As someone who's played the original Ghost 'n Goblins I can tell you 100% that game is total dog shit, the game was made stupidly hard on purpose for no other reason other than they still had the arcade mentality of game design.
This version of the game is still dumb as dick hard but it more or less follows the footsteps of game design from Soullikes games, where the game is stupid hard but if you die it's 100% your fault rather than the game just being cheap.