Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Hones The Series’ 2D Platforming To A Fine Point

By Elijah Gonzalez | July 30, 2025 | 11:00am

Video Games Reviews Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound Hones The Series’ 2D Platforming To A Fine Point

Before this year, the Hayabusa Clan had been missing in action. After Team Ninja’s 3D action games met an ignominious end with Ninja Gaiden 3 and the series fell to even further depths with the largely forgotten Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, these games slunk into the shadows for more than a decade.

But after a long break, this year has been an all-out ambush: an Unreal Engine 5 remaster of Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma, titled Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, came out in January, and PlatinumGames and Team Ninja are putting out the highly anticipated Ninja Gaiden 4 this October.

And there’s a third: sandwiched between this pair of character action games is Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, a 2D throwback from The Game Kitchen (Blasphemous) that borrows from every era of the series, refining these ideas into a razor-sharp platformer. Sure, it’s more an iteration than a reimagining like Ninja Gaiden (2005), and is caught in the limitations of nostalgia and homage as a result, but it’s so fast, responsive, and well-presented that you’ll mostly be too fixated with slicing through demons to notice.

Set chronologically between the Team Ninja prequels and the original NES trilogy (which feels quite fitting), the story begins as Ryu Hayabusa heads to America to repeatedly get knocked into holes, leaving his disciple Kenji Mozu to look after a burning Hayabusa village beset by Fiends. Unfortunately, for Kenji, his investigation into the source of this demonic invasion comes to a premature end after he’s bested and left on death’s door by a conniving big bad. This isn’t the end, though, because he meets Kumori, a Black Spider Clan ninja who was similarly defeated by the invading demons. After combining their spirits into a single body through an occult artifact, these former foes are forced to put aside their differences to stop Armageddon.

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As for what this fusion means mechanically, Ragebound has a bit of an Ikaruga-thing going on, to put it inelegantly. While you occasionally control these two separately—Kenji with his close-ranged sword, and Kumori with her long-distance kunai—their toolsets are fused for most of the game, resulting in one Voltron-like super ninja.

As for where Ikaruga comes in, as you’re slicing through hordes of flesh-devouring monsters and CIA operatives (what’s the difference? [ba-dum-tiss]), these foes will occasionally glow blue or red. If they’re blue, you’ll want to slash them with Kenji’s sword, while if they’re red, you’ll want to kill them with one of Kumori’s projectiles. If you do, you’ll gain a “Hypercharge,” which powers up your next attack so that it kills anything but bosses in a single stroke.

This Hypercharge system is a neat addition that’s consistently supported by the encounter design, as beefier foes are almost always paired with a glowing lesser enemy that sets up a one-shot. When done correctly, you can cut through enemies with such speed and precision that you’ll be on the next screen before their smoothly sliced torsos meet the ground.

There’s a sense of flow as you move from one victim to the next, and when fully locked in, you’ll quickly analyze armies of pixelated hellspawn approaching from every angle before cooly dissecting them in sequence—like in the original NES game, most regular enemies are felled with a single blow, and if you rev up your Hypercharges, even the big boys go down quickly. Or, you’ll probably mess up every once in a while, slashing when you should have chucked a kunai or chucking when you should have slashed as you try to parse the onslaught of angry little demons sprinting at full speed; even if things don’t go perfectly, it’s still always a fun challenge.

And it’s not just the Hypercharges that make these encounters brisk and definitive, because virtually every tool in your toolbox adds to the sense of barrelling through stages like a speedrunner. First off, you can climb walls and ceilings, letting you traverse these environments with ease. Then there’s the Guillotine Slash, an air attack that enables you to bounce off enemies, something you’ll do ad nauseam to clear otherwise insurmountable chasms.

