Club Retro 2022: March - Platformers with Swords

What platforms are you most interested in?

I really enjoyed Maximo vs. Army of Zin. Felt a bit more polished and less punishing.

Hm, well I don't know the categories, but of the list given I rank:
Ninja Gaiden
ActRaiser
Strider
Prince of Persia
Disney's Aladdin

which was pretty close to the order given.

I beat Mamono Hunter Yohko (Genesis). 

The franchise (also known as Devil Hunter Yohko in English) was conceived from the start as a mixed-media project; there's an OVA series, several light novels, 3 videogames, a manga one-shot and probably some other stuff. There is no shared continuity or universe between each of those; the only thing they have in common is some characters, and the demon-hunting aspect. The Genesis game was developed by Klon, a company that made no notable game, and published by SRPG pioneers NCS/Masaya. If you're the type who reads reviews only to find out if the reviewer liked the game or not, I'll spare you the trouble; it's terrible.

The main gameplay concept is that holding the attack button forms a barrier around you that protects you from weak projectiles, which most enemies fire tons of. Releasing the attack button fires the barrier as a projectile. You can also swing your sword, but it's just not enough, because enemies will frequently be out of range, and there's always a ton of projectiles coming at you. If you release the attack button once the barrier comes back to you, it goes away, so you pretty much have to spend the whole game holding the attack button, and learn to fire it carefully, swing your sword nonstop like an idiot while it's away (because enemies will comes at you from nowhere too fast to react, so it's the safest thing to do), then stop just in time when it returns so you don't fire it off in the wrong direction. That in itself took a really long time to master for me, as it felt very unnatural to hold a button for an entire game. Beyond that, the controls for just moving around are garbage. Turning around is hard. Jumps are weird, with a fixed arc, and half the time you'll do the wrong jump (ie mini-jump VS long jump) and fall to your death. There's a timer, and it's really, really tight. The one time I actually managed to make it through the first level without dying once, I beat the boss with exactly 1 second to spare, and I wasn't taking my time. I died from time outs multiple times. The level design is confusing. It's hard to parse what you can even jump on at first. Weather-based hazards (ie ice and wind, usually) in platformers always suck - making the controls worse for a while is just not fun - but they're especially bad in this game. The snow in the last level, for example, is only slippery in slopes, but it works in some crazy way where it will make you jump backwards, because it's so slippery that it's even slippery in mid-air, I guess. The windy part at the end of the first level is nothing short of disgusting. It takes a ridiculous amount of practice before you even get comfortable with how the game handles; until then, this is a game where you die all the time and it never feels like it's your fault.

The two things that make the game beatable is that it only has 5 levels, and that you get a ton of lives plus checkpoints everywhere, so you can progress even though you keep dying. In fact, enemies you kill don't respawn after you die (except certain types in Level 4), and even using a credit lets you continue from nearly the same spot where you died. It's like the developers knew their game was barely playable, and thought they'd give players a chance that way. 

It took me a million years to beat the final boss, because it doesn't follow patterns and it moves faster than you. In the end, being stupidly aggressive did it. 

As for positives, most of the backgrounds are nice. They have this dark fantasy thing going on that always works really well on the Genesis. The music isn't amazing or anything, but it's not bad either.

Ex wrote a review in which he said he only beat this game out of spite. I think that's probably the same for me. Specifically, I found it really difficult to give up after reaching the final boss. I'm a goddamn shonen hero, and I never give up, I guess, even when I'm torturing myself with a game I hate.

I won't score it. It's just really bad.