What a strange mess of a game. For every good side it has it's counterbalanced by something dumb. The disgusting amount of backtracking alone is enough to make the game plain not fun, and even then on top of it you also have to deal with piss easy bosses, needlessly vertical level design, and lack of any reasonable way to track collected items. Not to mention, furniture collection is yet another blatant form of padding out the playtime.
Circle of the Moon right before this one had major problems, but even it didn't try to be nearly as annoying.