It's GUY-DEN!!!

The Ninja Gaiden games on NES are considered among the best the platform has to offer for good reason. They were truly pioneering offerings that pushed the NES hardware, and the people playing them, to their limits. But once the 16-bit era came around, the series mysteriously vanished, with one notable exception, a collection of the original three games compiled Super Mario All-stars style into a single Super NES cartridge called Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. How did they handle the transition? Here’s our review. 

First, let’s talk about the games in the collection. When I was a kid, playing the original Ninja Gaiden was nothing short of mind blowing. Seeing the degree of narrative on display in an NES game in 1989 was unheard of, and it was pulled off so incredibly well that I once actually made my poor mom sit and watch me play just so she could see the story. (I guarantee she didn’t enjoy herself, but the good mom that she is, she never let me know). 

But it wasn't just the story, it was everything. The graphics were detailed, the music was brilliantly catchy, and the gameplay, while brutally difficult, was sharp as a tack. It’s darn near impossible to beat without a metric ton of practice or the assistance of a Game Genie, but it’s one of those situations where the good VASTLY outweighs the bad. 

Ninja Gaiden II: The Ancient Sword of Chaos had its work cutout for it, and it immediately took to the task with flying colors. The story was even more rich, the gameplay was even more refined, and the music and visuals were even more impressive than before. It's still stupid hard, but ever so slightly less unfair than the first. 

Then there’s Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom. It’s fine. The North American version was famously changed to be even more cripplingly difficult, presumably to combat the video game rental market, so it already had an uphill battle out of the gate. But the story was also much dumber than the previous two, and they inexplicably changed the jumping physics so everything feels much more floaty than before. It’s still a solid game, but not quite on par with the first two. 

That's the short version. I could go on for ages about these individual games and why they’re amazing in their own ways, but we aren’t here to talk about these NES classics in their original form. We’re here to talk about Ninja Gaiden Trilogy for Super NES, which if I’m being honest, is kind of a dumpster fire. 

Mechanically, everything is sound. The actual gameplay feels, at least to me, basically unchanged. And in all honesty, that is the most important thing to get right. These games play as well as they ever did, which is great. It’s in the everything else category where things fall apart. 

Let’s talk about the graphics. Where Super Mario All-Stars took great pains to ensure the games made the transition to 16-bits with grace, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy puts forth no such effort. There are no scrolling backgrounds, no new animations or artwork, nothing. All they did was add more colors to the existing sprites and backgrounds. It doesn’t look bad, and in fact in still images it looks quite nice. And if that was it, I’d be fine, but sadly it’s not. For whatever reason, these ports don’t include any of the NES game’s transitions. They would use these interesting transition effects to add additional movement to things or make scenes change from one to another with style. All of that is gone and replaced with absolutely nothing. If a character was supposed to fade in from the shadows, that character now just pops into frame immediately. If you walk through a door to a new area and the screen would black out with a series of stylish lines, it now just cuts to solid black. It’s a bit of a nitpick, but it really takes away from the original game’s cinematic style, which was a pretty big part of its personality, which is a pretty big part of what made the games so popular in the first place. 

But the most criminal offense this game pulls off is in its sound department. The music that helped propel the NES originals beyond just being solid action games has been absolutely butchered for this release. The actual music itself is more or less intact, but the instruments used to translate it to the SNES are abysmal to the point of being downright distracting. The sound effects aren’t quite as bad as the music, but they aren’t exactly a picnic either, with many sounding like they were ripped directly from an Atari 2600. (No, really! I’m not kidding!)

Ninja Gaiden deserves better. The eventual reboot on Xbox was great, but it also had pretty much nothing to do with Ninja Gaiden. Of course you could also argue the NES game didn’t have much of anything to do with the original arcade game either, but I digress. No matter how you slice it, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy for Super NES is a tremendous missed opportunity. That it somehow manages to make these NES games worse is beyond my understanding. Unless you’re a die hard Ninja Gaiden fan who absolutely has to try every version of the game, I can’t recommend anyone bother wasting their time with this one. 

FXPAK Pro (Classic Black)

$284.99

This is the All Region Classic Black version of the Super Famicom and SNES (it will fit into Japanese, European & North American systems). This...… read more

As for playing it today, that's a bit tricky. Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is a legitimately uncommon cartridge to come across in the wild, and complete copies can run well over $500. That's a pretty prohibitive price. If you do have access to a legally obtained backup though, the game works great on a flash cart like the FX Pak Pro, but honestly, the best way to play these games is still in their NES incarnations. The first two in particular are relatively affordable. The third is a bit more pricey, but it's also the one least worth playing. There's also a terrible port of the first NES game on PC Engine, some wacky ports of the second one on MS-DOS and Amiga, and a pretty impressive port of the third on Atari Lynx of all things. With he exception of the first game's availability on Nintendo Switch Online though, these games aren't currently available on any modern platforms. Here's hoping that changes soon.