Most companies wouldn't do what they could to make things look good. This was the first console after the Atari crash (caused by them cranking out any game they could including trying to make a "rubik's cube" game as if people would want to buy that instead of a real rubik's cube) so they were hesitant about pushing boundaries.
http://nesdev.com/NESTechFAQ.htm
It was actually possible to display 64 colors at a time on the screen. But it required some work.
The golden days of gaming.
I love gaming too but I fell out of it after Final Fantasy 8. It was too much crammed into too little with graphics they shouldn't have been trying to do on that generation console.
Then I figured out that I had a lot of extra time to do other things and, gasp, actually enjoyed that.
So, now, gaming is kind of... just a thing to do once in a while.
Hey! I remember that game!
We'll have to just disagree about the looks department - though it's pretty good for 8 bits.