The Mystical Ninja games are full of unexpected and frankly bizarre moments, so its not too surprising that a game set in feudal Japan had a working arcade version of a futuristic space shooter. How To Find It In order to play Gradius, you simply had to visit the local arcade and pay a few coins for the privilege. If you did so, you would have noticed that the games developers Konami had made a few tweaks to the original. Instead of a straight up port, the graphics and audio have been significantly upgraded, although anyone who was hoping to waste hours and hours would ultimately end up disappointed as only the first level of Gradius is playable. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see Konami put the effort in to improve the original title and it may have helped boost sales of Gradius III, which came out just a year before the Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES.