Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom (1991)

The final entry in the NES Ninja Gaiden saga, The Ancient Ship of Doom is a solid game that makes some great tweaks to the series. I didn't enjoy it as much as the prior two games (review #1 and #2), but it's still worth a play for those who enjoy this classic style.

The North American release is apparently significantly harder than what everyone else got. Enemy damage output is way higher, and you only get 5 lives for the whole game, and they removed the password system. I even read that the enemy and item placements were made more difficult. Honestly, we probably deserved this treatment.

I played the "Ninja Gaiden III Restored" mod, which reverts some but not all of the changes. I should have just played the Japanese version, since this one was still pretty annoying at times, and the story wasn't worth playing an English version for.

Anyway, one nice quality-of-life change here is that you can now see what item you're going to get before breaking open the item things. Sadly, they removed my favorite item from the last game, and in its place you can now upgrade your sword's range. I'm not a fan of that being tied to an item, but it's not a huge deal.

Another nice change is that there are no longer spots where enemies respawn infinitely, a pain point at times in the prior games. This game still has a lot of spots where there are way too many enemies, though, maybe even more of them. The last three acts are particularly bad about having an obscene amount of flying and jumping enemies which make already-difficult platforming super annoying.

Platforming mechanics received some love too, as you can now hang from certain things and pull yourself up onto them. It's a nice change, but some of the places you have to do it are pretty painful. Platforming in general gets brutal in parts of the last few acts to a point of tedium. I even ran out of time on one level, like how is that even possible? Lol. The game overall has more spots where you have to take it really slow and that felt like too much trial and error.

Story is not exactly an amazing part of the series, but it still was a fun part of the first two games. As I hinted at previously, sadly this game's story is just bad. It makes a full pivot toward sci-fi and never really finds a good flow. Cutscenes felt less exciting and overly reliant on flashing effects. Villains sucked. It's a shame since the initial setup had some potential.

But despite these complaints, it's still got a similar gameplay feel, some fun moments, decent bosses, the level of challenge you'd want from these games, and the nice graphics of a late NES title. It's a good game. Maybe just overall less memorable levels and story, and a bit more annoying stuff across the board.

It's a shame that the classic style Ninja Gaiden never made a true leap onto the SNES like many of its contemporaries. Could have been really great. But as a trilogy, the NES games are still fun IMO and definitely a must-play for those interested in classic action games.