Ninja Gaiden 4 – Accessibility Review
Hello, dear readers. Ninja Gaiden 4, the latest action game from Team Ninja, PlatinumGames, and published by Xbox Games Studios, has been released last week for all modern platforms, and we got the chance to try it out on our PS5 Pro.
To say that I was pleasantly surprised would be an understatement. The Ninja Gaiden series is renowned for its higher difficulty and for not being that accessible. I remember when growing up that I stayed away from it because even if I didn’t have the sight problems that I do today, the games were too hard for me.
Now, it’s 2025, and the developers have included so many accessibility options and helping features that I was finally able to play Ninja Gaiden 4, with some help from Alina.
This long-awaited installment introduces an all-new protagonist in Yakumo, a young ninja prodigy whose fate is intertwined with the legendary Ryu Hayabusa himself.
According to the game’s blurb, Ninja Gaiden 4 fuses Team Ninja’s tempered combat philosophy with the stylish, dynamic action gameplay of PlatinumGames. These will allow us to engage in visually stunning combat that rewards precision and strategy.
Although Ninja Gaiden 4 does not include Text-to-Speech or Ledge Guards, it has a great Navigation Assist system and features like auto targeting, auto movement, and a few others which will allow a blind player to have some fun in the game.
To be clear, the game is playable if you have someone to help here and there, and the tutorials can be read using OCR software, which is never a good replacement for TTS, but we play with what we have. You can also change a lot of other features like making the subtitles larger and things like that.
To see this level of universal design in a Ninja Gaiden game is truly refreshing, and with just a few tweaks, this excellent adventure could be fully accessible for blind gamers.
The biggest problem for now is that we can fall off ledges as without Ledge Guard there is no way for us to know where we are, but at least most of the time we spawn at the same location. The game has a lot of platforming requirements and, with auto movement enabled, most of them can be passed by pressing circle for auto movement or X to jump.
The Nav Assist can be enabled from the setting area and we can use it by holding R3, the right stick. When we do that, the time slows and the camera is turned automatically towards the current objective.
Be advised, in order to have all these features I recommend that you play the game on the Story difficulty, as this setting will allow you to enable all the helping features.
I am still making my way through Ninja Gaiden 4’s story and I find it quite interesting. As a new player I was super happy to get a nice story recap at the beginning of the game.
The voice acting is great, the music is intense and the presentation looks cool, according to Alina.
The combat is quite satisfying and we are introduced to all sorts of attacks and abilities on a regular basis.
I invite you to check out the YouTube video we have uploaded as there you will hear Alina and I as we set up the game, with all the options and also you will hear her reading me the tutorials.
I will continue to play Ninja Gaiden 4 and hopefully I will be able to complete the story, in which case I will return to this article and update it.
Until then, I can honestly say that for me Ninja Gaiden 4 is the surprise of 2025, in a good way. Congrats to the developers at Team Ninja and PlatinumGames for including accessibility features and in case they want to make Ninja Gaiden 4 or any of their games fully accessible for us blind folks, I’m always here and happy to help
Review code provided by Xbox Nordics
Victor Dima
