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Let's see. I've tackled doctors and pirates, so I think it's time for a look at Nintendo ninjas. Just in the interests of fairness, mind you! What follows is a completely arbitrary listing of the best Nintendo ninja characters and the games about them, based on the entirely biased criteria of what I have fun playing and writing about. Warning! Opinions and recollections that may be flawed by extreme old age lie ahead!

10. Everybody in Naruto

Naruto isn't properly a video game property, but it's spawned a ton of games. There are a lot of stinkers in there-- that's always the case with a Shounen Jump license-- but there are also a few that are good dumb fun. In particular, I have a fondness for the Naruto: Clash of Ninja fighting game series that sprawls over the GameCube and the Wii. Yeah, a lot of the games are little more than "expansion packs" that add new characters from whatever stupid new manga story is ongoing. Yeah, the fighting is pretty shallow and some characters (such as, frequently, Hinata) are ludicrously broken.

This said, the Clash of Ninja games have really lovely cel-shaded graphics, complete with some really wicked direction for the requisite flashy supers and specials. While the manga's world is distinctly tilted toward Naruto and Sasuke ultimately being the only people in the universe who matter (Sakura exists to cry and beg them to stop fighting), in the fighting game you can give Naruto's supporting cast a chance to finally shine. Instead of fading into the background for Naruto's next idiotic punchfest with the Real Main Villain, you can find out what would happen if they got to beat the bad guy themselves. In the case of female characters like Hinata and Sakura, you get to see what would happen if they were ever allowed to do anything important ever, or in fact, if Iroha was ever on-camera for more than two or three panels at a time.

Basically, the Naruto: Clash of Ninja games are way more fun than anything else in the Naruto franchise. They're also quite a bit more fun than a lot of the stinkier fighting games that have made their way to the GameCube, too. Now, it's true that hardly anyone in Naruto is... well, recognizably a ninja. The series badly suffers from Ninja Inflation syndrome, whereby it features so many ninjas that none of its ninjas continue to exhibit ninja-like traits. After awhile it feels like every other generic Shounen Jump martial arts punchfest.

Clash of Ninja suffers from this a little, too, as most of the classic "ninja" moves go to Naruto, and everyone else is a generic 3D fighting goon with crazy special moves. If this wasn't the case, and everyone in the game really felt like a unique ninja, it would chart a bit higher. Regardless, it's still pretty fun, so Naruto's massive universe of ninjas can just barely make the cut for this list. They have some decently fun fighting games, and that's more than most ninjas can (or would) say.

9. Palette-Swap Ninjas (Mortal Kombat)

Exactly how all these guys ended up called ninjas isn't exactly known, but I possess the clear intuition that they are ninjas. Scorpion is the only one technically supposed to be a ninja... although his palette-swap Sub-Zero was declared a Chinese Ninja Warrior by his theme song, and that's good enough for me.

Anyway, Mortal Kombat is for all practical purposes a world populated by a set of rainbow-colored ninjas from warring tribes or something. Look, I don't know, I'm not bothering to make sense of a storyline that tries to pass a gag character like Noob Saibot off as a serious evil menace. They all started as palette-swaps of Sub-Zero and Scorpion that were hidden characters, and got progressively more ridiculous as Mortal Kombat started trying to take itself seriously in the wake of its gloriously stupid flim version. It was a classic case of Ninja Inflation Syndrome in practice. In the modern games, there's no real sense at all that these guys are ninjas, though they were clearly meant to be in the older 2D fighters.

Now, these guys are ninjas in a very... Naruto sense of the word. They have incredible physical prowess, and superpowers that are otherwise pretty inexplicable. Take Reptile, for instance. He's a ninja with the power to... turn into a dinosaur that kills you. Well, that's one way to rebel against an arrogant samurai overclass, I guess. Smoke constantly emits smoke, which, yeah, that's to be expected, but it's not very stealthy, nor is Sub-Zero's famous ice-flinging. Scorpion started out as a guy with a flaming skull for a head, but around the time MK4 rolled around he started turning into a giant Scorpion. I mean, why the hell not? What else should he be doing?

The palette-swap ninjas have ended up being as close to mascots as Mortal Kombat has, and really the only characters with any lasting appeal. Guys like Liu Kang who were supposed to be the heroes got less memorable as their crappy motion-capture sprites looked increasingly dated. The palette-swap ninjas kept most of their bodies covered, so as the classic Mortal Kombat games aged they didn't look quite so stupid. Most of the "new" games focus more on the palette-swap ninjas than other characters, in fact, and have actually individualized their designs a little. Not bad for a bunch of guys born out of forthright laziness.

