Summary

• After more than a decade in the dark, Ninja Gaiden is finally back, and its revival is being led with Ragebound.
• Ragebound comes from Blasphemous developers The Game Kitchen, who have been working on the game for more than three years.
• The Game Kitchen director and producer David Jaumandreu walks us through the game's development, its surprising influences, and how it's addressing the Ninja Gaiden 4 elephant in the room.

Alongside , , and , has cemented itself as one of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:best 3D character acti𒉰on game series of all time. So if someone’s talking about Ryu Hayabusa, chances are they mean the modern version of him that was adapted by Team Ninja, not the original 2D version from Tecmo (who later m🉐erged with Koei and became ).

Unlike the other esteemed genre greats, Ninja Gaiden started long before it entered the third dimension and 🤡upped its violence and gore. Ryu Hayabusa’s origins that set the hardcore foundation for the series and were beloved at the time, even i🐼f the 3D entries are the ones that have truly endured.

To make matters more 𓆏confusin🤡g, the original NES Ninja Gaiden games actually take place after the modern games that succeeded them. Release chronology be damned.

Ragebound’s Beginnings And The Pressure Of Bringing Ninja Gaiden Back

Considering how long fans have wanted Ninja Gaiden to return with another character action game, there’s something poetic about the series' first making a comeback through the 2D genre that started it all. Of course, now we know that is also on the way later this year, but when was first revealed as the next game from developer The Game Kitchen, we ꧑didn’t know it was the appetiser before the blood-soaked entree.

“It was basically Dotemu who came to us and said, ‘Hey, we love your Blasphemous games, we have the opportunity of bringing back Ninja Gaiden, would you guys be interested?’”, The Game Kitchen producer and director David Jaumandreu tells me. “Raul, the anima♔tor, started crying when he knew we had this opportunity because he’s such a Ninja nerd, you cannot imagine. It was like, we have to make the best pitch this company has ever made. We have to take this opportunity. We’re super lucky that they came to us.”

While Jaumandreu and the team at The Game Kitchen were clearly excited about being given the opportunity to work on such a beloved and long-missing series, bringing Ninja Gaiden back after so long also came with its own challenges. The first of these was the pressure, which Jaumandreu admits was “huge”, mostly due to the NDA preventing them from saying anything about the project for nearly three years. That only heightened when Ragebound was revealed at The Game Awards last y𝄹ear, ▨as that meant that all eyes were now on The Game Kitchen and t📖heir non-Ryu-centric game.

We’ve had the pressure, but we love the series so much that we didn’t mind. When the trailer was revealed and we saw 🌟the reaction, the pressure started again there like “oh, s**t is real”. There are a lot of people waiting for this game.

The second major hurdle for The Game Kitchen is one being faced by more and more indie developers - working on anothဣer studio’s established IP. Having mostly come from its own creation, Blasphem๊ous, and various smaller projects, being given the reins to such a well-known series was a big change in direction for the studio.

“T𒈔he decision was really easy,” Jaumandreu says. “We really wanted to do it, so there was no contest. The news came during the development of Blasphemous 2, which had been a very complicated project and the biggest thing that we had done so far. In the end, we’ve been very comfortable working with another IP. It has its different challenges, especially with our first game, we were much slower than we’re used to because we had to be rea꧅lly cautious. Having Dotemu in the middle, who is really used to working with IPs, has taken out a lot of the pressure from us. So in that sense, we had the easy part.”

Team Ninja’s Involvement In Ninja Gaiden’s Return To 2D

While is the main partner of The Game Kitchen in the development of Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, there’s a third studio altogether that offered up the o🌃pportunity to bring the series back - , the developers of the modern games and the main team at the helm of everything Ryu Hayab♑usa.

Team Ni🗹nja has been working on its own Ninja Gaiden project for some time now in collaboration with , but since it’s the one in charge of the IP, it means that The Game Kitchen was in contact with Ninja a lot to show off its work on the game and the plans they had for the first 2D entry in the series in some time.

“[Team Ninja] had been there, they are still there since development is still ongoing,” Jaumandreu points out. “They’re really enthusiastic about their work and also about ♋what we’re doing. And it’s not only that we go to them and ask them, ‘Is this okay, does this make sense with the lore, is this depiction correct?’, they also comment a lot and get to play all of our builds. They’re quite open with sharing their opinion and really respectful as proper Japanese gentlemen, in the sense that they don’t enforce anything. It’s always, ‘what do you think?’”.

