izigame.me

If you're a new player that isn't here for nostalgia, these games will really frustrate you. It's not that they're too hard (they're actually very easy to cheese if you unlock the offered moves available), it's that the game design itself is antiquated and unforgiving. Dark Souls is the modern equivalent, famous for popularizing campfire-style save points that hark back to the before-time era of auto-saving when "if you mess up, you gotta redo *everything* that's happened since the last save point."
And this is the problem. If you don't put the time into grinding orbs to unlock the moves, the combat is much more difficult. When it's difficult, it's easy to die, which means you are constantly redoing poorly laid out game sections where there is no save point between the end boss of the chapter that you keep dying on, and the 2 mini bosses and platforming sections that come before it. My #1 complaint in video games is having to literally do the exact same thing as before over-and-over again, and this game dishes it out in spades simply because of design choices. And how do you unlock more moves to make it easier? Collect orbs, by...farming enemies, which means re-fighting the same enemies over-and-over-and-over. Having to redo things really sucked the fun out of ite for me, and I stopped playing the Steam copy on chapter 16 because I just could not handle having to redo everything every time I died. The game is very short, and I think the developers understood this, and designed it intentionally as padding. Not very fun.
BUT THE GAME IS FUN! I switched to playing on an emulator and was able to save scum all day, and quickly beat the game (the devs were successful in artificially lengthening the game). It was really fun.
I haven't played 2 or 3 yet, but since you have to get through 1 to get to those, I figured I had played enough to write a review for other people new to the franchise. If you're not a newcomer, this version seems to look and run just fine for me, and I imagine you'd be pretty happy reliving it in this form. The text is *much* more readable than on emulator, which is nice. But that's the only benefit of playing this over an emulator, IMO. But I'm not reviewing an emulated version, I'm reviewing the Steam version. Which has only terrible annoying saves and progression designed around repetition, and doesn't even work with trainers that I could tell (I tried wemod before switching to emulator just cuz I wanted to find a way to be done with the first one and move on).
TL;DR: the save spot placement is terrible and serves as game padding. The corny story and satisfying action make the game worth playing overall, though.
check out crustyoldhuman on Twitch cuz I like to play weird games and old man react at them. *shakes fist*
****Bonus Complaint!!**** astonishingly terrible platforming. It feels like platforming in Hi-Fi Rush (which was also terrible). Your jumping is mostly vertical, which makes jumping onto even a small platform directly in front of you a complete chore. I spent 40 in-game seconds one time just trying to jump on top of an elevator that squished a boss. Thank space they don't make you jump while you fight (that often...)