ability to scale and climb on top of walls, his ability to hang overhead. His chief criticism was the game's difficulty, saying that it's not the "rewarding kind of difficult" but instead "the cheap, annoying kind of difficult that makes you want to throw your controller at the TV screen and just go read a book". As with the Nintendo Life review, Thomas similarly criticized the inconsistent level design as well as a storyline which "begins [...] compellingly" but progressively becomes more bizarre, including "weird science-fiction themes about bionics and clones". In a retrospective of the Ninja Gaiden series, Eurogamer said that Ninja Gaiden III was the only game in the NES trilogy not to make it to Europe. They made similar criticisms about the difficulty level, saying that the North American version was made more difficult than the Japanese version by utilizing limited continues, making the enemies much more powerful, and removing the password system present in the Japanese version. They said the story was too outlandish, calling the plot, of which a short-lived anime Ninja Gaiden series would loosely be based, "a glorious load of old bollocks". While the version from Ninja Gaiden Trilogy for the Super NES remedied most of their criticisms, they said that the game added new frustrations which included slower framerates, lower-quality controls, and the omission and shuffling around of several tracks, which they said "is precisely the sort of thing that makes die-hard videogame fans apoplectic with rage". Soundtrack The game's soundtrack, composed by Hiroshi Miyazaki, Kaori Nakabai and Rika Shigeno was not released commercially at the time of the game's release. A formal soundtrack release was unavailable until Brave Wave Productions' 2017 vinyl box set, Ninja Gaiden- the Definitive Soundtrack''. The set was mastered by Keiji Yamagishi, and featured the soundtrack of the entire original trilogy. Notes References External links 1991 video games Atari Lynx games MidNite Software games Nintendo Entertainment System games Ninja Gaiden games Platform games Side-scrolling video games Single-player video games Video game sequels Video games developed in Japan Video games scored by Hiroshi Miyazaki Virtual Console games Virtual Console games for Wii U