INASA!!! My friend made this game... I'm American, so I don't have experience with a rainy summer day stuck at my grandparents' place in Japan - but I (and I imagine many others) have similar youth experiences of being left at a relative's house, feeling like there was very little to do... this game conjured a lot up for me. I loved the choice of letting you pick 20/40/60 minute play session, I also liked slowly uncovering the moveset. After about 10 minutes you'll have an understanding of the house, so passing time becomes a matter of how you use your moves... you can crouch, sit, jump around, open doors or move stuff. As a kid, once I had a Game Boy it became easier to feel busy (perhaps to a fault), but I remember doing things like trying to 'draw' images on plush carpets my moving the fibers, sliding down staircases over and over, looking at grandparents' travel knick-knacks...

On the fence with this one, but there's just enough wackiness with this game's expectations that I like it. It's got a bit of adventure, action, arcade kinda crammed together... weird rhythms of risking your candle resources in order to scrounge around a cave for other resources.

Wondering if you should spend your blow-up-all-blocks powerups to uncover other powerups.

The weird scramble to equip your life float, float on water and bomb what you think might be a wall to let you get out of the water safely.

The various level shapes and layouts, even if they start to texturally feel really similar (bomb, wait, get hit by impossible to dodge tiny bullet, bomb, wait, bomb, wait...). There's a kind of ambiguous risk-reward that's both mushy but kind of pleasing to try and brute force through.

The 'lore' suggested by the flow of these levels is strange. It almost feels like the game really wanted to accurately follow a story and so it goes for the less approachable level design. Some levels are entirely dark, you must navigate them by using your limited candles (or a rare lantern.) Many levels are trapped in unsignalled infinite loops, until you find a holy grail under a tile - usually not in any kind of intuitive place. It's arbitrary, it feels like maybe this RoboWarrior isn't meant to save whatever hell world they've visited. What makes the enemies all drop the same bombs you use? Why is the RoboWarrior doomed to not climb over the obstacles? Who created such bombable-block-thick worlds? Why is the world overrun with these creepy robot and slime things? Why are there hidden rooms full of old statues that drop power ups? Why are so many sewers full of power ups? Why are some seemingly-unbreakable walls actually bombable - but only if bombed 5 times? Somehow this game makes me think about the material science of its world.

The game makes little attempt at explaining any of this, but there's some kind of raw narrative power floating about that is hard to not respect. Especially so after reading a GameFAQs FAQ that had one-line descriptions of the games' levels. Were they official lines from the manual? Or made up by the FAQ author? Who knows...