Their advice isn’t very specific in terms of the base of the game, but more on the action, the situation. They really love their hard stuff, they really, reall🗹y love that.

Being Inspired By Celeste, Strider, And Katana Zero

With Ragebound’s three-studio set-up in place, it was time for The Game Kitchen to decide what kind of game it wanted Ninja Gaiden’s return to be. It was quickly d🔥ecided that Ragebound would take place during the events of the first NES game and run parallel alongside them with a new protagonist, Ryu’s apprentice Kenji, whꦦich was done to give a new perspective and take away from the “huge responsibility” of bringing the number one ninja back for a new game.

Considering the team’s experience with roguelikes, you might think that was on the cards for Ragebound, but Jaumandreu notes that the team had a sidescroller in mind “from the get-go”, even i☂f it wasn’t a requirement from Dotemu or Team Ninja. With a more classic approach set in stone, that gave the developers a laundry li💃st of both retro and modern games of the genre to take inspiration from and work towards adapting for Ragebound.

“The good thing about working with such a well-established IP is that we had so many Ninja Gaiden games on the backlog to take a look at,” Jaumandreu says. “That was incredible, and they’ve been our foundation for Ragebound💃. But, of course, we’ve been taking inspiration not only from retro classics, but also modern games. The Messeng🔯er, for example, the Strider reboot which we loved in terms of gameplay, control and immediacy. Katana Zero for its animation, Celeste in terms of movement and more complicated situations that don’t frustrate whenever you retry a lot.”

Despite its retro style, the producer and director promises that Ragebound will have enough content, both main and secondary, to kee⛄p you playing “for a long time”.

in particu𒈔lar is a surprising game to be inspired by, but its approach to difficulty was an indicator of how things should be done for Ragebound. The Game K💫itchen knew from as early as pitching Ragebound that its Ninja Gaiden game needed to have challenge as one of its pillars, but struggled to figure out just how much to include and what form it should take. As Jaumandreu points out, retrying a lot but not getting annoyed is part of Celeste’s charm and something the team tried to emulate.

“We’ve given it a lot of thought in terms of, the game has to be difficult,” Jaumandreu tells me. “But maybe difficult in the NES era was pattern memorisatio🦩n, maybe that’s something that’s not welcome anymore. We wanted to bring this♒ kind of difficulty into a new challenge, so that it feels challenging but not frustrating, so that everybody feels comfortable with the game, even non-hardcore gamers. We’ve put a lot of importance on the game to be challenging, but especially to have a high skill ceiling for those who look for an extra challenge.”

A Ninja Gaiden 4 Sized Elephant In The Room

For the first month of Ragebound’s development following its reveal at The Game Awards, it was thought to be the one and only game bringing Ninja Gaiden back from the dead. As we know now, that isn’t the case at all, as Team Ninja and Platinum Games are bringing us Ninja ꧂Gaiden 4 later this year.

The double dose of Ninja Gaiden takes some of the pressure off of The Game Kitchen to single-handedly revive Ryu. While Jaumandreu can’t go into specifics on what Ninja Gaiden 4 might entail and whether it’ll connect to Ragebound in any way, the 🤡presence of both a 2D and 3D game is a net positive for a team 🍨of developers who are just happy to see the series and its fans return.

“I don’t mind if people compare the two games because I’m pretty sure the game will be amazing,” Jaumandreu tells me. “We knew that itಞ was coming; we were in the loop and were so excited about it. It’s funny because when we announced first, there were a lot of comments saying, ‘Ninja Gaiden is back, 2D Ninja Gaiden is the best’, but there were also comments like, ‘Oh, I wanted Ninja Gaiden 4’. And then when Ninja Gaiden 4 was announced iꦓt was like, great, now you have one place to go and say ‘this is my s**t’.”

I think it’s great that we’re also getting a Shinobi game, it’s looking amazing. I’m really looking forward💯 to playing that one too.

While it’s clear that there is still, as there has always been, a big divide between the old-school Ninja Gaiden fans and thosed who grew up on the modern games, Ragebound’s attempt to merge the two eras together with a retro classic should give it pl🔯enty of previously 3D-only fans to give it a look. And, if nothing else, they won’t just be playing out of fear for the series' future♉.

“A lot of fans of the series will play both, and th🌠en there are fans of the series that will only be interested in playing one of them,” Jaumandreu says. “And I think that’s kind of cool because at least diehard 3D fans won’t have to play our game because it’s the only one coming and then be disgusted because it’s 2D.”