FromSoftware's Ninja Blade Delisted From Steam

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FromSoftware was developing a variety of titles before it struck gold with Demon's Souls on the PlayStation 3 in 2009. This includes its long-running Armored Core franchise, to Enchanted Arms and King's Field, which saw niche success outside of Japan. One of these other titles that was released before the breakout success of the Soulsborne formula was 2009's Ninja Blade, an action hack-and-slash game released as an Xbox 360 console exclusive and PC via the Steam storefront.

Ninja Blade put players in the shoes of a modern-day ninja, who uses a katana, twin swords, and broad swords to fight off various enemies. Much like other hack-and-slash games at the time, it was very heavily influenced by other seminal action games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden. Reviews at the time of its release were mixed, with much of the praise was given to the incredibly cinematic action set pieces and cutscenes with criticism for its bland action gameplay. Despite this, some fans consider Ninja Blade a neat overlooked title by FromSoftware before its massive success with Demon's Souls.

With FromSoftware now more focused on its monumental successes with games like Elden Ring, there were bound to be some older games from the developer that would fall to the wayside. This includes Ninja Blade, where it was quietly but very suddenly removed from the Steam storefront and is no longer available for purchase. According to the game's page on Steam, this title has been removed at the request of the publisher, which means either ND Games or bitComposer Games were the one who asked for this to be removed.

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delisted from Steam this morning. developed by FromSoftware pic.twitter.com/8AK9DEHBgf
— Wario64 (@Wario64) April 1, 2022

There is no formal reason as to why this game was removed from Steam from either publisher, though it may be due to the age of the game itself. Many of the recent reviews for this port have claimed that Ninja Blade isn't compatible with most modern machines. Listed problems include a broken frame rate, graphics, and controls also seeing issues. This port was published back in 2009, so there were likely to be incompatibility issues with an older PC release like this as time went on.

As of this writing, there isn't a window for when fans can expect to jump back into this older FromSoftware title in a state that is playable through Steam, though GreenManGaming currently still has the game for purchase. For Xbox 360 owners, they can only play Ninja Blade if they own the disc, as the game isn't backwards compatible on modern Xbox consoles.

Ninja Blade is available on PC and Xbox 360.