Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge
There’s a long-running joke in the Xbox community that Microsoft will finally hit its stride with Game Pass and Xbox releases “next year.” The joke has been going around since 2018, when Microsoft made a series of big studio acquisitions to create more Xbox games and make Game Pass more appealing. Year after year, Xbox fans have been waiting for a solid 12 months of new games to play, and it now looks like 2025 is going to be that “next year” everyone has been waiting for.
The annual Xbox Developer Direct this week was nothing short of excellent, after a turbulent year for the platform in 2024. Microsoft kicked the event off with a promise that all games shown would be on Game Pass, and impressively, they’d all be Xbox Play Anywhere titles so you can buy once and play on Xbox consoles and PC. It then dropped two big surprises: Ninja Gaiden 4 and a shadow drop of the remastered Ninja Gaiden 2 Black.
Published by Xbox Game Studios, Ninja Gaiden 4 is the latest entry in a long-running franchise that’s seen a lot of success on Xbox in the past. So it’s no surprise that Team Ninja also picked Microsoft to debut the remaster of Ninja Gaiden II.
South of Midnight finally got a release…