These guys would be higher up on the list, but Nintendo's always had a very ambiguous relationship to the Mortal Kombat Palette-Swap Ninjas. You see, back in the 90's, Nintendo took perhaps excessive pride in being family-friendly, while the Mortal Kombat guys enjoyed making each other explode into fountains of goofy pixilated gore. Nintendo insisted that the SNES version of the original Mortal Kombat be heavily censored, with goofy stuff like nonsensically toned-down Fatalities and flying blood turned white, thereby implying that the Palette-Swap Ninjas were disgustingly sweaty.

Otherwise, the SNES port was far superior to the competing Genesis port... which was relatively uncensored, thanks to the blood code. It otherwise sucked, but you had your blood. So gamers responded to this about the way you'd think, buying up the Genesis version while the now-familiar "Nintendo is kiddy crap!" criticisms started up. Before the Mortal Kombat controversy was over, Nintendo's attempts to make Sega look bad for porting the game with its gore intact (if hidden behind codes) had all of the main console manufacturers in the congressional hotset, leading to the birth of the ESRB and, eventually, to the super-lax Nintendo attitude toward "adult content" that lead to the likes of Conker's Bad Fur Day.

So, the Palette-Swap Ninjas are perhaps responsible for one of Nintendo's most severe public embarrassments, and some of their worst corporate behavior. Granted, it's not their fault Nintendo was for some reason desperate to sell a game on their hardware without selling it intact. They're just ninja death assassins, and killing each other in the messiest ways possible is what they do. Nintendo just should've respected that.

8. Shadowman (Mega Man 3)

If you want to start an argument in a room full of nerds, ask whether Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3 is the better game. Chances are there will be no survivors. I would probably hide under a couch and then declare that they were both good and instead we should be arguing about which version of Mega Man sucks the most. (Answer: that jerk from Star Force.)

In short, Mega Man 3 is one of the finest classic Mega Man games you could hope to play. It's not quite as iconic as Mega Man 2 in terms of bosses or weapon selection, but offers more freedom thanks to Rush's introduction and the useful slide ability. It also gives you the nascent beginnings of Mega Man's eventually-huge supporting cast with the introduction of Protoman. All told it's a little easier than Mega Man 2, but mostly just because the level design is less mean-spirited.

One of Mega Man 3's Robot Masters is Shadowman, and he's a fine example of how to work a memorable ninja into a video game where you wouldn't otherwise expect it. At no point is Shadowman explicitly stated to be a ninja, but it's sort of obvious given that there's a giant throwing star mounted on his head, and beating him lets you absorb his power over throwing stars for yourself. His weapon, the Shadow Blade, is actually one of the most useful in MM3. It works a bit like MM2's Metal Blade, letting you fire in 8 directions, but it travels half the screen and boomerangs back to you. This actually makes it easier to hit things with it, and it can tear through quite a few bosses.

There are a few reasons why Shadowman doesn't rank higher on this list than he does, and it mostly boils down to his behavior as a boss. Even his level has the decency to plunge you into darkness from time to time, but when you're actually fighting him he just uses the generic Jump Around and Fire attack pattern common to all Robot Masters. More troubling, his inevitable Robot Master weakness is to the idiotic Top Spin attack, which involves Mega Man flinging himself bodily at the enemy. It causes you to take a little damage but generally does tremendous damage to an enemy with the right weakness. Still, I can never watch Mega Man lurching into a bad guy sprite on purpose, spinning like a goon, without hearing "Yackety Sax" in my head.

So, the easy way to beat Shadowman is to ignore trying to fight him with skill or finesse-- just fight Top Man first, get the Top Spin, and then hurl yourself at Shadow Man as fast as you can. You'll both look like idiots, but Shadow Man will die first, because you're exploiting the ninja's natural weakness to incredible stupidity. Once you know this, his ninja mystique starts lacking something... even though he makes appearances in later Mega Man games, the stench of the Top Spin is always with him.

7. Those Ninjas That Kidnapped The President (Bad Dudes)

Now, technically, I could have called these guys "Dragon Ninja", but I'm not sure anyone has ever bothered to learn these guys' official name. It serves no purposes. What defines the ninja enemies of Bad Dudes on the NES is that the crazy sons of bitches kidnapped the President. Not his wife, not his daughter, not some jerk who works for him-- no, they kidnapped the mamafreaking President himself.

