BODY: Most open worlds ask you to walk across them. Ninjala 2: Unknown Planet seems designed so that you never touch the ground for long.
GungHo Online Entertainment's Nintendo Switch 2 sequel, due in spring 2027, takes the chewing-gum ninja brawler that racked up 12 million downloads and rebuilds it as a full open-world action game. Japanese outlet AUTOMATON got hands-on time with the game at Tokyo Game Show 2026, and the takeaway was less about scale than about tempo: the world is dense with collectibles, environmental puzzles and traversal toys, and almost nothing in it is designed to be crossed slowly.
Movement is where the gum gimmick earns its keep. Players fling gum-based grappling hooks to swing between structures, drop onto skateboards for ground sections, and chain the two together into momentum that rarely breaks. Combat runs at a similar clip — enemies get stuck fast in gum, Just Guard and Just Evade reward players who hold their nerve, and fights cap off with the series' theatrical "IPPON" finishers. Boss encounters add phases and enough structure to demand actual reads rather than button-mashing.
The TGS build offered two slices: a "Planet Exploration" course built around traversal and discovery, and a photo-mode section set at the ninja academy, leaning on character interactions. The game supports solo play and up to four-player co-op.
The business model is the headline shift. The original Ninjala was free-to-play with battle passes and cosmetics; the sequel is a straightforward buy-once premium title.
The insider take
That pricing change says a lot about where GungHo thinks this franchise lives now. Ninjala was pitched in 2020 as Japan's homegrown answer to the global free-to-play arena boom, complete with a weekly anime and a strong elementary-school following here — the kind of audience that reads CoroCoro and knows the characters before it knows the mechanics. Going premium and single-player-forward suggests GungHo has decided the IP's durable value is the characters and the feel, not the live-service treadmill, and a Switch 2 release lets it sell that to families who already trust the brand.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).