The time has come for another wall-crawling ninja adventure through hell.Ninja Gaiden: Rageboundmakes waves as the first 2D platformer in the franchise since the 90s, courtesy of developerThe Game Kitchen (ofBlasphemousfame)and retro-championing publisher Dotemu.For NES trilogy diehards,Ninja Gaiden: Rageboundpays worthy homage to the originals and their highly replayable track to mastery.
TheNinja Gaidenserieson the NES delivered system-defining, unforgivingly rigid action platformers that set new standards for cinematic storytelling and challenge. When the firstNinja Gaidenrevival appeared on XBOX in the early aughts, the presentation and perspective were wholly different, but the spirit remained the same.
That standard continues withNinja Gaiden: Ragebound. In a manner which recalls2020’sStreets of Rage 4– also published under Dotemu – this new canonical franchise entry reworks certain elements of the beloved series, but retains that crucial difficulty, especially after unlocking hard mode.New players should be able to plow through the story on normal, but speedrunners and 2D platforming gurus will find ample room for mastery and finesse on the second, harder playthrough.
Two Ninjas For The Price of One
Ryu Takes A Backseat in Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
Ninja Gaiden: Rageboundslots directly into the series mythos, only without Ryu Hayabusa at its center. Instead, you control Kenji Mozu, a ninja protector of Hayabusa Village, training under Ryu, promptly sent off to banish a demonic horde that threatens the village and the world beyond.
After the first few levels, Kenji cautiously joins forces with Kumori, a kunoichi of the Black Spider Clan who is functionally his enemy. Kumori then inhabits Kenji’s body as a spirit, granting him the use of her kunai darts and a few other magical abilities. Their odd-couple pairing forms the bulk of the game’s narrative, a spunky and flavorfully written affair;it came as little surprise to learn thatDeconstructeam’s own Jordi de Pacoserved as lead writer.
It’s peculiar thatNinja Gaiden: Rageboundholds back that higher difficulty by default.
As Kenji, you’ll slash your way through 17 levels, along with some tougher unlockable bonus stages and a super-secret ending after beating the game on hard.Admittedly, it’s peculiar thatNinja Gaiden: Rageboundholds back that higher difficulty by default, as franchise vets would arguably prefer the option to ramp things up at the start.
Ninjas Need Upgrades
Two Brand New Ninja Techniques Up the Ante in Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
Anybody who cut their teeth on the originalNinja Gaidentrilogy should feel those reflexes return after a few hours with Ragebound. Nuanced aspects of those NES games reveal themselves, like memorizing the precise distance of your sword slash or enemy knockback, especially those designed to casually nudge Kenji into a bottomless pit.Overall,Ninja Gaiden: Rageboundfeels like a loving riff on an established standard, a contemporary pop remake of the NES trilogy’s classic rhythm and blues.
Besides the few purchasable secret arts,Ninja Gaiden: Rageboundoffers two novel primary mechanics: the hypercharge and the guillotine boost.The latter is reminiscent ofCuphead’s “parry slap,”a kind of spin-slash that hits enemies for scratch damage and extinguishes most projectiles, making it vital to both combat and chaining jumps over bottomless pits.
Overall,Ninja Gaiden: Rageboundfeels like a loving riff on an established standard, a contemporary pop remake of the NES trilogy’s classic rhythm and blues.
The hypercharge is a power strike triggered by killing mobs with a blue or pink halo, and grants Kenji a single high-damage attack.Hypercharges fade in seconds, so they must be used quickly and cannot be stacked. To proc one, blue enemies require a slash-kill or guillotine boost, whereas pink enemies must be dispatched with Kumori’s kunai. The enemy will go down either way, but the hypercharge is squandered if your attacks don’t match the color.
These two mechanics quickly feel like second nature, letting you cut speedy, deliberate paths through the demon hordes. Outright whiffing either ability doesn’t necessarily translate to a game over, either, just some lost health and a bit of scrabbling around to regain your footing. In this way,they function as a nice test of your aptitude and reflexes, and it’s satisfying to cleave through a level with style from pure memory, accruing any bonus achievements along the way.