Bad Dudes dared to ask the player if you, personally, were a bad enough dude to rescue the President from ninjas. Why exactly a bad dude was required is a mystery of the ages, but it's true that Dragon Ninja didn't screw around. Karnov himself shows up on their side, and as the first boss. Note that this is a game that is not willing to admit that you're a bad dude after you've beaten the crap out of a magical fire-breathing circus strongman; no, that's where you start. The game wasn't lying about its dude badness requirements.

Indeed, playing Bad Dudes felt like playing Double Dragon on some sort of demented acid trip. Where Double Dragon was content to have you fight a staggering array of perhaps half a dozen total enemies, Bad Dudes threw an ever-increasing array of completely insane opponents in your direction. White ninjas! Blue ninjas with swords! Girl ninjas who try to drop on your head! Purple ninjas who swarm in the then-impressive number of as many as three at once while you rode on the back of a very slow truck! Dragon Ninja's numbers and deviousness were never-ending. Even once-harmless white ninjas might suddenly start throwing shuriken at you in later levels-- and having projectiles in a slow-paced side-scrolling brawler like Bad Dudes is just cheating.

Beating the Dragon Ninja wasn't easy, though perhaps not so heartlessly difficult as making your way through, say, Double Dragon. You still had to spend alot of time practicing to earn the right to hear your generic 80's guy say "I'm bad!" in a growly, poorly-digitized bark at the end of each level. You had to time punches extremely precisely to take out the Dragon Ninja hordes without getting hosed, and bosses were even more exacting exercises in charging up your punches and then attacking at just the right time. Since your attack animations in Bad Dudes were relatively slow, poorly-timed attacks left you open to quick, humiliating deaths.

If you could chew through the game's seven levels to eventually take out the leader of the nefarious Dragon Ninja, you could watch yourself stand guard while the grateful President happily ate a hamburger. You didn't expect much out of beating a game in the 80's, and even a little display like this was enough to make you feel like you'd really accomplished something. That you were, dare I say it, a bad dude. So thank you, Dragon Ninja. Thank you for serving as the universal barometer against which all dudes may measure their levels of personal badness.

6. Edge in FF4

I've gone over how much I like the plotline that writes Edge into Final Fantasy IV before, but I haven't gone over how generally neat Edge is. He shows up late in the plot and doesn't get much character development from there, but he's a remarkably useful character. See, every character in FFIV actually had at least one or two things they could do that were unique. Edge, being a Ninja, got "Ninja Magic" and the ability to Throw a range of classic ninja weapons.

None of them did overwhelming damage by themselves, but Edge was also useful in that-- much like Cecil-- he got to use powerful equipment in addition to his casting. He also had a ridiculous ability to evade enemy attacks, which you could actually enhance via Ninja Magic. He was best off attacking and buffing allies, a combat role nobody else in FFIV quite managed to fill, and could access a range of elemental damage types if you really needed them. Against bosses and other super-tough enemies, you could buy up stacks of different types of shuriken to chuck at an enemy.

Edge would rank higher if, well, he was just more relevant to the parts of the game after he joins your party. He's also kind of a jerk, when you get right down to it. His brash, impulsive personality isn't exactly one that prepares a person for limitless success as a stealthy assassin, and why is a royal prince doing his own ninja-ing, anyway? More fundamentally, though, he's not even the best ninja you can use in a SNES Final Fantasy game, and in most respects beyond that kind of generic.

The actual best SNES RPG ninja we'll discuss later, and it's probably exactly who you think it is. Still, Edge seemed pretty cool at the time, and he's still not bad. He does embody the principle that one really good ninja in a game is much more interesting than lots of bizarre super-powered types you're just calling ninjas.

5. Joe Osugi (Ninja Five-O)

Joe Osugi is an entirely traditional ninja. He carries a grappling hook, ninjato, and throwing stars. He can stab guys, do an awesome sword-spin jump, power his throwing stars up into instant-kill and multi-hit flavors, and use his grappling hook to do dizzying Bionic Commando-style platforming (only faster and with better physics). That by itself would give Ninja Five-O a place on this list.

Oh, but it gets better. Do you know how? Because Joe Osugi isn't just a ninja... he's a ninja cop. He doesn't just mow down surprisingly smart bad guys in interchangeable suits, he also rescues hostages and takes down flamboyant super-criminals like the "Kabuki (Warrior)". He can, if necessary, use ninja magic to make his battles all the easier, as he gains power by flipping out and killing people.

