Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound – Spidery Ninja Acrobatics
Ninjas riding motorcycles = awesome.
This is something that the world I grew up in seemed to inherently understand. At least, it did for most of the ‘80s, but that we all seemed to collectively forget as we got deeper into the ‘90s and then moved on to a new century. There are plenty of things that signal Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound as a throwback – Side-scrolling pixel art! Remixed music! Recreated opening sequence! – but it is the inclusion of scrolling stages where a ninja gets to ride a cool vehicle that really gets the vibe across.
That the vibes land just right is important. It’s cool and all that Ragebound recreates the opening of the NES classic scene-for-scene and then twists it by having its events happen in parallel to that game, inviting players to slice their way through a small chunk of Japan as newcomer Kenji Mozu, while stalwart Ryu Hayabusa is murdering fools in the States. Fans will love it. But not everyone is going to have memories of what is being homaged, and you have to feed these people a similar thrill somehow.
You don’t need to have played Ninja Gaiden in any of its forms to appreciate Ragebound. Maybe the odd wink and Easter egg may slip by – I may have googled the line “Ryu, be always brave…” just to be sure that it was lifted from the original, but I really didn’t have to –, but there’s an energy here that carries the game by itself. It is intentionally slapdash with its dialogue; keen to treat story as it was treated back in typical ‘80s action games. Ragebound wants to get straight into the running and jumping, and slicing, and it largely succeeds.
It helps that the controls are crisp. While character run-cycles animate with an almost disembodied kind of fluidity that can detach them from the world a bit, animation-priority is very much not a thing. Tell Kenji to jump, and he will jump; slashes happen the moment you touch the button.
That Goddam Format Technicality
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is available for pretty much any system still alive today, but it would be remiss of me to not specify the conditions of this review. That is to say, the game was played in full on Switch 2 using backwards compatibility, exclusively in handheld mode. Life made this inevitable, but it has to be noted that this is hardly the most optimal situation.
Aside from the smaller display and Joy-Con controls, the Switch 2 is stuck with the original Switch’s 30fps limit, something that can really matter in such a highly precise action game. Furthermore, while it didn’t personally bother me too much, this really hasn’t translated well to the weaknesses of the Switch 2’s display, to the point where I would strongly suggest looking at the other versions unless portable play is absolutely essential.
Strangely, Kenji only seems capable of attacking horizontally with his sword. This is redeemed within a couple of hours by a snapped-on plot-twist that meaningfully expands his moveset. While the storytelling here is intentionally daft, the pace is very much on point; narrative sequences exist to set minimum context, but, more importantly, skills and challenges associated with them are dolled out smoothly.
Looking at the actual stages themselves, the challenge curve is impressively refined. Checkpoints are mostly well-placed at the end of what feel like contained challenges, and early on, in particular, Ragebound does an excellent job of finding a way to mix things up just as things are starting to feel a bit too rote. By the end of it all, players will be slashing, throwing, teleporting and bouncing through stages that, while linear, can be notably vertical in places.
Perhaps that bouncing bit needs a bit of an explainer. You see, while there is a very real argument that 2025 has become something of the Year of the Ninja in videogames, there is arguably an even stronger case to be made for this being the Year of the Parry, or at least the year that we all started to pay attention to said mechanic. In Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’s case, parrying takes the form of what it likes to term ‘guillotine boosts’. Basically, tapping jump while mid air will create a brief moment when Kenji is protected and able to deflect damn near any attack, bounce off pretty much any enemy. Skilful parrying can avoid demise at the mercy of anything other than a bottomless pit; it’s a progression mechanic as much as it is a combat one.
And honestly? It’s pretty cool once you get the timing down. And players will have to get the timing down; even if you could somehow survive the onslaught of foes on screen without it, the guillotine boost is frequently required to move from point A to B, especially in the latter levels. Balancing movement with combat becomes increasingly important as each stage moves to the next. Never mind that Kenji will need all of the defences that he can muster once the game really starts throwing boss battles around.
The bosses, which true to traditional design appear at the end of the regular stages, typically look cool, can be quite creative, and become absolutely infuriating by the time you’re a few stages deep. Granted, Ninja Gaiden is classically famous for this to the point where if you know someone who completed the original, they’re probably lying, but there is nonetheless a disconnect with just how difficult they are when compared to how comparatively manageable the stages leading up to them were.
For the most part, the level design in Ragebound is excellent, if not exactly groundbreaking. With the occasional exception, it is realistic that a player could complete each section of any given stage on their first attempt, so long as they’re tuned-in and paying attention. This is absolutely not the case once locked in a room with the bulk of stage-end boss characters. Dying to learn the attack patterns basically becomes inevitable after the first couple. After it took me a full hour and countless retries to defeat what was still one of the earlier examples, I quite shamelessly cracked open the accessibility settings to lower incoming damage once at the end of each stage. I’d honestly suggest doing this to all but a very specific set of players who already know who they are.
At least everything mostly looks nice. Aesthetically, this isn’t the boldest and bravest pixel art out there, but it looks the part for its franchise and does so while looking more in line with what an instalment on the Sega Saturn might have looked like, rather than the 16-bit comparisons that have been inevitably flying around. Likewise, the soundtrack, which is helped along by several returning composers, is absolutely pumping. Expect plenty of up-tempo guitars and synth layered on top of more traditional Japanese fare… which is just about exactly what you want when ninjas are riding goddamn motorcycles.
And so I’m back at ninjas doing cool cartoonish ninja shit while riding vehicles again. This is hardly the only good thing about Ninja Gaiden: Rabebound, but it really does encapsulate the spirit of what is best about it. In many ways, it is a well-made and workmanlike piece of sidescrolling ninja action; it’s that it leans so hard into the ninja bit, notably the confused-but-cool worldview we had of ninjutsu back when the franchise was born, that gives it its leg up and makes it a worthy purchase consideration.
Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound was reviewed on a Switch 2 with a code kindly supplied by the publisher.
