth so you have to go to the underworld to kill the rest of them. It's like 10-15 hours of uncut adrenaline, which might not be healthy, but you will have a great time.
(Image credit: Koei Tecmo)
Maybe in hindsight I shouldn't have brought up the pirate thing. But even with the remastered graphics, it's evident Ninja Gaiden 2 belongs to an older era of games. Its levels are largely barren, its camera finicky, its tolerance for enemies firing rockets at you while you try to get within melee range higher than you'd see in a game from this decade.
(Image credit: Koei Tecmo)
But Ninja Gaiden 4's levels are somehow more boring, sticking you in the same few environments for hours where NG2 relentlessly barreled forward to new locales, without age as an excuse. Its new ninja hero runs around weightless like he's on permanent fast-forward. And for everything cool it adds to the combat, it also adds something that weighs it down or crufts it up.
I hope the series gets another sequel, because Ninja Gaiden 4 gives the impression of a very passionate team rediscovering the ancient texts and trying to decipher them. Perhaps the untimely death of series creator Tomonobu Itagaki—whose departure from Team Ninja after Ninja Gaiden 2 forever changed its identity as an action studio—will serve as further fuel for the next generation of designers there to examine how his exacting direction led to a pair of truly peerless action games.
Ninja Gaiden 4 does not quite capture the old magic, but I think it proves that they have the skill to make a game that does. If there's a next time, maybe they'll nail it. For now, Ninja Gaiden 2 still lays claim to the cowl.
(Image credit: Koei Tecmo)
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
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