Stylin'.
After you get to Death the game stops playing fair and starts randomly throwing you unwinnable situations. If you make good use of item crashes you can still get around this, but it's tedious as hell. I don't think it's as hard as the NES Castlevanias by any measure, but for some reason I have a harder time forgiving this one.
Playing as Maria is a lot of fun and the cutscene changes (and non-changes) are really refreshing.
Really cool set pieces.