Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom (1991) closed out the NES trilogy with the most elaborate cutscenes yet and a new move for Ryu Hayabusa: he can now cling to the underside of a ceiling and shuffle along it, which the level design leans on hard.

It also gave him a sword that grows. Pick up the upgrade and the blade gets visibly longer and hits from further away, which changes the safe distance for every enemy in the game. Lose a life and you lose it, which is a quiet way of making death cost something beyond time.

The infamous part is what happened in localization. The Japanese release has unlimited continues, so a hard stretch is a matter of persistence. Tecmo's American version cut you to five for the entire game and, on top of that, roughly doubled the damage enemies deal. Run out and you start from stage one. Veterans of the first two games, who had beaten those on stubbornness alone, hit a wall that stubbornness couldn't solve.

That decision is usually explained as an anti-rental measure, and whether or not that's true, the effect is a game most people never saw the end of. Which is a shame, because the back half is the best-looking thing in the trilogy: the ship itself, the biomechanical interiors, a final sequence that pushes the cutscene system further than the hardware really wanted to go.

For those who pushed through, it's a stylish, intense send-off, and the cinematic ambition the series pioneered taken as far as the NES could carry it. Just keep a fresh controller handy, and know that if you play the Japanese version you are not cheating, you are playing the one they actually designed.