the movement really is good. when i learned how to do that really big backflip after doing a slide jump? damn, that truly opened up a lot of opportunities to cheese my way into rooms i was not prepared to be in

on the flipside the combat just kind of exists. with only.. what, 6 different enemy types in the game you really only need the basic attack to deal with them, and yet there's a bunch of other moves you can carry out which are cool but pretty much pointless. Sure, the fact you can kick the sword in mid-air after you've thrown it is awesome but there's no point where i would ever bother to do that. then again, what was the point in having the ability to throw the sword anyway? maybe there was something i missed? i just pressed the button on accident every so often and lost it

I'm glad I've been able to play the game with the map but it is about as basic an implemention you can get other than just showing a jpeg. I was desperate for some sort of icon to show where i am on the map as opposed to just highlighting the room i'm in. i spent way too long cross-referencing the angles of walls to get my bearings. also some of the maps were too big for the screen and got cut off which is just kinda funny

however with the character design alone i retract all my grievances immediately 10/10 game thanks bye bye

I'm so close to loving everything about this game, and every so often i feel like i do. I love the premise, the music, the design. It emulates an early '00s arcade game really well... but that also includes all the bullshit gameplay elements.

There was a point for me, i think halfway through the stages on level 4 where I realised i wasn't finding the gameplay fun a good chunk of the time. It's down to enemy placements primarily. It gets to a point where there's so many of them following you with even more spawning out of nowhere directly next to you, it seems way too harsh. Plus, the game tends to introduce an entirely new enemy every other stage which feels too much. I'm currently on level 7, and I swear I've come across like 50 different kinds of enemy, and half of them are a fucking nightmare to deal with.

The game also likes to push a lot of other stage features and gimmicks at you just as quickly as it adds new enemies. Hidden tiles, slippery tiles, a superjump thing, spikes that only hurt you if you jump on them, tiles that flip between colours whenever you step on them, tiles that cycle through 3 colours whenever you step on them, fragile tiles, a little guy that moves around and resets your coloured tiles that you have to deal with, etc etc. it's.. a lot, and while i can appreciate just how much the game offers variety-wise with this, it's too much too quickly for me. I feel like there's so many more opportunities for cool stages with the features it introduces but instead it chooses to hastily jump to the next thing and then combine gimmicks together in stages.

I appreciated the ability to buy powerups more than ever once i got to the later stages, but i dunno, part of me feels like it was an easy fix to the unfair difficulty of some stages rather than just improving some of the stage designs.

23/06
I made this review the day before i beat the main game, and the issues i have still stand. I made use of easy mode for some of these final stages which made the end game actually fun challenging rather than annoying awful bullshit challenging. I'm pretty sure this got added in an update rather than being in the game from the start which is weird because jesus i would never beat this game otherwise.

The game continued to add more enemies and more stuff right 'til the end. I was saying to myself yesterday 'god what if the game adds like a lights out gimmick later that'll be so fucking annoying' and lo and behold it absolutely did. There was another gimmick, the fan tiles, that were also super frustrating to work with. Some stages had these huge areas full of fan tiles which bounce you around like the dvd video screensaver, and you had to get the exact right position and movement to bounce you around for a full minute until you get to the other end or else you die... and then even when you do that successfully you end up dying to an enemy on the other end that you just can't avoid AHHHHH

A standout moment for me was stage 9-12, where the map is nothing but a giant square. It's one of my favourite levels in the game. Enemies are littered everywhere on the grid but this time instead of being confined to a long 2-tile wide hallways that make death almost unavoidable you have this huge amount of space to dodge them. It's incredibly fun, and the game can for once actually justify throwing a million different enemies at you at once. I'd love to see another endless gamemode added to the game that's just this level over and over but with the square getting bigger each time you fully colour it and the enemies getting tougher and more abundant. I'd play the shit out of that!

Am I ever going to come back to this and get the V rank for each stage? Fuck no. I don't even know if it'd be possible lol. But for what it's worth I did get a good amount of enjoyment out of this. It's a neat premise with a phenomenal art style and soundtrack behind it, and whenever the gameplay wasn't driving me up the wall i got a hell of a lot of fun out of it.

cerise is a very cool character i like her a lot