This is one of Capcom's weaker efforts on the Game Boy. Ariel feels slightly unresponsive. It's difficult to quickly turn and shoot a bubble so you'll often take a hit from trying to.

Music is excellent for the platform. Boss designs all look great. Everything is very legible.

Overall the game is short and easy. There are secrets to discover to keep you beyond the half hour it takes to finish the game.

This came is almost amazing but there are so many issues where it just feels like the dev team needed more time with play testing. The timing is incredibly unforgiving. When I was going through the segment in Neo Arcadia with kinto blocks and being attacked by birds I realized that this is Mega Man X married with Ninja Gaiden and that's not a good thing.

There's no reason to engage with the elemental chips outside of bosses. I do like the stun-lock dance the developers want you doing.

Cyber-elves are idiocy. They're purely a collectible because they're single use. What am I feeding these guys for?

The aesthetics are so on point even if the audio quality is pretty trash. I played this through with the patch that reduced weapon grinding.

Tip for those emulating, use one of the control-types that doesn't require chorded inputs for the sub weapon and just map it onto a face button and put both shoulder buttons to dash, it's a much better experience.

There are so many things I love about this game but it's not without its rough spots. Some of the secrets: heart tanks, and capsules feel like you're trying to get the game to glitch out to get that one perfect dash jump off. The timing of the final Sigma battle is such a huge spike in difficulty compared to the rest of the game which is fairly balanced. I'm not sure I really like how hard the design leans on X's charge shot. It slows down the speed a lot from Classic Mega Man even if everything else is ostensibly faster.

This game is wonderfully compact. In 3 hours you'll breeze through eight dungeons punctuated by decently challenging boss battles.

I love how cleanly Buster's pixel art reads. Everything is chunky, colorful, well proportioned and well animated. Power ups are passive and plentiful, making you progressively more nimble as you explore the labyrinth.

The music is great and clearly indebted to Maze of Galious (as is the core design). Can't recommend this micro metroidvania enough.

"The metroidvania one."

So what do we really have here? You start off as Mikey. You're trying to find and rescue your brothers scattered throughout a large continuous environment. Each turtle has a unique ability that allows you to progress deeper through the labyrinth.

You get a complete map at the beginning of the game with areas of interest marked with a nondescript dot. Unlike Castlevania, you don't see doors marked on the map.

The player is left to make educated guesses about where to press forward, and this is my favourite design element. The maze is fairly simple to actually explore but seems vast from the map. Navigating without a guide is not difficult.

What is difficult, is the bosses. They move too fast. They are too big. They have too many i-frames. As you learn their movements and improve your reaction time, they are beatable but it's not enjoyable.

The turtles themselves are fun to control. You have an air kick, and a generic attack. As best I can tell the hit boxes are the same for all turtles. You aren't able to spam attacks, they have about a half second cool down period, so you need to be precise with your strikes like with a Ninja Gaiden.

Music is good. Enemies lack variety. It's no Metroid II but it's interesting and competently put together.

I love this broke-ass game. That you can exploit the mechanics and one punch man your way through the most difficult battles is a strength, not a weakness. I love how each class has its own growth mechanics. I love all the bizarre effects your equipment can have.

Uematsu is in fine form, wringing out memorable melodies from the GB sound chip. The art design is strong. Everything reads really clearly and the enemies have fun, cute designs.

Overall it's a really impressive release for year one of the Game Boy. Mechanically I like this better than Final Fantasy I and II. Kawazu is a mad genius.