In addition to Kumori’s kunai, you’ll also unlock a variety of equipable secondary weapons like arcing sickles or grenades. While you need Ki to use these, as long as you’re using these ranged weapons in moderation, you’ll get a steady supply of energy from dispatching Fiends up close, setting up a satisfying loop of switching between your instruments of death. Meanwhile, if you’re sick of a particular screenful of foes, you can activate a Ragebound Art, a finishing move that gets energized as you beat down foes with Hypercharges—again, these mechanics all bleed into each other. Lastly, because this was developed by the people who made Blasphemous, there’s also a fully invincible dodge that lets you roll through incoming attacks like you’re in Lordran.

Still, although there’s a hint of The Game Kitchen’s previous work in this roll maneuver, a big overall difference is that while Blasphemous emphasized animation priority due to its soulslike influences, Ragebound is pure whizzing speed. All of the previously mentioned techniques are unleashed with a hair trigger: jumps, sword strikes, dodges, and Hypercharge finishers combine in a blur of blood geysers, a speed necessitated by the fact every foe lunges at you full tilt. You can even bat down incoming shuriken or bullets with a well-timed sword slash, and when you’re on your game, you’ll be slicing up an alarming number of bad guys per minute.

There is a sense of style and nonchalant cool that comes across in your characters’ energetic animations, as Kenji’s sweeping sword strikes and Kumori’s energy-charged daggers choreograph a pixel art martial arts film with an impressively high body count. The levels are tight and well-paced, coming in at 10 to 30 minutes in a game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. And while it pretty much only exists in this high-octane mode, there’s just enough variety thanks to a decent amount of enemy variance, platforming-focused sections starring Kumori, and the odd-sequence where you ride a motorbike, because every pixelated action game needs one or two levels behind the wheel of a vehicle.

And the best changes of pace come when, after blitzing through these levels, you’re forced to hit the brakes in a tricky boss encounter. These lieutenants in the demon invasion earn their status with fun-to-internalize patterns that push your skills to the test, forcing you to roll, bounce, wall climb, and utilize your resources effectively. Each phase is a rewarding puzzle designed so there isn’t a single solution to the overall encounter (i.e., just roll through everything).

These fights are a constant high point, and this is a rare instance where I was consistently challenged without encountering an adversary that I’d call “unfair”—it’s a total cliché at this point to describe a good retro-inspired platformer as “maintaining the old-school appeal while sanding off the rough edges,” but hey, this one does that. A good example of a positive change is that when you get hit by an enemy while jumping over a giant pit, you can do a fighting game-style air tech instead of limply plummeting to your death. The game is full of an incalculable number of small details like this that prevent NES-controller-chucking frustration.

There’s also quite a bit of new-age flavor in the Ninja Gaiden (2005)-esque Golden Scarabs littered throughout the stages, which can be exchanged with good ol’ Muramasa (who somehow looks younger here than in the prequels) for talismans that grant passive buffs, new secondary weapons, and additional Ragebound Arts. While I found a loadout and mostly stuck with it because these upgrades didn’t seem particularly balanced, their inclusion added a dash of customization and extra incentive to poke around in each level without negatively affecting the pacing. Add in a combo counter that gives grades such as “Master Ninja,” just like in the character action games, and it’s clear this latest entry is plucking ideas from across different eras.

Admittedly, though, this faithfulness sometimes feels like a bit of a limitation. While Ragebound executes on virtually all of its ideas with an assassin’s precision, it doesn’t quite go past being another retro platformer in a sea of games that want to conjure a particular ‘80s/’90s flavor. Again, the Hypercharge system is a cool new idea that helps orchestrate the mayhem, its bosses are beautifully designed, and everything rests on a smooth difficulty curve free of Alma-esque nightmare encounters, but it’s all familiar enough that it doesn’t quite reach the level of legendary platformers that pushed the genre in new directions.

Still, it speaks to Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’s strengths that the worst thing I can say about it is that it’s not revolutionary: sometimes you simply want to play as a pair of Hypercharged ninjas cutting through cronies in a high-octane pixelated bloodbath. After a decade-plus break since the last new game in the series, it makes sense why they chose to play it safe, and The Game Kitchen’s latest successfully pushes that premise to its limits.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound was developed by The Game Kitchen and published by Dotemu and Joystick. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.