 Ninja Gaiden III was designed by Masato Kato , who took over Hideo Yoshizawa 's main role in the game 's development from the previous two titles . In an interview with Kato , he said that Ninja Gaiden III needed " to go into a new direction " . The game was given more of a science @-@ fiction motif as opposed to the Cthulhu Mythos motif in the previous two titles ; the enemies changed to look more robotic than in the previous games . The original intent from the developers was to make the game easier than the previous titles , " to create a game a normal player can enjoy " . However , the perceived popularity of difficult video games in North America caused Tecmo to release the game for the NES with a much higher difficulty level than the Japanese version . They also decided to place the events of Ninja Gaiden III between the events of the first two titles in order to maintain continuity ; they figured that it was too difficult to continue the story after Ninja Gaiden II : The Dark Sword of Chaos , so they developed the plot sometime before the events of Ninja Gaiden II that revolved around the game 's main antagonist , Foster . 