Ninja Five-O is everything good about terrible 80's action movies that starred the similarly-named Sho Kosugi, and everything good about 80's side-scrolling action games. Only, somehow, it's better-- no vintage game had level designs this precise, controls this responsive, or AI this smart. Ninja Five-O is the perfect game for the nostalgic in that it's everything you believed your old games to be, rather than a painfully accurate reflection.

Ninja Five-O was a Game Boy Advance title and a surprisingly rare one. Without a big franchise to attach to itself, it got lost in the flood of GBA shovelware, like tons of other magnificent games. If you can track down a copy of Ninja Five-O at any GameStop it will cost you a mere five dollars; on e-bay, expect to be gouged by sellers charging ridiculous prices int he $50 range, and not necessarily with complete packaging.

This is still a game worth tracking down and playing even at ridiculous prices. The worst you can say about it is that it gets a little repetitive. If you have already played it, then go play it again and marvel at what a perfect little side-scroller it is. Konami and Hudson desperately need to get together to give us a Ninja Five-O II on the DS, with frustrating dual-screen swinging. I'd love it forever, and it's definitely one of the best Nintendo ninja games.

4. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The modern incarnation of the Ninja Turtles has had some video games, and frankly I don't care about them. The TMNT crew are on this list solely on the strength of their NES and SNES titles, which were absurdly good given that they were early 90's vintage licensed games. Most other cartoon spinoffs in NES form were barely playable, let alone any fun, but the Ninja Turtles had a run of licensed titles so legendary that you could expect basically everyone you knew to own at least one or two of them. I sure did, since the original incarnation or Turtlemania knew no race, class, or gender lines. It was a beautiful thing, in its own way.

Anyway, much of this quality came from the simple fact that the Turtles license landed in Konami's hands. Unlike, say, Acclaim, who could spew out licensed shovelware with alarming speed, Konami clearly put quite a bit more care and effort into making the Turtles games actually fun-- if, in some cases, brutally unfair. The sterling example of this is the original NES title, which alternated top-down exploration and side-scrolling action stages. The side-scrollers were pretty fun and not too difficult, given the standards of the time.... until you got to the water level.

Yes. That water level.

Forget everything you heard about Battletoads and its speederbike levels. You can beat that speederbike level if you just sit down and memorize it. The water level in the NES TMNT, where you're swimming around trying to defuse bombs? Ridiculous. Even if you know where all the bombs are, finding and defusing them requires the sort of uncanny reflexes reserved for people who make speedrun videos. It was a cruelly unfair thing to hand to eight-year-olds, but by god we played it anyway and in our sad little hearts, we believed that we could somehow defuse all of those bombs. We were wrong, but that didn't make us love the games any less.

Since the NES TMNT sold incredibly well despite being balls-impossible, sequels were inevitable, and they were a bit kinder to their young audience. They also weren't quite as good, for the most part. TMNT II was a port of the memorable arcade game, but dumbed down for the sake of the NES-- so no giant sprites, voice samples, or four-player action. So, really, almost no reason to play it besides the extra level. TMNT III was also a side-scrolling beat 'em up, but this one designed for the NES, so it felt a little less neutered (but, ultimately, still a bit mindless).

TMNT IV was also a slightly neutered arcade port, this time of the TMNT: Turtles in Time arcade game. It didn't suffer as badly as TMNT II from the transition to arcade to home console, thanks to being an early SNES title. Most of the main sprite animations were recognizably the same, with details mostly being sacrificed in things like backgrounds, weather effects, and enemy AI that were easy to ignore. Some irritating auto-scrolling levels were now "bonus levels", and one got a nifty Mode 7 makeover. There were new bosses and levels to make the game longer that didn't feel especially out of place, and the Turtles actually got some extra moves that made them all feel more individual. This actually made it a cornerstone of most early SNES collections, even if you were a bit too old for Turtles or hadn't otherwise cared about their games for awhile.

The final and possibly best Turtles game of all from the NES/SNES glory days was Teenage Mutant NInja Turtles: Tournament Fighters. This wasn't an especially popular title, as it hit when the market was glutted with Street Fighter II clones and the Turtles fad as a whole was on the way out. It still got a lot of good reviews, due to being... well, an unusually well-made fighting game, with proper depth and controls that actually felt comfortable on the SNES pad.

There were also NES and Genesis versions, but the SNES was by far the best with huge sprites and one of the earliest "super meters" to appear in any console fighter. It was also one of the few Turtles licensed anythings to pull from the long-running and surprisingly dark TMNT Archie comic and the original Mirage comics. It's well worth playing if you can find a copy these days, and "serious" fighting game afficionados are still playing TMNT Tournament Fighters competitively (although, to be fair, those guys also try to play crap like the Gundam Wing SNES fighter competitively).

