Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the final entry in the NES trilogy, Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom! With the NES era coming to a close, Tecmo wanted to get one last Ninja Gaiden game out. This game would have a different creative team who wanted to make changes to the formula and attempt to tell a different sort of story than its predecessors. Would these changes improve the overall experience, or would it cap off the original trilogy on a down note? Read on to find out…

For this article, I played the NES Ninja Gaiden III, as well as the re-released version of the game in Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (the reasons for this will become clear later). Having played both versions, I can confirm that the Trilogy release’s altered graphics, bizarrely, have desaturated a lot of the brighter colours for God knows what reason. This is actively detrimental to the experience: for one example, streams of molten metal in the NES version end up looking like fountains of literal shit in Trilogy. In addition, the soundtrack has been downgraded significantly, reminding me of the hack job they did on Resident Evil Director’s Cut: it’s that level of crap.

Love

• Further Refines the Ninja Gaiden Formula – You’d be surprised that they could find more ways to refine Ninja Gaiden on NES hardware after the second game, but they sure managed it here. The flashiest new feature would have to be the ability to grab onto overhanging bars and then move forward while hanging, or jump up onto the platform above. This adds an entire new dimension of strategic platforming whenever it is implemented. However, I think my favourite refinement is that you can now see what power-up is inside of each orb before you smash it. This makes it a lot easier to manage your ninja art of choice and know whether it’s worth it to go out of your way for an orb in a dangerous area.
• Sword Power-up – Ninja Gaiden III adds a new upgrade which extends the range of your sword swing. It should go without saying that this is extremely handy for a game of this sort, but I also like the way that they’ve executed the idea. The upgrade only lasts until you die or reach the end of the current act, whichever comes first. This seems very fair to me, whereas Ninja Gaiden II‘s shadow ninjas were a bit too good and made the game feel so much worse when you died and lost them. Plus, with the aforementioned ability to see what’s inside each orb, you really get excited when you spot one up for grabs!
• Enemies Don’t Respawn! – OH MY GOD, FINALLY! No more cheesing the game by manipulating enemy spawns, and no more frustration caused by endless respawns, if an enemy is pissing you off, just swing your sword at them. This “Love” is really self-evidently great, need I say more?

Mixed

• Level Gimmicks – For the most part, Ninja Gaiden III jettisons the level gimmicks which plagued Ninja Gaiden II‘s runtime, and it’s a much less frustrating experience for it. However, they do come back all at once in act six: you suddenly have slippery platforms, foreground obstructions, and quicksand. On the one hand, thank you Ninja Gaiden III for confining this to a single act. On the other hand, the execution of these level gimmicks is at its absolute worst here, with excessively-slippery platforms, foreground obstructions making it impossible to see where the platform ends, and areas where the entire ground is quicksand, forcing you to jump constantly (including after defeating a boss, you still have to remember to jump or you’ll die and get forced to replay the entire boss fight and the run-up to it)!

Hate

• ABSURD Difficulty – Look, I’m sure that I’ve made it abundantly clear by this point that I do not enjoy old-school difficulty and don’t have the patience to see these games through to the end. I don’t hold that against the games too much though, because they seem like they’re reasonably achievable with patience and practice. However, Ninja Gaiden III takes this to an even more absurd level, where I feel that it’s actively detrimental to the experience. For the first two games, I was able to struggle through to the last act before the challenge just got to be too much. With Ninja Gaiden III, I made it to the start of act three before I rage-quit. This game is, without a doubt, the hardest of the trilogy for one reason: even basic enemies do an idiotic amount of damage. You need to be damn-near perfect to survive this game, because it is incredibly punishing. Making a mistake and taking a couple hits will leave you with a sliver of health, so even tanking a hit to land a jump is an incredibly costly move. Oh, and the game only gives you a limited number of lives with which to complete the game. Perhaps the biggest piss-off though? The game wasn’t even designed this way: Tecmo decided, for the North American release, to just make the game harder, so they increased the damage of enemy attacks, gave you a life limit, and removed a password system to be able to “save” your progress…
  • …which brings us to Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. The version of Ninja Gaiden III in this compilation is based on the original Japanese release, which features the game’s originally-intended difficulty. The differences are like night and day: I could barely get to act three in the NES version, but in Trilogy I actually reached the final boss (the only NES Ninja Gaiden game I could do that for)! So, for all its faults, at least Trilogy makes Ninja Gaiden III reasonably playable!
• Narrative – Compared to the previous two games, Ninja Gaiden III‘s narrative feels like a step down in quality. While its predecessors had b-movie narratives, Ninja Gaiden III‘s story is intensely bizarre. So, for some reason, the game is an interquel between the first and second games, but it doesn’t bother to tell you this until the very end of the game… There’s a rogue US Agent, Foster, who has created these clone-mutants (called bio-noids, lol) using lingering power from the demon Ryu defeated in the first game. The bio-noids were used to kill Irene, but it turns out that she’s not actually dead, because she knew what Foster was up to and was working with the US army against him. Anyway, the bad guys have cloned Ryu, so he now has to stop this imposter and figure out who killed Irene (but actually didn’t). Got all that? Good, because I haven’t even gotten to the titular Ancient Ship of Doom, which one of the bio-noids has claimed possession of, is going to use it to destroy the world and then replace it with a new one sculpted in his image. Suffice to say, it’s utter nonsense. Worst of all though? Even with the weird things going on, the narrative is not even particularly interesting. The first couple games were pretty simple, but the characters kept things interesting and the abundance of drama made things feel like there were some actual stakes.

Ninja Gaiden III is a weird case. When I was doing well, I found the game to be pretty enjoyable. However, if I made any mistake, I was punished so hard that it made the next mistake I made near-certain death. That just… isn’t fun. I’d be remiss if I did not mention that the version of Ninja Gaiden III in Trilogy is at a level of challenge that feels reasonable, even to a modern audience, so it might be worth a look. When you can actually enjoy playing the game, Ninja Gaiden III is a pretty good time!