 When Nintendo released Super Mario All-Stars in 1993, it was a pretty big deal. It demonstrated that the almighty Nintendo was mercifully sympathetic to people who only owned a Super Nintendo and not an NES. It finally threw us a bone by re-releasing some older games. It showed that Nintendo was finally open to the idea of backward compatibility, albeit in a roundabout way. Most importantly, Nintendo restored each of the four games on Mario All-Stars with updated graphics and music so they felt brand new again. Not only that, there was something a little more complicated going on too. The 16-bit console wars were all about bigger, better, faster, stronger, onward and upward and don't look back. By the time the mid-90s started to roll around, games like Super Mario All-Stars and accessories like the Super Game Boy were Nintendo's way of saying for the first time, hey, slow down a bit and enjoy the classics you might have forgotten. So collections like Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, which came out in 1995, were welcomed with open arms. I remember really looking forward to playing these games again. Sure it was kind of disappointing that Ninja Gaiden evidently wasn't going to get a Super Nintendo game, but we'll take Ninja Gaiden Trilogy as a consolation, especially if it gets the Mario All-Stars treatment, right? Well, uh, that's not what happened. Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is sadly a collection of three bad ports. Visually, the game looks a tiny bit touched up but still just a little off. I mean, if you're gonna touch up the sprites and backgrounds, you should try to consider the inherent advantages of the Super Nintendo hardware and work with that, right? The way they kind of sorta half-assed the visual quote-unquote upgrade here is more distracting than anything. It kinda looks like it did on the NES, but not quite, to the point that all I could think about was playing my original cartridges to see if there's even any difference. Spoiler alert, there is, but barely. The gameplay itself is pretty similar, thankfully, but they left the controller scheme exactly the same as the NES games. So B is Attack, A is Jump, and B and Up is your special weapon. I'm sorry, but the B and A Attack scheme just doesn't work nearly as well on a Super Nintendo controller as it does on an NES controller. Why Attack and B Jump is the way to go here. I get why they left it the way they did, to be true to the original, but they really should have updated that aspect. And for God's sake, you have four buttons not being used for anything. Assign the special weapon to one of them. It gets worse. Listen to this music. Does that sound anything like Ninja Gaiden to you? The sound and music in Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is by far the worst part of this collection. It is atrocious. I mean, for fuck's sake, they kept the controller scheme the same because it's what people were used to, but they thought it was okay to butcher the music so badly? They didn't think people would be used to the original music too? Geez, man. Really, the only positive that comes from Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is a password system that curbs the difficulty a little, so at least there's that. Anyway, yeah, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is a disaster. The cartridge goes for an average of $125, and I can't think of a bigger waste of money. You can buy an NES in all three Ninja Gaiden games for less than that. It need to be much better off. Ninja Gaiden Trilogy was a great idea that was executed in the most half-assed way imaginable. It's too bad.