Sometimes you shouldn't return to your childhood faves I guess. I played this game obsessively when I was like 8 or 9 years old, found all the secrets, beat it over and over. It doesn't really hold up now though, even if the wild jumps in terms of theming, and some of the delightful enemy designs that come with that, do start to feel a bit like a surreal fever dream.

Probably the biggest problem for me is simply that the Game Boy's hardware felt like a real issue to me all these year's later. The game puts a lot of value on making the character models have a decent amount of detail but due to the small screen size of the Game Boy the trade-off here is this very zoomed-in feeling to your perspective that, in a platformer, really limits the level design; you have to be able to see where you're heading, what enemies are coming your way, or where secrets could be hidden around you, which with such a limited range of vision in turn limits what challenges the game can present. The bulk of the game was very easy ultimately, apart from the harsh difficulty spike in the final level.

Much with Super Mario Land I find myself feeling that if this wasn't a Mario game then I just wouldn't care.