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| I played this! by Bananadine 10/01/2011, 9:31am PDT | ||||
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| It turns out it IS easy... but mainly because it has a password system, and infinite continues even without the password system. If I beat it as a kid, as I still think I did, then I did so by banging my head against it over and over for a while.
There are some bits that would be pretty hard without the infinite continues. I died a few times on jumping puzzles, but much more often, I died on bosses. The bosses are indeed cool! But the ones toward the end are pretty tough, and you don't get enough of a life meter to figure out a nice strategy to use on one of them before its attacks have killed you a few times over. That tengu guy or whatever, man he kicked the crap out of me with his giant fat hopping body that you have to perfectly run beneath several times per fight. I never felt like I had to memorize anything, though. Especially in the jumping puzzles. To get past those, you just need to be careful and... you know, jump at the right time. You can see what's happening. I can believe this though: sdroa jists wrote: especially because at least three of the later jumping sections involve platforms that greatly change their behavior when somebody lands on them--so, how in the world would two guys do that together? Unless the platforms work differently when there are two players (and it sounds like they don't). Another point not mentioned in the video: Goddamn Kid Ying has two horizontal jumping speeds, and once you're using the slower one you can't get back to the faster one. It's infuriating! Especially on the stupid 360 d-pad I was using, which seems to treat up-and-right as if it were merely up at crucial moments, or something like that. You go out over a pit and whoops you did a short jump sucker, you can't speed up now! On the other hand, yes there are "spells" in the game, and no they are not totally useless. You guys talk about jumping puzzles being too hard and spells being too useless and yet there is a spell that lets you FLY! (And for me, one that works like a starman so you can win your boss fights! I think I only used it on one boss though.) I didn't mind the weapon, shoe, and armor loss. Weapon loss is barely relevant because all the weapons are pretty good (the most highly upgraded ones have the longest range, but they somewhat balance that by being annoyingly slow, which can totally get you killed in the last top-view area) and anyway, the best weapon by far is always the money-throwing one, which you pretty much always have, since enemies usually drop money. Shoe loss isn't a big deal because it only happens in towns, and the enemies in towns are easy to just not get hit by (except in the last area). And as for armor and life--well you have infinite continues, so who cares? The side-view sections are all just easy enough to beat with few or no special items, though you need to practice them some to do that. And a person could say that that kind of practice is necessary only because it leads to lame memorization, yeah, but I dunno, I take these things as puzzles. And I never felt like I was being penalized for not knowing something I couldn't have known. All of that means, though, that all the in-town enemies and items and minigames are mainly there for flavor, and not to work well with the other stuff. The game is just, like, a lot of stuff thrown together. It's fun! I had fun with it this time around. But without nostalgia helping me like the game, ehhhh I could take it or leave it. My verdict is about the same as the Cable verdict, but I wouldn't say the game "fails the test of time" in the sense that modern standards have left it behind. It's not like there aren't still games that crudely throw together lots of brief action segments and comical, semi-competitive minigames. Like Mario Party or whatever? And who knows how many movie-themed kids' games. We as individuals got tired of simple minigames and some kinds of simple Mario-style action challenges, but the world at large did not. |
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