The new Ninja Gaiden game by the developers of Blasphemous is a match made in heaven

Koei Tecmo kicked off The Game Awards 2024 with an unexpected but exciting announcement: The reveal of Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, a brand-new 2D entry in this legendary franchise and a collaboration with The Game Kitchen, developers of the excellent Blasphemous series.

This beautiful animated trailer tells the story of Kenji Mozu, a young ninja who will have to protect Hayabusa Village from a terrifying army of demons while the series’ protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, is far and away traveling to America. As incredible as the animation of this trailer is, the thing that immediately grabbed our attention was this game’s astounding sprite work.

After all, The Game Kitchen is developing Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound. This is the Spanish studio behind Blasphemous 1 and Blasphemous 2, two dark Metroidvania adventures that are famous for having some of the biggest, most impressive, and most detailed sprites ever seen in a video game. Choosing this studio to take over the Ninja Gaiden franchise was a brilliant decision because, as we can see in this trailer, Ragebound is going to feature the same incredible sprite work that we would expect from The Game Kitchen.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound will come out in the Summer of 2025, and it will be available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. It’s important to point out that Dotemu will be publishing this game and not the company that created the IP, Koei Tecmo.

This is exactly what the Ninja Gaiden franchise needed

It may be easy to forget now, but this used to be one of the most beloved and important 2D side-scrolling franchises back in the 80s and 90s, mainly due to its fun but extremely challenging NES trilogy. The series went dormant for many years when the gaming industry pivoted to 3D graphics until the release of the 2004 reboot (simply titled Ninja Gaiden), a stunning and ruthless hack-and-slash game.

This genre was a perfect fit for the IP, which ended up thriving during the 2000s due to the success of these games. However, the critical and commercial failures of its two latest entries, Ninja Gaiden 3 and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, forced Koei Tecmo to put the franchise to sleep once again in 2014 (The only exception was the Master Collection, a compilation of the 3D hack-and-slash trilogy that came out in 2021)

Ninja Gaiden is way too good and iconic to remain dormant forever, so the announcement of Ragebound was a much-needed return to form for this franchise. In the trailer, we can see some fun 2D side-scrolling gameplay, complete with tough-as-nails enemies, challenging platforming, violent combat, and excellent music. Considering that The Game Kitchen excels at these types of experiences, there’s no doubt that the studio will do an excellent job with Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, not to mention that it will be single-handedly responsible for bringing back this classic franchise.