Practice Leads To Mastery
Speedrunners Should Love Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, But Leaderboards Would Be A Big Plus
Kumori isn’t just a secondary weapon personified, and there are Demon Altars in each level that allow Kenji to trade bodies with her and initiate a challenge course, usually for collectibles or to bypass an obstacle ahead.These diversions are fun little pop quizzes, and they never trigger a proper fail state,allowing you to re-run them until perfect, even when the margin for error is often quite slim.
Accessibility controls in the game include font changes, health/damage assists, and other methods which make the game easier. Interestingly, even the delay of hypercharges and guillotine boosts can be decreased, though I did not interact with this menu at all during this review. CRT visual effects can also be switched on at any time.
These bonus areas allude toNinja Gaiden: Ragebound’s general orientation towards speedrunning, with every level attempt timed and bonus grades and achievements awarded for faster clears. As a result,the lack of any proper speedrunning tools is perplexing; why doesn’t the game allow you to segment off problem areas to practice on, allow a quick restart from menu at a previous checkpoint, or record and compete with ghost recordings?
The game lacks online leaderboards, practice modes, numbered scoring, or anything else that might bolster its general speedrunning and competitive themes. Sure, we live in an era that will see the best players simply promote their runs on Twitch, YouTube, and the like, butNinja Gaiden: Ragebound’s systems could have streamlined and encouraged these elements with online leaderboards at minimum.
Gunning For the S++ Level Grade
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’s Unlockable Hard Mode and Modifiable Difficulty
For most players, I predictthe game’s bosses will prove generally easy, with just a few different attacks apiece and a changeup here and there. The levels preceding them tend to be harder, but polite checkpointing supports repeated attempts and flawless boss fights are a manageable goal. If anything, I wanted them to mutate on harder difficulty, but I didn’t notice much difference during my hard mode victory lap.
Where normal difficulty could see some players running a B or an A score on a first level attempt, hard mode packs the screen with gauntlets of complicated enemies, auras, and traps.Outside the 17 main levels, the eight secret unlockable levels are often more frantic, and present some of the game’s best action sequences.
While you can definitely play through the entire game with just the sword and kunai,Muramasa’s shop returns inNinja Gaiden: Ragebound, selling optional artifact-like talismans and secret arts. Talismans offer a boon – a particularly useful one procs a hypercharge upon boost-killing any three enemies – with two equippable at a time, and secret arts offer a special mana-limited sidearm and powerful rage spell.
For most of my playthrough, my slots were set and rarely changed. Interestingly, some talismans can also make the game significantly harder while boosting your letter rank by one, so there are at least some homespun additional difficulty switches available by activating two debuffs at once.
A Groovy Retro 2D Action-Platformer That Earns Its Namesake
Fun and Feisty Ninja-Slashing Action
The longer I playedNinja Gaiden: Ragebound, the more I felt my mastery increasing.A single playthrough on normal shouldn’t take more than six or seven hours, but hard mode worthily doubles that playtime with meaningfully different content and level design, not just buffed up enemy HP. Hard mode also unlocks the true ending path, which involves a secret challenge I won’t spoil here.
Past that, the game is specially built for those who love testing themselves to achieve higher grades on levels. It’s helped by a tone-perfect soundtrack –original NES composers Keiji Yamagishi, Ryuichi Nitta, and Kaori Nakabi contributed a few of these new tracks– and some finely detailed pixel art and animation, with screenshots recalling the originalNinja Gaidenarcade game but fittingly fast-forwarded through four decades of technological progress.
Ultimately, consider me a believer. For strictNinja GaidenandShadow of the Ninjapurists, I might still refer to2021’s excellentCyber Shadowfor something more retro, butNinja Gaiden: Rageboundsmartly updates the classic jump-and-slash format in a way that often feels modern and clever, with satisfyingly smooth movement controls throughout.We just need a proper leaderboard to show off our sharpening skills.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound
Reviewed on PC
InNinja Gaiden: Ragebound, Ryu Hayabusa confronts a resurgent Black Spider Clan threatening global chaos.
Screen Rantwas provided a digital PC code for the purpose of this review.
