Ninja Gaiden Turns 25

One of the hardest NES games of all time turns 25 and that game is Ninja Gaiden.

The game was created by Hideo Yoshizawa and the artwork was done by Masato Kato. The first game was released in arcades in 1989 with the same name but a very different format. The arcade game was a beat’em up game and it was hard in its own right. Later that year the game was released on the NES and this time around it was a hybrid of action platformer/ hack-and-slash gameplay.

You take on the role of Ryu Hayabusa, a ninja who seeks revenge after he finds out about what happened to his father and ends up going on a quest to save the world. The game was and is very hard to the point that the term for this kind of difficulty was dub “NES HARD”.

The gameplay, sound, and pace are some of the best on the NES. Ninja Gaiden was also said to be the first game to introduce cinematic cutscenes to tell the story and for an 8-bit game that was way ahead of its time. The game would go on to be a smash hit and release two more games that were released in 1990 and 1991 and would be named the Ninja Gaiden trilogy.

Go and play this game but be warned you will be throwing your controller a lot and you will learn to hate those brown birds.