Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Review - Screenshot 1 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

To return to Ninja Gaiden’s 2D roots in 2025 is a wonderful thing. Dotemu, upon acquiring the license for a series reboot, approached Spanish indie developer The Game Kitchen to get the job done. Known for their remarkable Blasphemous titles, the project was overseen by Team Ninja, who have held the series mantle from 2004 to present. And, while Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is not strictly the Ninja Gaiden one recalls from its NES days, the task here has been carried off with all the panache modern technology can afford, resulting in a blisteringly gorgeous action-platformer.

For those old enough, Ninja Gaiden was once a formidable 8-Bit challenge that either destroyed a child’s willpower or forged them eternal gaming mastery. It was, and still is, brutally hard. While Ragebound echoes this, in that it gets seriously challenging after its first third, its format is far less aggressive. You don’t have lives, you have checkpoints, and respawns come in an infinite flavour. You don’t have entirely linear progression, but a world map where you can return to any substage to earn higher ranks, complete mini challenges, or recover Golden Scarabs. If you're not well equipped and your reflexes suck, however, the Pirate Stage boss will have you spitting teeth.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Review - Screenshot 2 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Ragebound’s plotting is heavy compared to the games of old, with regular cutscenes and dialogue exchanges between an incredibly broad cast of characters. It takes place in parallel to 1988's Ninja Gaiden, with an opening prologue where you play Jō Hayabusa - Ryu Hayabusa’s father - who is defeated in battle by its end. Ryu, forced to cut the training of a young Kenji Mozu short, heads to America to avenge his father’s death, concurrent with the events of the original NES game. Kenji, the new protagonist, is left behind to defend the village from a demonic invasion, and a new adventure is on.

Visually, Ragebound is stunning. The locations are varied; not content with idling in the mountains of Japan, it moves with its plot, expanding into cities, subways and multi-tiered construction sites. The colour casting is exceptional, the detail incredible, and the animations fluid and sharp. Your demon adversaries, punched through in bursts of blood and an occasional decapitation, lie dispatched on the ground while severed limbs of the opposing clan spin through the air. While most sprites are relatively small, they come imbued with bags of visual personality and an undying coolness.

The aesthetic is cartoonier than Sega’s forthcoming Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, but well suits the series canon. Fire rages, waterfalls cascade, rain patters, and sunsets set. The entire thing, from end to end, is a feast for the eyes, roaming across glades, through pitfall-filled caverns, ominous bio-factories, and decorated corporate headquarters. Complimenting the visuals is a terrific score, its rock-cinematic soundtrack oft recalling historical Ninja Gaiden motifs.

Thankfully, it plays fantastically, too, thanks to limber mechanics and finely crafted stage designs. The combat doesn’t feel overburdened, even when your options extend during the game. Combining simplicity with depth, you have a straightforward slash and a “Guillotine Slash”, which is performed in the air by tapping the jump button a second time, encircling Kenji. The Guillotine Slash not only kills or damages an enemy, but allows you to spring off of them, effectively a double jump. You can ping off of almost anything that can hurt you, chaining hops across Shuriken, fireballs, and thick enemy skulls; and the added height will boost you toward overhead platform apparatus. Depending on your prowess, you can make Ragebound look incredibly good, snapping about the scenery and dispatching enemies with a variety of imaginative mixups.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Review - Screenshot 3 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Kenji can power-up at will by using a moderate portion of health, affording him a hyper strike that cuts through armoured enemies. Alternatively, this same single-use power-up is carried by certain demons, denoted by a glowing aura, who are almost always paired on-screen with larger, shielded foes. This creates a nice cadence where you bounce and strike for the aura, power-up, and then violently cut through the bigger foe like butter. Additionally, Kenji can slide-strike from a dash by using the shoulder button in tandem, and, crucially, roll safely through incoming dangers.

Checkpoints litter the fairly large stages, which are split down into substages, and act as respawn points for dishonourable defeat. During your travels you collect Golden Scarabs that can be traded at the shop for Talismans, granting you new abilities. Only two can be equipped at a time, adding a strategic but flexible dimension to the gameplay; and with useful properties like replenishing your health whenever you pass a checkpoint, or increasing your attack power when close to death, they’re indispensable.

Bosses are brilliantly done; often giant, monstrous things that not only look superb, but deploy proper, sequenced attack patterns. Here, your skills - rolling, guillotine slashing, and powering up - are exercised in clever ways, and it feels rewarding to flex Kenji's skill catalogue. Slaying twin serpents over a river of blood is a wonderfully intense skirmish, and requires absolute pattern memorisation and all of your attributes to best.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Review - Screenshot 4 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is anywhere between three to six hours in length depending on your ability, but it’s not until around the hour mark that things fundamentally shift, switching characters from Kenji to Kumori, a Black Spider Clan Kunoichi. A ranged character, she throws blades in four directions and is incredibly fun to play. Neater still, she ends up not just siding with Kenji, making for interestingly hostile banter, but combines with his body. For the remainder of the game you are graced with both character’s properties, long and short range powers combined. This adds several new quirks, requiring you to use each character's abilities to tag specific colour-coded, aura-wielding enemies, and a new Rage Meter that can destroy every on-screen adversary or bat chunks from a boss’s health bar.

From this point, things get really inventive. There are junctures where Kenji must give over control to Kumori, who in spirit form has a brief window to execute a series of movements, skipping and teleporting, to reach a hidden item, switch, or trigger to allow you to continue through the stage. Her energy meter ticks down rapidly, meaning she can make scant few errors in completing the task. Failure doesn’t result in death, but a return to Kenji’s body to start over. It’s not an entirely novel device, but does add new definition to an already well-thought-out game; and, along with arcade-like motorbike chases down subway tunnels, infiltrating Pirate Caves, and hitching rides on helicopters, it’s impressive how much variety The Game Kitchen have crammed into the adventure.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Review - Screenshot 5 of 6
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

So where's the rub? Sadly, the frame rate just isn’t holding 30fps on the Switch 1, even when docked, with judders when there are as few as three on-screen enemies. It’s a shame, since the Switch can ably handle this. It's no dealbreaker, but it's irritating, and hopefully it will be rectified in a future update.

Conclusion

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is the kind of game that makes you want to improve. Chaining death with balletic grace feels so liberating that you don’t want to be interrupted in your flow. The way it implements all of its mechanics, along with increasingly interesting, beautiful, and ever-taut stage design, is a treat, and a truly linear arcade-style DLC would be a blessing should one ever transpire. While some Talismans can be purchased to actually make the game harder, the base challenge will certainly test you. It's a real shame about that frame-rate judder, but in terms of seductive 2D Ninja action, it lands squarely on catlike feet. SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance, you have been challenged to a duel.

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