If you asked me on any day of the week, I would tell you that I love Ninja Gaiden, but what I really mean by that is I really love the Team Ninja character action games (and even then I only really like the first two of those). But the NES originals are a bit of a blind spot for me. I’ve played bits and pieces of them, but I’ve never been able to stomach the whole thing due to how frustratingly difficult they are (which can be said of the modern games, but there are less death pits there). And let’s be real, those games are no Castlevania, are they?
However, the announcement of Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound had me hooked from the 20 seconds of gameplay footage we saw when it was announced at The Game Awards; in part due to the associated news that it would be coming courtesy of TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge publisher Dotemu and Blasphemous developer The Game Kitchen. We all saw a snippet of a fast-paced platformer akin to the NES era, with over-the-top gore and style straight out of the excessively overindulgent Tomonobu Itagaki-led 3D games. So I jumped at the chance to head out to Dotemu and get my hands on it.
