Ninja Gaiden

The name Ninja Gaiden first appeared in 1988 on arcade cabinets as a side-scrolling brawler, but the legend was built by the NES version released around the same time — a completely different game, a fast side-scrolling action platformer from Tecmo in which you clung to walls, swung a katana and watched cinematic cutscenes between stages that nobody expected from an eight-bit console. That pairing of storytelling ambition and merciless difficulty defined the brand for decades: Ninja Gaiden always punished carelessness without ever cheating. Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos and Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom refined the formula, while the Master System and Game Gear versions carried it beyond Nintendo hardware.

A second life arrived in 2004, when Team Ninja rebuilt the series as 3D action for the Xbox. Ryu Hayabusa moved differently from the heroes of the era's other action games — combat leaned on blocking, dodging and reading the enemy rather than long showy combos. The revised Ninja Gaiden Black is widely treated as the peak, and it reached PlayStation 3 as Ninja Gaiden Sigma; Ninja Gaiden II on Xbox 360 pushed both the pace and the gore harder still. The third game, in 2012, met a distinctly cooler reception. What the series keeps is its reputation as the yardstick against which honest difficulty in action games is still measured.