The 20 Best Ninja Games Ranked

While certain noted academics may define ninja only by their mammalian status, fighting all the time, and their tendency to flip out and kill people, we can assure you there's a lot more to quality ninjutsu than that (though they do help). Video games have long been the perfect medium to explore the beautiful, bloody spectrum of ninja badassery, and in celebration of a glorious history in the subtle arts of murder and persuasion, here are 20 of the best ninja-based titles ever created.

With his cool mutton chops and wild world full of painfully specific Japanese folklore, Alex Kidd is one of those mascots that time forgot. All of his exploits are stranded on the poor, underrated Sega Master System. It's even more of a shame considering his final outing, Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, is not just one of the best platformers in the series, with some wonderful earwormy chiptunes and a pole swing mechanic to zoom across levels, but also started life as a sort of chibi remake of the original Shinobi. That game's four bosses returned as cutesy versions. All that said, Alex Kidd in Shinobi World still delivered the fast paced action that ninja fans would expect.

On the surface, The Last Ninja is yet another point-and-click adventure game on the Commodore 64. But spend any significant time with it, and you can see the conceptual seeds that would eventually blossom in games released decades later. You could target individual body parts during combat, a la Fallout's V.A.T.S. system. The game itself is one of the first truly open worlds in gaming, with its isometric view letting players move and backtrack pretty much anywhere in a given level. And for the first time, a full range of ninja weapons were granted to the player. Today it feels like a severe de-make of Assassin's Creed, and that's not a phrase one can apply to anything else made in 1987.

The infamous thief/assassin Ishikawa Goemon is essentially Japan's answer to Robin Hood, but the specifics of Goemon's life are possibly even more inseparably Japanese than Robin Hood is British. Suffice to say, the poor guy's pop cultural street cred is virtually nil in the West, except for his one lucky break, where Konami saw fit to bring Goemon's SNES debut to Western shores. And Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a hell of a starting point.

Part side-scrolling beat-em-up, part platformer, part RPG, and all very quirky, the game's weird Japanese design elements turned the grim legend (seriously, look up how that dude supposedly died and shudder) into one of the more endearing would-be mascots of Konami's heyday.

Strictly speaking, Warframe isn't specifically about ninjas. It's more of a "if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck" sort of ninja game where you play as a race of lithe space warriors called the Tenno as they slice and shoot their way through the various races of interstellar bastards who want their heads. But there's no doubt once you start playing what the intent was, especially considering the extensive amounts of customization you can pour into your individual Tenno's blades, guns, and costume to make them your own special brand of lethal space-faring viper. Most shocking, however, is the fact that Warframe is a free-to-play title, and yet, in many ways, its a major, epic experience on par with and often surpassing the similar experience offered by Bungie's Destiny.

One of the founding father titles of indie gaming's rise, N+ falls into that special category of stripped-down, brass-tacks gaming, where the simplicity of its visuals and controls belies an evil deceit that is out to ruin you by any means necessary. Floating and running around the grayscale levels feels  great, and the game relies on the simple pleasures of no-frills platforming to throw unimaginable obstacles, laser-precise death traps, and death-defying jumps at the player when they least expect it. However, the game's infinite lives means that jumping right back in and trying again is always a second away, and the irresistible lure of banging your head against the wall of a particular stage again and again is a hell of a drug.

The ongoing story of Lo Wang — yes, really, that's your dude's name — always tended to live in the shadow of Duke Nukem, with a similar humor, look, and feel. While understandable seeing as the first games in the series were built using Duke Nukem's engine, the 2013 reboot gives Lo Wang the spotlight entirely. Given that Shadow Warrior has Wang facing off against a pantheon of pissed-off Japanese demons and their pissed-off drama, Wang doesn't just rely on his twitch-reflex ninja skills to slice and dice his way to his goals, but a hefty arsenal of pure steel firepower. And yet, the game never tips the scales too far in either direction, giving the game a nice balance of elegant, deadly ninjutsu and gleeful gunplay.

Developer Vanillaware has pretty much cornered the market on pairing lavish, breathtaking 2D artwork with old-school side-scrolling beat-em-up gameplay, sprinkled with a bit of JRPG fairy dust for extra flavor. Unfortunately, while Odin Sphere and Dragon's Crown get most of the attention, one of their best efforts, Muramasa, has faded into memory, which is a shame because it's maybe the strongest effort of the three.

Vanillaware's fast-paced, lightning-quick combat is a better tonal fit with the Edo-period ninja story and aesthetic, which is captivating in its own right — involving a princess possessed by a dead ronin, and an amnesiac ninja who accidentally unleashes hell — while also delivering one of the most impressively detailed and extravagant visual tellings of Japanese folklore in all gaming.

Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven is the epitome of a certain style of ninja experience, a fine wine meant to be sipped carefully and thoughtfully rather than guzzled. Rikimaru and Ayame are designed to kill silently and invisibly, like in most stealth ninja titles, but there's a patience and precision involved that no other title perfected like this — least of all, the Tenchu sequels that followed.

More than this, however, that patience is rewarded, as new characters become available, operating on the same principles of stealth, the silent kill, and treacherous tactics against one's enemies. The story's how and why become more intriguing as the game plods along, reaching a climax in the present day with a job probably better suited to Agent 47 than an Edo-period ninja. Even despite its sometimes bratty camera, Wrath of Heaven is a refined experience that demands respect.

Even as previous Metal Gears came off resembling a dream logic retelling of a Tom Clancy novel, they are milquetoast, teetotalling straights compared to the hallucinogenic cyberninja absurdity that is Revengeance. Platinum Games has no pretenses towards making a larger point with their take on Metal Gear, exemplified right upfront by focusing an entire game on everyone's least favorite Metal Gear character that isn't a crying Otacon. But Platinum Games commits, with gameplay that recalls the best and most exhilarating bits of the Xbox Ninja Gaiden titles, goosed up with a visually spectacular bullet-time multi-slash mechanic. Plus, it features all the tongue-in-cheek and freewheeling craziness that's ever fallen out of Hideo Kojima's skull. When Raiden poses, late in the game, two seconds from ripping a persistent enemy to shreds and growls "THE RIPPER IS BACK!", we're laughing with AND at him.

Take everything great about each of the games above, and cram them into one handy package. That's Shinobi III. Everything you want out of a ninja game is here: the flashy attacks, the speed, the acrobatics, the mystical arts, the swordplay, the shurikens, the endless horde of masked enemies to lay to waste. But Shinobi III refused to limit itself, and stuck our hero, Joe Musashi, in an insanely wide range of wild scenarios, from serene bamboo forests, to a laboratory that seems to only manufacture living brain tissue, to surfing during a missile assault. Somehow none of it seems out of place, and all of it, no matter what, lets the player be the most badass ninja on the planet at the push of a button.