Best NES Action Games of All Time

The NES Action Library: Where the Genre Was Born

The NES action library is gaming’s foundational text. Contra defined the run-and-gun. Mega Man defined the platform-action-RPG hybrid with weapon stealing. Castlevania defined atmospheric platform-action. Ninja Gaiden defined cinematic storytelling in action games. These weren’t just good games — they were genre definitions that every subsequent action game was measured against.

The NES hardware — 1.79MHz 6502 CPU, 2KB RAM — forced developers to create action game designs of extreme efficiency. Every sprite, every sound effect, every frame of animation had to earn its presence. The constraints produced games with focused, essential mechanics rather than sprawling systems, and those focused designs proved more durable than technically superior games of later generations.

Mega Man 2 — The NES Action Peak

Mega Man 2 (1988) is universally recognized as the best NES game by audiences and developers who have studied the platform extensively. The weapon system — defeating each of eight Robot Masters grants their weapon, which exploits the weakness of a specific other Master — created a meta-puzzle around the correct order of completion while remaining completable in any sequence by skilled players.

Takashi Tateishi’s soundtrack was the first Mega Man score to be performed live in concert (Capcom World in 1990). Flash Man’s time-stopping ability, Quick Man’s laser maze, Wily Castle’s music — the specific elements of Mega Man 2 have been referenced in tribute so many times that they’re cultural touchstones for an entire generation.

Contra — Two-Player Action at Its Founding Moment

Contra (1987/1988) established cooperative console action gaming as a design category. Two players, simultaneous, both subject to the same bullets — the Spread Gun, the Laser, the Machine Gun in order of preference — making decisions about priority targets while supporting each other through the game’s 8 stages. The Konami Code (↑↑↓↓←→←→BA at the title screen) gave 30 lives per player, converting arcade-difficulty design into a completable experience for most players.

Contra’s NES conversion included stages not in the original arcade game, modified to accommodate the different aspect ratio of a home television. The conversion is considered superior to the arcade original in multiple design respects.

Ninja Gaiden — Cinematic Storytelling in Action

Ninja Gaiden (1989) demonstrated that NES games could tell stories. The cutscenes between stages — fully animated in NES sprite art with dialogue and story progression — gave Ninja Gaiden a narrative structure unlike anything in NES action gaming before it. Ryu Hayabusa’s quest to avenge his father used the constraint of the hardware to tell a story that players engaged with as they would a film.

The gameplay itself was demanding: wall-climbing using both walls alternately to ascend, precise jumping timing in wind-affected stages, and boss encounters in the final stages that remain some of the NES’s most designed confrontations. Ninja Gaiden was simultaneously the NES’s most cinematic game and one of its hardest.

Castlevania — Atmosphere as Design

Castlevania (1986) established the franchise’s fundamental design language in its first entry: Simon Belmont’s whip, the sub-weapons (cross, axe, holy water, stopwatch, knife), the Medusa head enemies that knocked players off platforms into pit deaths, the candle-lighting for hearts and items, and the specific staircase navigation that feels nothing like any other game’s movement.

The soundtrack by Kinuyo Yamashita — Stage 1’s Vampire Killer, Stage 4’s Beginning — is among the NES’s most celebrated game music, recognized by players who have never touched a Castlevania game. The atmosphere of draped stone corridors, moving platforms, and gothic enemy designs gave the NES an aesthetic register it had no other games to occupy.