Now, with the exception of Tournament Fighters, none of the Turtles games were exceptional. Mostly, they were just solidly pretty-good and worth owning when you otherwise needed to avoid most cartoon tie-in games. You could argue the Turtles weren't really very ninja-like, I suppose, but they have more ninja mystique than, say, all those jerks in Mortal Kombat. I say we give the Turtle Teens a pass for Memortable Achievement in Licensed Games, and then get a few rounds of Tournament Fighters going. (I'm Armaggon.)

3. Izuna

Izuna is a pretty memorable RPG ninja, all things considered. She doesn't get any beefy armor-wearing meatshields to huddle behind, or any friendly clerics to heal her inevitable wounds. Izuna is tasked with making it through eight randomly-generating Mysterious Dungeons with little more than her stats, her wits, and whatever she finds lying around on the ground.

A roguelike is not a good place to be if you are a ninja. Roguelikes are about bulking up your defensive abilities and minimizing risk. Victory is assured by first tanking well enough to survive damage, and then enhancing offense to kill things more quickly. You're best off if you can use magic or other abilities to let you multi-hit bad guys, or even pets to fight for you. Izuna's got none of that. Half the time she's reduced to punching out gods with her bare fists, or throwing magic pills at them.

Ninjas also do not tank, and Izuna is no exception. Until you've gotten her ridiculously over-level, she can't really take more than five or six blows from most enemies before her HP needs to be refilled by an item. Your only real hope of success is to enhance her evasion rates, which involves customizing items that are inherently both breakable and losable. If one breaks in the dungeon, you'd better hope you have the right item to repair it, or... time to get a replacement and start over.

Of course, in some ways, a Mysterious Dungeon isn't a bad place for a ninja to be. They tend to be full of randomly-generating items that give you the chance to improvise your way out of bad situations. For Izuna, this includes plenty of useful ranged attack weapons like Kunai, Shuriken, Bombs, and even Caltrops. Used wisely, these little things make you much more survivable. You can also find magic talismans, but they drain your SP-- and your ability to do melee damage. So a good ninja won't be relying on magic much at all.

Your situation isn't hopeless in Izuna, just rough. You can find talismans that let you escape the dungeon if a run is going south, as well as HP and SP restore items. You can also find nice winding passages to take a rest in, and let your HP regenerate back up to full. Even if you're forced to flee an enemy, your HP increases with every step. Between dungeon dives, you get some shops in town for repairing and customizing equipment, making particularly good items easier to hold onto.

Izuna doesn't rate higher because, while taking a ninja into a Mysterious Dungeon is a pretty hardcore exercise, Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja features unusually easy dungeons as Mysterious Dungeon clones go. In some ways, it's really Baby's First Roguelike. Death costs you all of your current items but not your experience levels, which can only be reduced slightly by certain monsters. Simply grinding your way to 99 before seriously tackling the game is an option, if a stupid one. It really shouldn't be there, though.

Izuna herself is also not really the denizen of a very memorable storyworld. Her problems are mostly self-inflicted, the result of greed, and her only real struggle is to keep the gods from (rightfully) cursing her for trying to steal their stuff. It's basically her own fault she keeps having to wander into Mysterious Dungeons to slay monsters, and that limits one's sympathy. Still, if you've never had the courage to pick up a dungeon crawler before, give Izuna a try. It's the sort of game that might make you feel like a ninja, when previously your felt like some sort of bard or lame support class.

2. Shadow in FF6

Remember when I said that Edge wasn't the best Final Fantasy ninja on the SNES? Yeah, it should've been obvious who exactly I did mean. Shadow is the official team ninja in the epic Final Fantasy VI, and he is pretty much the standard by which all other RPG ninjas must be measured. Edge, for instance, is worth only .254 su (shadow units), while Izuna is at .321 su. These are not a bad ratings for non-Shadow ninjas.

Shadow was awesome in FFVI on two different fronts, gameplay and story. As in most great titles, these two elements didn't exist in discrete, unrelated worlds where one stopped to let the other begin. In gameplay terms, Shadow was a really useful character with a powerful melee attack and a range of decent equipment. He was statted out roughly the way Edge was, only his Throw command was better and his physical attack damage more impressive. Instead of "Ninja Magic", he got something vastly more interesting: a dog who would randomly appear both to take hits for him, and occasionally to annihilate the enemy with ridiculously powerful counter-attacks.

