A top-of-the-line puzzle game to this day.

The spritework is lush and gorgeous, bringing Lip and friends' fairy world to life in style. The music is memorable and charming. And of course, the gameplay: it's a brilliantly intuitive tile-matching game with a very precise and gradual difficulty curve. It gets the "low skill floor, high skill ceiling" angle totally right while being consistently encouraging to the player.

Seriously, you should play this game if you haven't. You can play the game in Japanese on NSO, and there's also a translation patch out there.

Even if wasn't originally designed as a sequel to Super Mario Bros., upon comparing the two, I appreciate how much this game improves on SMB1. The four playable characters add a great variety and improve replayability. More varied environments, including vertical platforming sections, help to mix up the proceedings. There's a greater variety of boss fights. And overall, the pace of the platforming is more varied, with some levels still focused on quickly running to the exit but others having more exploration involved.

And hey, if its non-Mario origins show through a bit too much for you, there's always the other SMB2, I guess. For me, though, this is by far the better game.

Just like the castle, this game has two sides.

On the one hand, I quite like how Juste plays. His forwards and backwards dashes feel more comfortable to use than Alucard's backdash, and are useful both for quickly traversing the castle and for positioning yourself in combat. The spellbook system is a great improvement over the similar card system in Circle of the Moon, and helps Juste have a good balance between classic Belmont whip action and more magical options. The equipment situation for Juste is also better than Nathan had in CotM. Visually, I'd say the game looks pretty good for GBA for the most part.

On the other hand, let's see... the actual layout of the castle is full of aggravating locks and one-way passages, and the double-castle is far more annoying to navigate than Symphony of the Night's. The music relying primarily on the chiptune capabilities of the GBA is one of this game's more controversial elements, and while I actually rather like some of the tracks, others are a bit grating and repetitive. The game's story is exceptionally weak, with flat characters and dialogue. The shop system is pointlessly obtuse.

In short, this game is good, but doesn't quite measure up to most of the other exploration Castlevanias.