Ninja Gaiden Trilogy

Publisher: Tecmo
Developer: Tecmo
Release Date: August 1995

I first got into gaming at the tail-end of the NES era, and the Ninja Gaiden series was one of my most cherished from the 8-bit days. The action was tight and challenging, the cinema sequences were groundbreaking for the period, and the graphics and sounds were among the best the NES had to offer. As hard as it may be to imagine now, those games were considered killer-apps at the time. So you could imagine my delight when I heard that Tecmo would be releasing a compilation of all three games for Super Nintendo! Instantly images of 16-bit-quality renditions of these classics, a la Super Mario All-Stars, began dancing in my head.

And what a letdown it was. While the gameplay is relatively unchanged from the originals, which is to be expected, the graphics are only very lightly touched-up, with some of the sprites and backdrops looking a bit crisper with an extra color or two. What is thoroughly disappointing is that the graphics are actually worse in places! Details like the lightning strikes in Ninja Gaiden 2 and the beautiful parallax scrolling backgrounds of Ninja Gaiden 3 are completely removed!

And the music! Though Tecmo did virtually nothing to alter the graphics, it decided to go out of its way to fiddle with the music. The NES trilogy featured some of the most outstanding tunes of the 8-bit era, but the SNES version simply does not do them justice. The cheap midi instruments, along with various ill-conceived "creative" changes applied to the notes and pacing of certain songs, result in a disastrously underwhelming soundtrack. In fact some songs in Trilogy are completely remixed and barely recognizable when compared to the originals. Tecmo would have been far better served retaining the original NES instrumentation and arrangements and redirecting its energy toward geniunely improving the graphics.

As I mentioned, the gameplay largely remains intact, thankfully, as do the cinema sequences. The trilogy basically plays the same, with a few exceptions: each game now has a password system, and Ninja Gaiden 3 is restored to its original Japanese difficulty(the NES version dealt the player double the damage, among other cruel devices).

Ninja Gaiden Trilogy happens to be one of the pricier games to obtain on the Super Nintendo aftermarket, but that is because of rarity rather than quality. Obviously the game was released near the end of the Super Nintendo's life and was distributed in small quantities. In fact the only copy I ever saw in person was the one my local Blockbuster Video was renting out at the time. Unless you're a hardcore collector, you're honestly better off saving your money and purchasing the original trilogy for NES.