Last week, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, a remake for Ninja Gaiden 2 with new visuals, shadowdropped alongside the announcement of Ninja Gaiden 4 releasing later this year.
A long dormant franchise, developer Team Ninja, now known for their fast-paced (and more punishing) take on soulslike are finally revisiting this, to delight of old and new fans. My social media feed is filled with posts of players rediscovering how refreshing “non-soulslike action games” can be, and there’s many more to come.
And this isn’t an edge case. Recently, there’s been a boom of old and dormant franchises resurfacing to great success. And while Ninja Gaiden is more highly-regarded back in the day, there are also game series that found mainstream success from years of being a niche, and game series where their latest iteration is when they finally got their flowers.
A new generation of gamers are rediscovering underrated classics from the past alongside long-time fans who may have not have the platform to share their love are now coming out of the woodwork. And I’m loving it.

Armored Core Finally Flying High
To give another example, since I brought up soulslike before, look at FromSoftware bringing back Armored Core. To many folks, FromSoft has always been the team that made punishing action-RPGs, even before the days of Demons’s Souls.
But for those who knew this jack-of-all-trades of a development team back in the day, their bread-and-butter was Armored Core. The mecha action game was missing in action for a good decade, coinciding the dev’s newfound success that eventually created a whole new subgenre.
When Armored Core VI released back in 2023, there’s been a lot of rediscovery happening as more and more players old and new started to appreciate the series. Critically, reviews of past Armored Core games have been swimming in the 7s since ever, even Geoff Keighley, the guy that had the honour to introduce that jaw-dropping reveal trailer for ACVI, was not hot on the game. Not so for ACVI, which had its fair share of awards including Best Action Game at Keighley’s The Game Awards and several Game Of The Year awards from outlets around the world.
But it’s not just that, Armored Core as a whole now has a newfound appreciation. And I experience this first hand by seeing prices of used copies of Armored Core 4, For Answer, V and Verdict Day soaring. On the eve of PlayStation announcing its closure of the PS Store for PS3, I tried to snag a physical copy of Armored Core For Answer sold online. It was at a decent price, less than RM100 if my memory hasn’t failed me.
(For context, the equivalent of a $60 USD full-priced game in Malaysia back during the PS3 era retails around RM180.)
A few days later, my order was cancelled, so I looked around for other copies online and all that was available have now risen in price, upwards of RM100.
And when CEX, the gaming goods retailer that buy and sells used games and gaming gear, open up shop here in the country, copies for Armored Core For Answer are not only rare, but expensive. At one time at the MyTown branch of CEX, they didn’t display the one copy they had on the shelf, because it was rated at RM295. That’s a couple of ringgit short from the price of a $70 USD full-priced PS5 game. It didn’t just held its value, it grew.
And now Armored Core has an animated adaptation on Prime Video? And a new line of plastic model kits that are hard to come by in this parts of the world that you better pre-order them? What a time to be alive.
Personally, I grew up playing Armored Core starting with Armored Core 3 and up until Last Raven. I knew its reputation as being a good B-game. It didn’t appeal to the critics of that time. But man, they sure slept on this series.
Go and check out content creators who only recently played the past Armored Cores and see how they thought of it. The ones I see, which meant there’s a hint of personal bias here, have been pleasantly surprised by most of the past entries.
After a decade of beauty sleep, Armored Core is now a multi-media IP.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer (2025) – Off To A Rolling Start
And there’s another example of a long-dormant, underrated game series that’s gaining momentum with a new release: Tokyo Xtreme Racer. This racing game is another example of being a long-running series with limited appeal and middling review scores. But those who played one of the games and managed to untangle its many quirks will find this to be more than what the at-the-time-current crop of mainstream racing games had to offer.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer frames a race as a head-to-head outrun battle, with health bars out of a fighting game. It’s a very video gamey way of expressing how illegal expressway racing was conducted: very impromptu (you blink the headlines to challenge a fellow racing who’s just cruising while waiting for a battle), and then attempt to cleanly outrun the opponent.
I vividly remember when Need For Speed Underground 2 was touting a feature where you can challenge rivals on the open world for a head-to-head race, and was extremely underwhelmed by its implementation. It was an afterthought.
(NFS Carbon got touge racing right, though)
Meanwhile, the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series makes head-to-head challenges its whole identity. Add in extensive car customisation, hundreds of rivals with personality and lore (lore!), and in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift series, parking lot meetups (a feature NFS fans have been begging for inclusion for years), a banging soundtrack (the song Clever Drive is heavily sampled in many songs as the foundation of a small music subgenre called Rally House) and it’s one of the most compelling street racing series ever made. Yet it only had a cult following.
And I’m so happy seeing the new Tokyo Xtreme Racer series, simply titled Tokyo Xtreme Racer, knows what it needs to be but now with a more global audience that appreciates it. SteamDB reports that, at the time of writing, concurrent players on Steam is around 11,000 players on average since its Early Access release (with estimates of at least 90,000 copies sold so far). Plenty of content creators, even VTubers, are taking a clever drive on this new entry, and so far fan reception has been positive. It’s gaining momentum and buzz, something another racing game launching in Early Access would’ve wanted.

Underrated Games Deserves More Love
I’m saying all this mostly because these two game series I’ve mentioned, Armored Core and Tokyo Xtreme Racer, are games I grew up with, love them despite what reviews led me to believe otherwise, and wanted to get another shot. I have nothing against the reviews, or the reviewers. The past AC and TXR games have their rough edges and are so out there compared to the expected norms of mainstream AAA games of the time.
But what I’m saying is, a new generation of gamers are out there discovering, loving and championing the new entries of these old, long-dormant series. Maybe it’s because they are “so out there compared to the expected norms of mainstream AAA games” of today.
Fashion comes and goes, like how time can be a flat circle, and gaming trends might come and go as well. Maybe it is in vogue right now to tap into that 20-year-old fountain of old IPs that can be resurrected. Capcom is reviving Onimusha and that’s coming next year. And who knows what other niche cult hits of the yesteryears are ready for a comeback.
And if this cycle of cult hit comebacks is not just a fluke the three game series mentioned here just lucked out, maybe it’s reassuring. The flops and misses of today may find a new appreciation to tomorrow’s next generation of gamers.
And hopefully, more underrated niche game series are just late bloomers, they’ll get their flowers eventually in another decade or so.