Sega nailed a license with Tecmo to produce original Ninja Gaiden games for Master System, Game Gear and Genesis - tho in an odd twist, the 1992 Genesis game is the only one that got scrapped before the finish line. I played a leaked beta with friends on stream, and given its similarities to the soon-releasing Streets of Rage 2, it's not hard to see why it was abandoned: It obviously falls short of both the mechanics and content featured by the latter.

The art production is strong and the music is excellent, but the combat is just a simple 3-hit combo game as is. The level aesthetics take a lot of cues from SoR1's urban nightlife and Revenge of Shinobi's globetrotting, even down to some platformer sections mixed in. There's very weird glitches and unfinished bits all around - the level 2 boss softlocks the game if you knock it off the ledge, the jump kick doesn't work, only diagonal movement is working (presumably bc they weren't done implementing checks for the dodgeroll mechanic), some cutscenes re-use unfitting or poorly-chopped graphics, and the final boss dies in 2 hits. It's finished enough to get a 'full' idea of what the final work would've done, but still obviously a B-tier production. They obviously shouldn't have crunched it out to meet a pre-SoR2 launch, but if it released after, its simplicity would've made it look dated by comparison. I wonder if it would've been more ideal to just port the arcade game instead: I assume it's bad, but at least they'd have a quick, finished product with up-to-par sprite art.