I thought I was good at side-scrolling games until I played this. Anyone who thinks they kick ass at side-scrollers needs to play this and be forever humbled. It’s hard. Incredibly hard. This game is difficult to the point of Unfair. However, it still manages to be fun to play. There’s a basic overworld, which consists of your Hero moving along predetermined paths to event squares, where you can have some fortune-telling old hag laugh at you, or buy items from a guy with Tourette’s Syndrome, or go and get your ass kicked in one of the side-scrolling stages. I wish I knew what the items did, but I’m too lazy to find out. Well anyway, I guess this is your standard NES game in the same vein as Castlevania - you’ll die frequently, hurl your controller at the TV and swear to never play the game again, and then you’ll just try again the next day.

Everything’s complete for the most part, but things definitely feel like a 1998 translation. NPCs have only one line of text available on-screen, so anything being spoken to you is divided up by a handful of words at a time. It makes for some very stilted conversation (as well as some difficult screenshot-taking).

The credits aren’t translated (so I’m told), and there’s a couple of display bugs that kind of confuse things. So, it’s not entirely entirely complete, but it’s plenty to get you through the entire game with no problems. Play without fear!