Since you got Shadow relatively early in the game, he seemed like a tremendously useful character... and you got more attached if you realized that he was one of the few characters it was possible to lose. There's a decision you can make about halfway through the game that makes it impossible to re-recruit him when the game "restarts" in the World of Ruin. Even if you save him, you get to go through a ridiculously complex sequence that involves triggering certain cutscenes and wagering the right item in the Colosseum if you do want to get him back. Even if put safely back in your party, he's doomed to die tragically, if awesomely, during the game's ending.

This brings us to the other prong of Shadow's badassery, which is directly tied to his role in the story. Shadow pretty much never shows up and does anything in FFVI that isn't harder and manlier than what anyone else in the game is managing. Most of the guys in FFVI have a secret sorrow that burdens them with melancholy, while Shadow's secret sorrow burdens him with an overwhelming need to kill people for money. Guess which of these things is impressive and which one gets old after awhile.

I mean, the game tried to do things to soften Shadow up a little. He has a dog and a kid! But his kid is a souped-up caster who paints pictures that maul monsters, and his dog will tear your face off. Even if you save him before the World of Ruin begins, you have to go to the Colosseum and beat him senseless if you want him to join your party. At the end of the game, he ups and dies because he's just too hard and manly to let anyone else die. He's a character type that hadn't shown up in Final Fantasy before and hasn't made many appearances since, and we miss this kind of guy. Shadow was more than just a ninja in terms of job class, he was a ninja in spirit.

1. Ryu Hayabusa (Ninja Gaiden)

Some of you kids may only know Ryu as the main guy from Ninja Gaiden on the Xbox. Well, he belonged to the NES... not first, exactly, but it certainly happened at one point. More to the point, it was the NES run of games that put Ninja Gaiden on the map. Much like the Castlevania series that they're compared to with alarming regularity, the NES Ninja Gaiden games were side-scrolling action-platformers that were hellaciously hard less because of deliberate design on Tecmo's part, and more because of the primitive state of game design at the time. Ryu's attacks had an inadvisably small hitbox, and there was no checkpoint system to keep you from having to replay huge chunks of the game after a death. As a result, most people couldn't beat any of the Ninja Gaiden games. Hell, most people spent them getting killed by birds, but you felt very proud of however far in the games you could get. If you liked the acrobatic half of platforming, Ninja Gaiden offered you a lot more than most other NES games. The ability to cling to and climb around on walls made pit-deaths a thing of the past, and you got some great special weapons to work with. The bosses were fun to fight, and the graphics had a hard-edged urban look to them that few NES titles managed with any degree of success. If you could get through the more savage parts of the game's levels, you effectively found a reward that made you feel like your effort was genuinely worth the hours and hours of practice it took to get there.

You'll notice I don't run down the games in detail as I have for other series stars, and that's because all of the Ninja Gaiden games were pretty interchangeable in my mind. Ryu's sense of physics never changed much, and the power-ups available to him as the progressed changed remarkably little. If they were being released now, gamers would be sneering and calling them "expansion packs", but back then it was tacitly assumed (and hoped) that a sequel would mostly just be an expansion to a prior game. The alternative was the unremitting misfortune of Zelda II.

Now, Ninja Gaiden did get a little easier as it went on... mostly because Tecmo had to be under pressure to make games that sold so well a bit friendlier to the people buying them. I'm convinced this eventually lead to the series fizzling, since most people's relationship with Ninja Gaiden was a drunken, abusive one that resulted in a lot of black eyes from "falling down".

It was Ninja Gaiden's tough-as-nails gameplay that helps make Ryu such a memorable Nintendo ninja (that, and his game having an actual plot, complete with stylish cutscenes). If you could actually make it significantly far in any given Ninja Gaiden game without cheating, you seriously felt like a one-man army. Everything Ryu did fit the ninja stereotypes perfectly, too, and there was a vague sense of playing the game less as a platformer and more as a "ninja badass" simulator (assuming ninjas could gather power-ups in order to make their shuriken turn into huge whirling flaming discs, anyways).

Succeeding as Ryu involved a lot of devious thinking and careful planning, supposedly the great strength of the ninja that basically no other game reflects to any degree. You had to use everything in your environment and every skill in your arsenal to survive. If in a more primitive way than its Xbox descendant, Ninja Gaiden at points felt like a game that really wanted you to think like a ninja as you played it. Almost by default, that makes Ryu Hayabusa the best Nintendo ninja, and one of the few that lives up to the not-insignificant hype that always surrounds the ninja name.

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