Though it’s one of the fairer titles in its series, Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts was lacking a lot of mercy even by the standards of the time when it was originally released. Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts - Super Arthur addresses this by altering the gameplay in several ways, as listed in its description.

The biggest impact by far comes from returning to your previous set of armour upon being hit instead of losing it all at once, and from being able to collect and cycle through the game’s weapons using the shoulder-buttons instead of only being able to hold one at a time. These two changes alone give the gameplay a much nicer flow, and the other changes complement this as well.

Though I always found the original release to be perfectly enjoyable, I feel that the Super Arthur hack makes Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts more fun, both when comparing it to its SNES contemporaries, and when comparing it to more modern standards for action games. It also makes the game considerably more time-respectful, which is a big plus.

This hack does everything that it sets out to do, though I would have liked to have seen a bit of text on the title-screen denoting that it’s the Super Arthur version and not the vanilla release, for a bit of added clarity and polish.

In spite of a lifelong fondness for the original game, Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts - Super Arthur has quickly become my go-to way of playing Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts, and its design feels every bit like something that would have been released on the SNES back in the day. Highly recommended.

I tested this game in the versions of RetroPie for both the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B and the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and it worked as it should with both.