Gamers Touch

I noticed that I got quite a spike in visitors when I posted the first two reviews to Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2, so today I’ll be bringing you the third and final review in the Ninja Gaiden NES trilogy. This one surprisingly will not be full of hate as the others have been since I actually enjoyed this game. I know talk about crazy since this game is usually known as the black sheep when talking about the original trilogy, but for some reason all my issues from the first two games were no longer apparent and I felt happy playing this. So here you go, my review of Ninja Gaiden 3: The Ancient Ship of Doom (Wow, that’s quite a name).

So once again you’re put into the role of Ryu Hayabusa, the ninja who’s had more bad luck in the past few games than most people have in their entire lives. He’s lost his Dad, had evil demons battle him over a sword, and now in this installment his girlfriend is killed. This guy can’t catch a break can he? You’ll start out with a few scenes that make it seem as if Ryu was the one who killed his own girl but you’ll soon find out that it’s a double, so you now have the job of unfolding this grand mystery.

This game plays just as the first two, but now you have the ability to hang onto free ledges with the option of jumping on top of them or shimmying across them. Along with this added feature came a few new power up’s, butdoing away with the shadow clones which ticked off a lot of people. With the removal of the clones many fans felt it was a step backwards but I didn’t mind them missing much since now you could pick up Sword Power Up’s. I noticed that I played so much better when I didn’t have to be pixel to pixel with an enemy to kill them. The Sword Power Up’s extend your sword’s slash and make the game that much easier. Another change that was made was the inclusion of a recoil reduction when you got hit by an enemy. If you recall back in the first Ninja Gaiden if you got hit by an enemy you’d be launched backwards, this was fixed a bit in the second game, but it’s finally been perfected in this third game, so you don’t have to consider yourself dead when you get hit by the smallest of enemies.

Besides the gameplay the overall environments are a LOT different than those of the first two. This time around rather than fighting strange demons you’ll be going up against mostly aliens and robots. The stages will also look a lot more mechanical than before and the music reminds me a lot of Mega Man – this could be another reason why I love this game so much. Although the enemies look different they’ll attack in the same pattern as the old enemies did in the other games, so there’s not much difference there. The levels will be twice the size as they used to be so be prepared to do them all over again from the beginning if you die. Also be warned that the TIMER will become a factor in the game now because of some of the sizes of the stages.

In the other games I complained about enemies respawning even if you’ve just killed them and took a step forward, this problem isalmost non-existent in this installment. When I first started the game I already had a noose made up on the ceiling of my room just in case I couldn’t handle this problem, but with this respawning issue resolved I could finally enjoy a Ninja Gaiden game.

I’ve been good at every Mega Man game out there and so when the smalls problems I had with the first two Ninja Gaiden games were resolved I flew by this game in about an hour’s time. Sure I died a few times, but who seriously thinks they’re gonna not lose one life while playing a Ninja Gaiden game. The final boss is almost a replica of the ones from the first two games and he wasn’t nearly as hard as some of the others. In the end you find out Irene never died and as always Ryu turns into mister poetry and starts talking about the world and how evil some people are and blah blah blah – It reminds me of the narration of X’s thoughts at the end of Mega Man X. Anyway, I actually recommend this game to anyone and I had quite a fun time playing it.

So THERE, stop bashing me Ninja Gaiden fanboys – I actually had fun with this one.