Ninja Gaiden Trilogy

The Good
Ninja Gaiden Trilogy has three things going for it:

-It's the entire trilogy in one package.

-It plays the way you remember.

-It has a password system for each game.

Does that sound good enough to warrant a purchase? It's not.

The Bad
In all honesty, this should have never been released. Have you ever heard about NES clones and how they have trouble with color and audio in some games? This is what it feels like.

I'm not sure why, but the people behind this compilation decided to play with the color palettes. Change when it's good is fine, but change just for the heck of it isn't usually a good idea. Instead of picking colors that were better, they chose colors that were worse. Most of the colors have been replaced with darker, in-between tones that make everything look wrong, and not just compared to the original game. They're just plain hideous.

If there's one thing beside the gameplay that always stood out in the Ninja Gaiden series, it was the music. While the NES wasn't known for its sound quality, the right people could always get some quality tunes out of it. Unfortunately, Tecmo must have fired the right people. All of those sampled drums and other sounds that made the Ninja Gaiden soundtrack so great are history. "But wait", you say, "Surely they replaced everything with modern improvements." Nope. They had the power of the SNES and they squandered it. The same old tunes are there, but they've been utterly befouled, actually managing to sound worse than the NES versions. Even the sound effects took a dive.

One thing that's always confused me with some games that get ported like this is the control scheme. Tecmo left the control configuration as the NES-style A/B with no option to change it. It's awkward, to say the least. Even in the NES days, my thumb laid across both buttons for easy access. In the SNES era, everyone had switched to B/Y controls. Surely it wouldn't have been an issue for them to fix it, but I suppose that they felt as though they had "fixed" enough.

The Bottom Line
Ninja Gaiden Trilogy was a lazy port. It's the original games after they had been kicked around in a landfill and repackaged. If you're a die-hard collector or have an SNES but no NES, go ahead and give it a whirl. I warn you, though. It won't have the same effect as it would have if you played it on the NES.