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Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom (1991)

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Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, known in Japan as Ninja Ryūkenden III: Yomi no Hakobune (忍者龍剣伝III 黄泉の方船, lit. Legend of the Ninja Dragon Sword III: The Ark from Hades), is a side-scrolling platform video game developed and published by Tecmo. It was released in Japan on June 21, 1991 for the Famicom and in North America on August 15, 1991 for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The NES version was not released in Europe. It was later ported to the Atari Lynx by Atari Corporation and released in 1993 in North America and Europe, the European version retaining the North American Ninja Gaiden III title. It was also re-released as part of its Ninja Gaiden Trilogy Super NES compilation in 1995 in Japan and North America. Long after, it was released for the Virtual Console service in North America on February 18, 2008 for the Wii and in North America and Europe on November 28, 2013 and January 23, 2014 respectively for the Nintendo 3DS. It was designed by Masato Kato, who took over for Hideo Yoshizawa—designer of the first two games in the NES series.

The game is the third installment of the Ninja Gaiden trilogy, set between the first two games in the series, Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos. The player controls Ryu Hayabusa as he is framed for the murder of Irene Lew and investigates the circumstances behind her death. He eventually discovers a plan by CIA agent Foster and another person named Clancy to utilize an interdimensional rift to create and control a race of energy-infused superhuman mutants. The game features similar gameplay to its previous two Ninja Gaiden titles and includes some new features such as the ability to hang overhead from pipes and sword power-ups.

As with the previous titles, Ninja Gaiden III received mostly positive reviews from critics. Early reviews praised the game for its plot, gameplay, and difficulty; later reviews criticized the plot, level designs, and the game's difficulty level, in which the North American version was intentionally made harder than the Japanese version through limited continues, stronger enemies, and omission of a password system. The Atari Lynx port, while receiving general praise for graphics and controls, received poor reception for its sound and for the inability for players to see characters and items, attributing it to the Lynx's small screen.

Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom 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, Tecmo released the game for the NES with a much higher difficulty level than the Japanese version by doubling the amount of damage the player took from 1 health bar per hit to 2 health bars per hit. 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.

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.