Title Screen

The arcade game Ninja Ryuukenden aka Ninja Gaiden came out in 1988 and was ported to the NES the same year. However, the game was re-programmed and slightly changed. At the time, it was a usual thing not only to port the game but instead to release different versions on several consoles under the same name that included different levels and other system-dependent alterations. The Ninja Gaiden series - which by now gained a huge fanbase - by now includes several sequels as well as re-releases for newer consoles.
Back in the days, the European NES title of the game was "Shadow Warriors", however, later games of the seires used the original title. In 1995, there was an SNES game called "Ninja Gaiden Trilogy" that included the original three NES games on one cartridge.
Unfortunately, they did not only alter the graphics but also censored all religious symbols.
For this report we compared the original NES version to the SNES Trilogy games, which many subsequent releases were based on. As a result, those are also censored.

Here is a direct comparison of several scenes that show the censored religious symbols. While one might think that the missing green hexagrams on the floors of of stage 6 might be a coincidence, the final boss will at the latest show that the symbols (which during this fight are purple) are not only missing for graphic reasons. The final boss wears an amulet around his neck that shows the exact same symbol. Again, this was retouched for the SNES Version.

SNES Version	NES Version

During one of the numerous cutscenes, an ally of the Hayabusa family gets shot at. The depiction of this incident is different for both versions. We cannot say whether or not this is an intentional censoring, however, it is very noticeable that the red color does not come out of the injured man's mouth. It thus seems as if his head was not injured here. Since we cannot preclude that this is censorship, we included this part of the game in the report. The text stayed the same.

SNES Version	NES Version